HT This Day: August 8, 1945 -- Atomic bomb assault against Japan
President Truman disclosed in a White House statement the terrific destructive power packed into the missile which was dropped during the day on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base
London: An atomic bomb which loosens the pent-up forces of the universe equal to over 20,000 tons of T.N.T., has 2,000 times the blast power of the British “grand slam bomb” and represents one of the greatest scientific advances of history, has been dropped on Japan.
US war secretary Henry L Stimson today predicted that the new atomic bomb would “prove of tremendous aid” in shortening the war with Japan. Mr Stimson made this statement as the army reported “an impenetrable cloud of smoke and dust” had cloaked Hiroshima after it was hit by the new weapon from the air.
Reliable military quarters in Washington report that complete plans for an all-out atom bomb assault against Japan are ready for immediate implementation, Reuter’s Washington correspondent cabled early this morning. Meanwhile, they are awaiting complete reconnaissance report on the effect of the first such missile which crashed down early on Monday morning on Hiroshima, fortified port and army base on west Honshu island, on which Tokyo stands.
President Truman disclosed in a White House statement yesterday (already published in these columns) the terrific destructive power packed into the missile which was dropped during the day on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base, 190 miles west of Kobe. He said the bomb added a new and revolutionary increase in the destruction of the Japanese homeland. This awful bomb is the answer, the President said, to Japan’s failure to accept the Potsdam demand that she surrender unconditionally at once or face utter destruction.
The product of 2,000,000,000 dollars spent in research and production the greatest scientific gamble in history-the atomic bomb had been, said the President, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war.
Japan is being told about the atomic bomb. President Truman’s epoch-making announcement threatening her with a rain of ruin from the air it being broadcast repeatedly from powerful medium-wave transmitters m the Marianas as well as from shortwave transmitters along the United States western seaboard, says Reuter’s special correspondent.
Dramatized in the leaflet form, details of the most terrible missile in history will soon be scattered over the Japanese home islands. Indeed, the United States nerve war experts think that the psychological effect of the bomb may be even more devastating than the physical.
Three years’ work
An accurate assessment of the damage inflicted by the bomb is not yet available. However, the War Department said that as soon as details of its effectiveness were learned the Department would release them.
Mr Stimson said that the explosive power of the bomb was such as to “stagger imagination”. He added that scientists were confident of developing even more powerful atomic bombs.
Mr Stimson said that security requirements did not permit disclosure of exact methods of producing the bomb or the nature of its action. The development of the bomb was the culmination of three years’ work by Allied scientists, industry, labour and military forces. He was convinced that Japan would not be in a position to use a similar weapon.
The possibility of using atomic energy in the manufacture of weapons was brought to the late President Roosevelt’s attention late in 1939, Mr Stimson said. The Chief Executive named a committee to investigate and by June 1942 sufficient progress had been made to warrant a big expansion of the project.
Three plants to produce bombs started in December 1942. A special laboratory had been established near Santa Fe directed by Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer whose “genius and inspiration,” Mr Stimson said, were largely responsible for the development of the bomb.
A hunt for the atomic bomb began right after the war got under way when a German mathematician, a Jewish woman named Lize Meitner, put forward the theory that a phenomenon exhibited by that rare metal, uranium, which had puzzled scientists for years, was really an explosion of the atoms of uranium. Within two weeks after she published this calculation the great physics laboratories of the United States, England and Germany had verified her prediction. She was banished from Germany shortly afterwards, but Hitler put all available physicists at work on atomic bombs and atomic power at the ‘’Keiser Wilhelm Institute” in Berlin.
What the scientists found was that the rare form of uranium known as 2-3-5 uranium, when bombarded with low electrical energy (in the form of neutral rays), would react by splitting some of its atoms almost squarely into two.
Up to that time no atom had ever been really smashed. A few electrons or other particles had been forced out by smashing rays which used to be either X-rays or rays made of atomic particles.
When uranium atoms split into two, as the German woman predicted, a whole new world opened for atomic power. The energy released by an atom breaking into two was thousands of times greater than the energy when just a few pieces were chipped off.
This new situation started the United States and Britain on a hunt for atomic power and atomic bombs and even before the United States entered the war all this atomic work was placed under censorship. Since then not a single development has been published until today’s bomb.