Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [5]
The atomic-bomb tests that followed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings put into the air radiation that no human-made boundary could contain. The waste products of nuclear reactors, on line for peaceful or warlike purposes, threatened to poison ground water as well. Fear of a nuclear nightmare also transcended nations. The creation of Soviet or (mostly) US military bases that held, or were reputed to hold, nuclear weapons within their gates—bases in the Philippines, Okinawa, Cuba, Turkey, and England—brought home to nearby residents the possibility that they might be the targets of a nuclear attack or victims of a nuclear accident. Resistance to the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons ranged far and wide, from Japan and Oceania to Europe and the United States. Popular culture, including literature, art, music, and even humor, reflected global fears of nuclear war, and just as often a heady defiance of those apparently willing to wage or countenance it.
The uranium-based bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was thus the world’s bomb. While it was an American’s hand that released the bomb from the belly of the Enola Gay, and while Japanese died in droves that morning as a result, the atomic bomb was in a meaningful sense everyone’s offspring and certainly thereafter everyone’s problem. Had the Japanese, or the Germans, the British, or the Soviets made the bomb first, they surely would have used it against their enemies; that they did not get the bomb first had nothing to do with any moral qualms about producing it. No one’s hands were entirely clean. Otto Frisch, the Austrian who came to Los Alamos and worked on assembling the critical mass essential for a nuclear chain reaction, felt nauseated when his fellow scientists celebrated the destruction of Hiroshima, while the Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard told a correspondent that the bombing was ‘one of the greatest blunders in history’, eroding as it did ‘our own moral position’. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific head of the Manhattan Project, lamented to President Harry S. Truman that he had ‘blood on his hands’ because of his contribution to the bomb. (According to some accounts, Truman caustically offered Oppenheimer a handkerchief to wipe the blood off.) ‘As far as I can see,’ said Mahatma Gandhi, ‘the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feelings which have sustained mankind for ages’—meaning that everyone, not just the immediate perpetrators of the bomb, had been morally compromised.3
This book tells the story of the Hiroshima bomb. It will explore, in layperson’s terms, the physics of the bomb, the international crises that led to the Second World War, the creation of a community of scientists, throughout the world and especially in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, dedicated to developing a weapon that could undo the evil that resided in Nazi Germany, the harnessing of their efforts by the wartime state, the political and strategic decisions that led to the bombing itself, the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and the endgame of the Pacific War, the largely unavailing attempts to control the spread of nuclear weapons in the war’s aftermath and the evolution of the nuclear arms race, the effects of the bombing and the bomb on society and culture, and the state of things nuclear in the early twenty-first-century world. Throughout, the account will contextualize the event—too seldom regarded as