base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. Proponents of the A-bomb-such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state-believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused.
ATOMIC BOMB EXPLOSION FULL
In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. No Surrender for the Japaneseīy the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device-a plutonium bomb-at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb. They sent them to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a team led by J.
Over the next several years, the program’s scientists worked on producing the key materials for nuclear fission-uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239).
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