World War 2
The A-Bomb
At dawn on the 16th of July 1945 a colossal fireball erupted over the New Mexico Desert, fusing the sand of the desert to glass and exploding with a force equivalent to 20'000 tons of TNT. It came with a huge mushroom cloud that boiled thousands of feet into the sky. This was the event of the testing of the first atomic bomb, a new era in warfare had dawned.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of the Allies' most intelligent scientific brains were gathered together in a specially built laboratory complex at Los Alamos in New Mexico. By 1945 about 125'000 people were engaged on the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. It was only after the war that Allied scientific teams investigating Germany's atomic weapons program discovered that German research into nuclear weapons was less-superior than the Allies, by at least two years. Hitler's dream of an A-Bomb remained only a fantasy, in his ever-confused head!
Only in America could the massive resources necessary to develop the bomb be concentrated. The overall eventual cost to design and develop the Atomic Bomb was some two billion dollars. It was only three weeks after the initial test of the A-Bomb in the desert of New Mexico, that the Americans used it against Japan. The Americans chose to use Atomic warfare against Japan, as the Japanese refused to surrender through conventional warfare, although the Japanese position was a hopeless one, they continued to fight, all the while Japanese casualties were rising.
The Americans demanded Japanese surrender in the Potsdam Declaration, but rather than accept the terms, the Japanese increased resistance. In order to quell the Japanese forces, the United States needed to demonstrate the military might of the US.
Many US generals advocated continuing traditional warfare, including heavy bombing of the Japanese mainland, coupled with a massive land and sea invasion. This operation was codenamed 'Operation Downfall'. However, while this approach may have proven successful, the US high-ranking generals estimated that up to a million US soldiers could die in the operation. President Truman was shocked at such a death toll, and opted instead to use the Atomic Bomb.
The bomb was intended to warn Japan of the devastating force possible from the U.S. military forces so that they would have no choice but to surrender. Hiroshima was selected as it was a major manufacturing hub. On the 6th of August 1945 an American B-29 heavy bomber dropped a Uranium-235 version of the bomb, the torpedo-shaped 'Little Boy' on the city of Hiroshima, instantly killing around 80'000 Japanese civilians, also injuring thousands more. However, the Japanese did not surrender immediately after the bombing; instead, the United States dropped a second Atomic Bomb, this time on the city of Nagasaki on the 9th of August, where again, another B-29 bomber dropped the 'Fat Man', a bulbous plutonium bomb, killing 35'000 people to bring about Japanese capitulation. Japan formally surrenered to the Allies on the 2nd of September 1945.