Mist or rain would absorb the heat of the bomb blast and thereby limit the conflagration, which experiments with city bombing in both Germany and Japan had shown to be the principal agent of casualties and destruction. These detailed instructions were the result of careful committee work by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Don't let it go up or the target won't get as much damage. Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog. No radar bombing it must be dropped visually. Oppenheimer himself gave an Army officer heading for the Hiroshima raid last minute instructions for proper delivery of the bomb.ĭon't let them bomb through clouds or through an overcast. Oppenheimer not only had threatened his health with three years of unremitting overwork to build the bombs but also had soberly advised Henry Stimson that no conceivable demonstration of the bomb could have the shattering psychological impact of its actual use. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the secret research project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that designed and built the first bombs. The horror soon began to weigh on the conscience of J. The huge death toll of ordinary Japanese citizens, combined with the horror of so many deaths by fire, eventually cast a moral shadow over the triumph of ending the war with two bombs. " The first reports on August 6, 1945, accordingly described Hiroshima as a Japanese army base. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Two weeks before Hiroshima he wrote of the bomb in his diary, "I have told Mr.
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Truman shared this reluctance to be thought a killer of civilians.
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However many died, the victims were overwhelming civilians, primarily the old, the young, and women and all the belligerents formally took the position that the killing of civilians violated both the laws of war and common precepts of humanity. The exact number of dead can never be known, because whole families-indeed, whole districts-were wiped out by the bombs because the war had created a floating population of refugees throughout Japan because certain categories of victims, such as conscript workers from Korea, were excluded from estimates by Japanese authorities and because as time went by, it became harder to know which deaths had indeed been caused by the bombs. Numerous attempts have been made to estimate the death toll, counting not only those who died on the first day and over the following week or two but also the thousands who died later of cancers thought to have been caused by radiation. What more could one ask from an act of war? But the two bombs each killed at least 50,000 people and perhaps as many as 100,000. The atomic bombs that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifty years ago were followed in a matter of days by the complete surrender of the Japanese empire and military forces, with only the barest fig leaf of a condition-an American promise not to molest the Emperor. I imagine that the persistence of that question irritated Harry Truman above all other things.