Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb

PROLOGUE
August 6, 1945
8:15 a.m.
Hiroshima, Japan
Ten-­year-­old Toshio Nakamura woke from a short night’s sleep. He was home in Hiroshima, Japan, eating peanuts as he sat on his bedroll. Suddenly, without warning, an enormous FLASH bathed the space around him in a blinding white light. Before he knew it, he and his two younger sisters, Myeko and Yaeko, were in the air—­a violent blast blew them clear across the room. Toshio landed on top of Myeko, whose legs were pinned under a piece of fallen timber. She was crying, “Mother, help me!”
With a mother’s reflex, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura ran to her children, desperate to dig them out of the debris. Toshio was unharmed, but Myeko was buried up to her chest. Yaeko was still below—­silent. Frantically, Mrs. Nakamura threw aside shards of broken tile and lifted the heavy pieces of timber pinning her two daughters. She quickly freed Myeko. Then she saw Yaeko’s arm. She tugged.
“Itai! It hurts!” Yaeko wailed.
Relieved that her children were unharmed, Mrs. Nakamura yelled back, “There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not.” Then she jerked Yaeko up, freeing her from the remains of their collapsed house.
The Nakamuras went out to the street. They gasped in disbelief, for in front of them lay a scene of utter destruction. All the houses on their block had been reduced to piles of rubble, just like theirs.
As they would later find out, the four-­engined American B-­29 SuperfortressEnola Gay had just dropped on their city the first atomic bomb ever used in war. The bomb exploded two thousand feet over Hiroshima’s main shopping district, and in less than a second, the temperature at ground zero reached seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. People as far away as one half mile instantly turned to water vapor. Statues melted, roof tiles fused together, and buildings caught fire or exploded with unimaginable ferocity. At least eighty thousand people died immediately. The Nakamuras’ house was about three-quarters of a mile from the center of the explosion, sparing them that fate.
“The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding,” Toshio later recalled. “We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned, and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park [that] night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridgeand met my girlfriends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded, and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”2
Three Days Later
Nagasaki, Japan
Shortly after 11:00 in the morning, twelve-­year-­old Hiroyasu Tagawa heard the distant whir of a plane flying high over his aunt’s house, where he was staying with his sister. Four months earlier, an evacuation forced the family to leave their home in downtown Nagasaki. So that the kids could remain close to school, they agreed to temporarily split up. Hiroyasu and his sister moved in with their aunt, who lived a short distance from town, while their parents moved to Urakami, a neighborhood farther up the Urakami River on the city’s northern fringe.
Hiroyasu ran out to the garden. He looked up to the sky. Sure enough, a plane sailed high over the mountaintop, the sun glinting off the metal of its fuselage.
Suddenly, everything turned orange. Hiroyasu quickly covered his eyes and ears and dropped to the ground. This was the position he practiced daily at school for times like this. “Soon dust and debris and pieces of glass were flying everywhere,” he recalled. “After that, silence.”