Common Sense on Weapons of Mass Destruction

2. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

2 The Effects of Nuclear Weapons I n h i s p u l i t z e r p r i z e – w i n n i n g b o o k t h e Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Richard Rhodes describes the evolution of the science of nuclear physics that led in less than fifty years to the atomic bomb. He also describes the actual effects of using an atomic bomb. The account of the attack on Hiroshima quoted, summarized, and paraphrased below is found in Chapter 19 of Rhodes’s book, “Tongues of Fire.” As Rhodes tells the story, August 6, 1945, began as a beautiful summer day in Hiroshima. The director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital began his diary entry of that morning: “The hour was early, the morning still warm, and beautiful . . . shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden.” During the night, some 1,000 miles away, on the island of Tinian in the Mariana chain, the atomic bomb named “Little Boy” by its designers , carrying a potential explosive power equivalent to 12,500 tons of tnt, had been loaded onto an American b-29 bomber called 2 0 the Enola Gay, named after the mother of the pilot, Captain Paul Tibbets. The bomb was ten and one-half feet long, twenty-nine inches in diameter, and weighed approximately four tons. One Enola Gay crew member said it looked like “an elongated trash can with fins.” Accompanied by escort planes, the American plane left Tinian at 3:00 am, and was just a few miles from Hiroshima by eight o’clock that morning. As the American b-29 crossed over the Inland Sea and Hiroshima , a few ships could be seen in the harbor. The bombardier selected as his aim point the Aioi Bridge, a T-shaped bridge spanning the Ota River in central Hiroshima. Tibbets’s plane sent out a strong blip on the radio to the escort planes, indicating to them that the bomb would be released in two minutes. Little Boy exploded at 8:16 am Hiroshima time, forty-three seconds after it left the Enola Gay, 1,900 feet above the courtyard of Shima Hospital, and 550 feet southeast of the Aioi Bridge. As one crew member described it, “Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fire creeping up the sides of the mountains.” In the words of another crew member, the city looked like “a pot of boiling black oil.” Still another said, “The mushroom was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke, and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside.” On the ground, a young girl in the suburbs remembered that “just as I looked up into the sky, there was a flash of white light and the green in the plants looked in that light like the colors of dry leaves.” Closer in toward the city, a junior college student recalled that his teacher had had the students look up at the bomber in the sky, and that “we felt a tremendous flash of lightening . In an instant, we were blinded and everything was just a frenzy of delirium.” Further in, toward the center of the city, no one survived to remember this light. Rhodes explains that an authoritative Japanese study begun in 1976 in consultation with t h e e f f e c t s o f n u c l e a r w e a p o n s / 2 1 thirty-four Japanese scientists and physicians concluded that the temperature at the explosion site had reached 5,400°F, and that people within half a mile who had been exposed were burned to bundles of black char in a fraction of a second. Rhodes quotes a patient speaking to that same doctor at Hiroshima Communications Hospital who kept the diary: “A human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn’t he?” Rhodes notes that the small black bundles stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands. The Japanese study explained that it was not just human beings that died at Hiroshima: In the case of an atomic bombing . . . a community does not merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed. Within two kilometers...