3/1/2024 0 Comments Atomic bomb domeThe only actual fact that we could get at the end of the second month of study, at the beginning of October, was that at Nagasaki they had recorded the burning and cremation of 40,000 bodies. I am embarrassed by the fact that even though I led a medical party which was supposed to get figures on the mortality, and so on, that we could not come back with any definitive figures that I would be able to say were more than a guess. They had very little way of telling how many people had survived or had returned to the city. They did not know what the population of either city was beforehand. One very great source of confusion was the fact that the Japanese themselves had no information, no precise data. Though the numbers derived have been cited many times since, it is worth quoting Warren’s own caveats on them, delivered before Congress in February 1946: Stafford Warren, the Chief Medical Officer of the Manhattan Project, and a pioneer in nuclear medicine, led this effort. One of their tasks was to estimate total casualties. These representatives went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess every aspect of the attacks, with an eye both to understand what had happened, to measure any lingering radioactivity, and also to learn what could be generalized as “the effects of atomic bombs,” for use in future planning. On August 30, 1945, one of the first American teams to land in Japan were scientific agents of the Manhattan Project, tasked with understanding the effects of the atomic bombings. Oppenheimer would comment obliquely on this variance in before-and-after estimates during the hearing on his security clearance in 1954: (Compton amended that this estimate had assumed people would seek shelter given that no warning was issued for the attacks, this did not occur.) This is not recorded in the meeting minutes, nor in any other report or correspondence, so it does not seem that this estimate had any special weight to the participants. Robert Oppenheimer had suggested that an atomic bomb dropped would kill “some 20,000 people” if exploded over a city. The only pre-Hiroshima estimate on record is the recollection from Arthur Compton that at a May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee, J. It is not clear that Truman had any real sense of how many casualties there would have been prior to the attacks. After the August 9 Nagasaki raid (which he had no apparent foreknowledge of), he would put a stop to further bombing, telling his cabinet that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” according to an August 10, 1945, diary entry by then-Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Such numbers were large, and appear to have had a sobering effect on President Harry S. The same story quoted “unofficial American sources” that estimated that the “dead and wounded” might exceed 100,000. Aerial surveys revealed at least 60% of the city’s “built-up areas” were destroyed, leading to the conclusion that perhaps “as many as 200,000 of Hiroshima’s 340,000 residents perished or were injured,” as one United Press story put it. On August 8, news reports from Japan, plus a damage report created by the United States, began to paint a picture of the destruction. These efforts would inaugurate what has been 75 years of research into the effects of the bombing, both in the United States and in Japan. The Americans, in turn, scheduled further overflights, seeking photographic evidence of the effectiveness of the bomb. The American announcement that it had been an atomic bomb was released 16 hours later, and in response the Japanese high command dispatched a scientific team to make measurements to confirm or refute the claim. On the ground, eyewitnesses were largely unaware that it had been a single attack, and a consistency across accounts is their shock at realizing that the entire city had been affected at once by a single plane. Observation aircraft tried in vain to photograph the damage later in the day, but the city was too obscured by smoke to accurately assess. Neither those in the airplanes that observed the attack nor those on the ground experiencing it could get more than a qualitative sense of the destruction in the immediate aftermath the smoke, fires, and carnage were too great. The geography of Hiroshima meant that a bomb with the explosive yield of “Little Boy” (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT), detonated at the ideal altitude, could destroy nearly the entirety of the city. Their goal was destruction and spectacle, to show the Japanese, the Soviets, and the whole world, what the potential of this new weapon was. The city, flat and surrounded by hills, was in many ways an ideal target for the atomic bomb, at least from the perspective of its creators. Hiroshima was bombed on the morning of August 6, 1945.
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