The Bomb: First Impressions

Newspapers announce the end of the war with Japan.

(U.S. Department of Energy)

Sixty-one years ago, on August 6, 1945, as the Enola Gay opened its bomb bay above Hiroshima, most Americans were enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon. As “Little Boy” fell toward that city of 343,000, Fords and Packards rolled along peaceful country roads half a world away. When a pressure wave shot through Hiroshima with the speed of a bullet, children played stickball in the streets of Dayton and Peoria. And as a blue-white flash cooked the sky above Hiroshima to 18 million degrees Fahrenheit, American families sat down to Sunday roasts.

Americans were hardly strangers to war in 1945. One in seven served in the military, and many more had lost loved ones. But practically no one, except for a handful of scientists and politicians, had any sense of the devastation that a new kind of bomb could wreak. That changed on August 7, when President Harry S. Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima to an astonished public. Suddenly Americans knew that they possessed the most powerful weapon in the history of war. The nation awoke, in the words of a New York Times headline, with a “sobering awareness of power.”

If sobered, few were immediately regretful. Most believed that only an unconditional surrender by Japan could end the war and shuddered at the predicted millions of casualties, both American and Japanese, from an invasion of that country’s mainland. Many were thankful that a single device had done the work of countless troops. In an initial poll, 85 percent of the country approved of the bombing.

The public’s support did not diminish its awe. Truman described the Manhattan Project—the $2 billion spent, the 125,000 employees, the secret tests in the New Mexico desert—to a stunned nation. He called it “the greatest scientific gamble in history” and apologized for its secrecy.

The Wall Street Journal saw a potential source of energy, while coal and oil executives promised their shareholders that nuclear power wouldn’t threaten their businesses. Others called for restraint and, although the word still lay years in the future, nonproliferation. This was all within a day of Truman’s announcement. A supremely industrialized wartime nation was confronting how revolutionary the bomb was. One editorial declared the beginning of “a chapter in human history in which the weird, the strange, the horrible becomes trite and obvious.”

Despite this sudden awareness, there was little talk in the beginning of the toll in Hiroshima. Eighty thousand Japanese had been killed instantly, and another sixty thousand would die from wounds and radiation. Truman’s initial announcement on the radio said the bomb has been dropped on “Hiroshima, a military base . . . because we wished to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” A subsequent White House press release also didn’t address the number of dead but announced that the bomb had “destroyed” the city’s “usefulness to the enemy.” It added, “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.”

In the early days after the attack, only a few scattered voices objected. Most of them were religious. The Vatican and Catholic newspapers promptly denounced nuclear weapons. One minister in New York said, “Our savage generation cannot be trusted” and called the nuclear program “a triumph of research, but also a superb symbol for the Age of Efficient Chaos.”

On August 7 the papers began to tell the story of the making of the bomb, a combination of futuristic science, brilliant large-scale management, and dramatic espionage. The key scientists quickly became celebrities. Many looked to Albert Einstein. Yet he proved strangely cagey, despite having asked President Franklin Roosevelt to pursue research on the possibility of atomic weapons in 1939. Einstein retreated to his sailboat on Lake Saranac in upstate New York and claimed to have only “a little bit more interest” in atomic bombs than the average citizen. Perhaps he felt some regret about his deadly council to Roosevelt.

The press soon decided on the true inventors, principally the physicists Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Lise Meitner. A typical political cartoon showed a scientist in a lab coat and thick glasses holding a tiny atomic bomb as a brutish figure labeled “War” stared greedily over his shoulder. And so the nation had a new kind of warrior hero. Before August 7, America had had GIs and generals like George Patton as their martial models; now men and women in lab coats killed more enemies than any soldier ever could.

The nuclear project had been the ultimate New Deal undertaking, a vast public-works program conducted on the frontier of science and under the direction of the Army. And Americans were not the only ones to marvel at the achievement. A group of German physicists learned about the bombing of Hiroshima while held prisoner in England. Secretly recorded by the British government, they discussed their failure to win the atomic race. Werner Heisenberg, who had been the director of Nazi Germany’s nuclear program, blamed a lack of trust in “the relationship between the scientist and the state.” Another observed that “Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale.” The Nobel Prize winner Otto Hahn, after considering the terrible scale of the bombing and his own anti-Nazi views, declared to his fellow German scientists, “I am thankful we didn’t succeed.”

—Jon Grinspan is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Philadelphia.