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Atomic Bomb
American leaders called the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki our 'least abhorrent choice,' but there were alternatives to the nuclear attacks.
When judging the morality of the use of atomic weapons in World War II, observers typically focus on Japanese deaths, while ignoring the far-larger number of non-Japanese casualties.
In the spring of 1945, American bombing raids destroyed much of Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities, killing at least 200,000 people, without forcing a surrender.
Editor’s Note: David Dean Barrett is a military historian, specializing in World War II.
The U.S. government managed to hide the magnitude of what happened in Hiroshima until John Hersey’s story appeared in the New Yorker, driving home the truth about America’s new mega-weapon.
Editor's Note: Lesley M.M.
Kimberly Miller Hill has sent us a photo taken, she writes, “… on or shortly after V-J Day, showing a uniquely American depiction of confidence and might. The ‘quarterback’ holds aloft a symbol of destruction, which, in subsequent years, caused controversy riddled with complexity.
A final interview with the most controversial father of the atomic age, Edward Teller
Stationed near Nagasaki at the close of the war, a young photographer ventured into the devastated city and stayed for months.
Those Yanks of World War II are white-haired now. Great-grandchildren play about their feet. The grand parades and great commemorations are over. Only a few monuments to their achievements are yet to be built.
Recently discovered documents shine a new light on the President’s biggest decision
How the U.S. Air Force came to drop an A-bomb on South Carolina
It worked, and, in a few millionths of a second, science became more powerful than all the age-old nation-states
The Jornada Del Muerto, the Dead Man’s Trail, a waterless seventy-five-mile stretch of alkaline desert in southern New Mexico north of Alamogordo, was named in an age when transportation depended on water and grass, rather than refined hydrocarbons.
The super-secret atomic bomb made a giant, bright yellow fireball like a super-sun that hurt the eyes.
In 1945, I was a member of a super-secret Army intelligence unit attached to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb.
I played with the knobs and dials, not knowing I might have blown up Chicago.
During World War II, I served aboard USS Alabama in the United States Navy. Al Barkan, a shipmate more than ten years my senior, assumed the role of mentor to me. Al was a graduate of the University of Chicago and a natural teacher.
Some worries surrounded these early atomic-bomb tests. Among them: Would the Pacific Ocean explode?
In the autumn of last year, France’s Prime Minister Jacques Chirac ordered a series of test explosions of French nuclear weapons at the center that his government maintains for this purpose on Fangataufa and Mururoa atolls in French Polynesia.
The war’s-end anniversaries are over now. In a sense, they were over on June 6, 1994, with the commemorative ceremonies that drew the nation’s gaze back half a century to the Normandy landings.
Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command that simply was not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki.
In a conflict that saw saturation-bombing, Auschwitz, and the atom bomb, poison gas was never used in the field. What prevented it?
Forty years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing at least 110,000 and possibly 250,000 Japanese, and speeding that nation’s surrender.
As three recent films show—one on the atomic bomb, one on women defense workers during the Second World War, one on the government arts projects of the thirties —this history of our times offers film makers arresting opportunities.
The Agony of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the life of J.
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