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The bomb itself was codenamed ‘Little Boy’ (named after a character in the classic noir film The Maltese Falcon) and consisted of a gun-type fission weapon fuelled by uranium-235. While Germany had issued its unconditional surrender in May of 1945, Japan had opted to disregard the Potsdam Treaty, prompting the decision to initiate the mission to drop the atomic bomb on the country.
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Considering a name for the aircraft, Tibbets had decided to name it after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets (who herself had been named after the heroine in a novel). Tibbets had personally selected one of the B-29s on the assembly line and assumed command for the first mission. Enola GayĬommanded by Colonel Paul Tibbets, the group relocated to the tiny Pacific island of Tinian. Although the B-29 had already seen service for conventional bombing raids, the aircraft had to be specially adapted to carry the atomic weapons, mainly through stripping down the planes to be lighter and designing the bomb bay with new release mechanisms. The B-29 heavy bomber aircraft was considered ideal for this purpose. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”Ī US combat group had been formed in the winter of 1944 to develop the means to deliver the newly created atomic weapons to targets in Germany and Japan. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Many years later, Oppenheimer expanded on this by discussing the initial reactions from the witnesses: “We knew the world would not be the same. On recalling the explosion, Oppenheimer later called to mind a passage from the Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one ” The blast, which was equal to 20 kilotons of TNT, turned the desert sands to glass and released a blinding light. The first successful detonation, codenamed Trinity, was conducted on the 16th July 1945. Physicist J Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos laboratory where the bombs themselves were designed. The results of which were the creation of atomic bombs capable of harnessing the awful and destructive forces within. With the discovery of the splitting of the atom, it was inevitable that the enormous energy unleashed would be considered for military uses. The Manhattan Project had been designed to explore the use of the first nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, in the years that the war had been active, a special research and development unit based in Los Alamos in the United States was finally delivering results.
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Yet this battle was seen as purely a means to gain a base of operations for the mainland invasion of Japan, which was anticipated to bring even greater casualties on both sides. The invasion of the Japanese islands of Okinawa had seen the loss of 14,000 Allied lives, with the Japanese toll over 77,000.
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The Pacific War had seen some of the most brutal battles to be waged during the world conflict. Germany had already fallen following the capture of Berlin and the subsequent Potsdam Declaration had been issued calling for Japan to surrender. That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One…īy 1945, the Second World War had appeared to be drawing to a close.