This
is the introduction to a nonfiction piece I've been working on for
some time now, pertaining to the military and political circumstances
surrounding the American campaign against Imperial Japan from early
spring 1945, when Army Air Corps Gen. Curtis LeMay and his B-29s
began firebombing Japanese cities from low altitudes with devastating
effect, through mid-August, when Japan's capacity to wage war had
been utterly annihilated after months of relentless American aerial
bombardment--culminating with the twin nuclear blows which changed
the face of warfare forever.
August
6th and 9th of this year marked seventy years since the destruction
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.
SECOND
SUN: THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS
OF
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
D.
B. DeVilliers
Seventy
years ago, the sun rose early above the barren New Mexico desert,
bathing the pre-dawn landscape in brilliant blinding light before
burning it to ashes.
In
an instant, any sign that life had once existed in this place was
immolated by searing hellfire. Devastation swept outward, as ripples
caused by a stone dropped into a pond do, from a single point--a
gaping crater where, seconds earlier, a steel tower had loomed
menacingly before the cacti and sagebrush.
At its apex, this
tower had housed the product of one of the most ambitious scientific
endeavors in human history--years of toil by the world's brightest
minds made manifest, shut up inside a flimsy tin shack suspended a
hundred feet from the desert floor.
It
was here, over a rural and desolate region of the American Southwest,
where the course of history was irreparably altered, forever damning
the notion of total industrial warfare to the pages of history--or
rather, consummating the marriage of post-Second World War global
conflict to the certain annihilation of modern society.
...
Approximately
thirty minutes before dawn on the 16th of July 1945, the United
States catapulted humanity into the atomic age with the detonation of
a twenty-kiloton implosion-type nuclear device: named Gadget by its
makers. The now-famous scientific leader of the Manhattan Project, J.
Robert Oppenheimer, called the test Trinity--a reference to its
biblical significance, which was not lost on those who witnessed the
titanic explosion that chilly morning.
However, Trinity
represented not the end of this atomic endeavor; rather, it marked
the beginning of its terrible climax.
Gadget's iconic cloud
had hardly just begun its conquest of the heavens when a series of
massive and intricate mechanisms whirred into motion inside the
American military juggernaut.
After humming along since its
establishment no more audibly than the workings of a fine Swiss
watch, Trinity's success kicked off a second, much larger phase of
the Manhattan Project--execution.
The
project's innumerable automatic process ticked away to initiate and
sustain larger, more elaborate processes, which in turn soon
activated even larger processes still. Men and materials were moved
across oceans and continents to fill their proper slots within the
Manhattan machine. From the sixteenth of July onward, Manhattan's
mechanisms grew exponentially louder with each passing day, with each
passing hour. When August arrived, the faint whirring of clockwork
had become the thunderous clamor of great engines.
The
American war machine's twisted song approached a grotesque
crescendo--a furious cacophony, a tremendous and deafening atomic
roar which wrought devastation the likes of which had never been seen
before by mankind.
...
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