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and Nagasaki were largely undamaged by bombs before August 1945, they were not entirely so, and information about other bombed Japanese cities was sufficient to bring the residents of the two fated places to a fearful understanding of what might be coming. There is no suggestion here that humans can prepare themselves psychologically for the shock of being bombed. There is also no comfort to be sought in the vague familiarity that one has with bombing on a second or subsequent— or second-hand—encounter with it. But there was, in Japan in 1945, a vague familiarity with bombing: we, or someone like ourselves, have been through this before. Indeed, millions had suffered blast and fire from bombing raids across the globe—in Shanghai and Pearl Harbor, in Warsaw and Rotterdam, London and Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden, and in Tokyo in March 1945, when in one night American bombs took some

90,000 lives. But no one had been through an atomic bombing before Hiroshima in August. No one had suffered such an intense blast and searing fire resulting from a single bomb. And, above all, no one had experienced the effects of indiscriminate radioactivity, which spewed from the core of the Little Boy uranium bomb and fell to earth that day. Hiroshimans would call the hidden killer ‘poison’, and the word was appropriate, given how excess radiation acted upon the human body. Radioactivity was insidious in the way that gas had been during the First World War. It was mute and invisible. It seemed even less discriminate than fire. It killed from the inside out, violating the body more outrageously than any other hideous result of bombing.

To what extent did the scientists who conceived and built the bomb and the civilian and military officials who authorized its use know that radiation from the weapon would kill human beings? They knew some things. The Frisch-Peierls Memorandum of 1940 had warned that a significant portion of ‘the energy liberated in the explosion’ would be in radioactive form, and that radiation might cling to the debris created by the blast and thus ‘be fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion’. The MAUD Committee thereafter discussed radioactivity in some detail. Anyone exposed directly to the bomb’s fissions would die of blood damage. ‘The effects of radioactive products would be considerable,’ Margaret Gowing summarizes the Committee’s finding, and ‘they might or might not be of secondary importance’. The committee urged that the possible impact of the bomb’s radioactivity be thoroughly studied before the weapon was used. The committee’s interest seems to have been technical, not moral. And the MAUD report itself, which would transform the American weapon project, made scarce mention of the radioactivity issue. ‘Perhaps ...we should have considered whether radioactivity was a poison outlawed in spirit by the Geneva Convention,’ one of the MAUD scientists later reflected. ‘But we didn’t.’ Neither did the Americans, at least to any great extent. Compton was concerned enough to implement safety measures at the Met Lab by the middle of 1942, calling in medical experts to check employees’ levels of radiation exposure and issuing radiation-sensitive badges to those who worked in the most vulnerable areas. One of Groves’s nightmares was runaway radioactivity after the Trinity test in July 1945; he prepared evacuation plans for the surrounding ranches and communities just in case.

But, like the MAUD Committee members, scientists working on the Manhattan Project never dwelled on the bomb’s radioactivity, and tended to avoid conjecture that they were producing a dirty weapon. This was partly because they did not believe, or would not let themselves believe, that radioactivity would cause damage beyond the enormous blast area of the bomb. Briefing the Los Alamos scientists, Robert Serber estimated that radiation would kill everyone within 1,000 yards of the blast center— but that it wouldn’t matter because the blast itself would kill everyone within 2,000 yards. Norman Ramsey, the Columbia physicist who served as