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By Root 1091 0

and British scientists had been working for years on the problem of nuclear fission, engaged in a quiet but deadly laboratory race with the Germans. The race really began in August of 1939 when Albert Einstein wrote President Roosevelt a letter in which he announced the possibility of creating a controlled nuclear reaction. He pointed out that such a reaction might be used to create a powerful bomb. Almost six years and two and a half billion dollars later, the first atomic bomb in history, a test bomb, was detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico. That was on July 16, 1945. Ten days later, at the Potsdam Conference in the ruins of Berlin, Truman and the other Allied leaders issued an ultimatum to Japan, calling on her to surrender immediately or suffer the consequences of new and terrible weapons. The ultimatum did not clearly spell out what the Americans possessed, and the Japanese, thinking they were already being hit with as terrible weapons as could be devised, announced that they would fight on. Truman authorized the dropping of the new bomb anytime after August 3.

This decision was not the result of agonizing thought. There had been discussion among military and political leaders and a committee made up of the scientists who had developed the bomb. There were a few half-hearted suggestions that the Japanese might be invited to a demonstration of the bomb, but these received little support. Bombs are made to be used, and the scientific committee concluded by recommending that a Japanese city be struck in such a way that it would provide a clear idea of the power now possessed by Japan’s enemies. There were only four cities left in Japan that had not already suffered major damage. At first the Americans thought to bomb Kyoto, but it was a religious and cultural shrine, the traditional home of the Emperors in the time of the Shogunate. They decided instead to go for Hiroshima, a manufacturing city of about seven square miles and 350,000 population.

The great bomb was dropped from a B-29, jauntily named Enola Gay, an aerial bomb, it exploded above the center of the town at nine-fifteen on the morning of August 6. There was a blinding flash and a great boiling gust of flame, smoke, and dust rising to a mushroom-shaped cloud that towered over the city. Within a second, four square miles of the city vanished, nearly 80,000 people died, and Hiroshima was destroyed. In the midst of terror and devastation, the atomic era was born.

There was great rejoicing in the Allied world. The enemy had been smitten. It was not known at the time that the enemy was already trying to surrender. A new government, under Premier Suzuki, had approached Soviet Russia as early as May with a request that Russia mediate the conflict. However, the Japanese insisted upon surrendering on terms, and the Russians had their own designs for eastern Asia, which did not include a premature end to the war before the Russians got what they wanted, so the hesitant attempts came to nothing. Now, on August 8, the Russians declared war on Japan and Red Army troops poured over the Manchurian border and began a rapid occupation of territory. The next day the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb, on the city of Nagasaki. Again the giant fireball and the mushroom cloud appeared in the sky, and again thousands disappeared in a sudden flash, leaving other thousands behind to suffer the maiming and radiation poisons.

That was enough. The Japanese government, at the urging of the Emperor—the army was determined to fight on—offered on the 10th to surrender, its only condition being that the person of the Emperor and the imperial throne remain inviolate; the Allies responded positively, and on August 14 the Japanese accepted the terms and surrendered. The Russians raced troops into the Korean Peninsula and southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and the first American units arrived in Japan on August 26. At the end of the month the U. S. Fleet anchored at last in Tokyo Bay, under that most magnificent of mountains, Fujiyama, whose white peak hung like a cloud in the western