It’s now August 6, 1945.
A summer’s day begins in Hiroshima, the city of water. Against a backdrop of rolling mountain ranges, the valley flattens and fans out past the hills of Futabayama and Hijiyama towards the delta of the Ōta River and its branches, which look, from the air, like fingers of a giant, outstretched hand.
Before the war, Hiroshima was a place of plenty, with produce coming from the sea in front of it and from the country behind it.
It doesn’t look like the day when a Dark Force will come from the skies.
Just this week, Akira Inagaki turned thirteen years old. He’s getting ready for school and his mother, Kaiya, is fretting that he is dawdling and will be late again. His father, Yori, a newspaper editor by profession, is away on duty with the Military Intelligence Corps of the Imperial Japanese Army. It’s just mother and son left in the household.
A small, stocky boy, with a circular face framed by thick, straight hair, Akira is a bit of a dreamer. From an early age, he has wanted to be a pilot. The very first time he saw a plane, he’d looked up into the sky in awe.
“Okaa-san, why wasn’t I born with wings to fly in the sky like that?” he’d asked his mother.
“My little boy was not born a bird,” she’d responded. “He must learn to fly the hard way.”
“What is this hard way, Okaa-san, so I can learn it?”
“The way of books, my son, they alone will give you your wings.”
Akira had soon discovered all about the hard way because he didn’t take naturally to the mathematics and physics he had to study at school. His ambition to be a pilot, however, kept him on track, helping him to overcome the boredom and frustration he sometimes experienced while learning.
On this strangest of summer mornings, Kaiya is walking with her son to school.
Their city is set in a sheltered corner of a large inland sea, which is a waterway between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific. Its bay is known for its temperate climate and placid, shimmering water.
The gentle flow of Hiroshima’s river is spanned by the distinctive T-shaped Aioi Bridge. It links the city to one of the bay’s small islands. This bridge, its form so easy to identify from the sky, is the aiming-point of the world’s first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”.
The name may conjure up a picture of childhood innocence, but it’s a heavy, squat nuclear weapon, something like an outsize torpedo. Its shape is vaguely reminiscent of a baby whale, complete with a box-like set of fins.
It’s 8.00 a.m.
As usual, the waters wrapped around the city are tranquil. Somehow, though, there’s an eeriness permeating the morning. A stillness before an impending storm. It’s not so much that there was an air raid siren about an hour ago. That’s nothing unusual for war time. The all-clear has just sounded, anyway.
No, it’s due, in part, to the rumors that have been circulating recently in response to the nagging question: why has the city been spared from the Allied aerial bombing raids taking place across Japan? This question is especially perplexing given that Hiroshima accommodates the headquarters of the 2nd Army, its soldiers charged with defending southern Japan. It has been suggested by some cynics that the enemy may have something “special” in mind for the city.
And yet, on the surface, Hiroshima looks and feels so undisturbed this morning. Certainly, this old castle town, with its army base, seems unaware that the future is about to arrive in full force from a sky its depleted Air Force can no longer protect. The fire-breaks, which the Patriotic Volunteer Corps have been creating in some built-up areas of the city by dismantling selected homes and buildings, will be too little, too late.
The people live their simple lifestyle in tens of thousands of traditional Japanese homes, from mansions to more modest dwellings, just like Yori, Kaiya and Akira. Even after some evacuations of its inhabitants during the war, there are still over a quarter of a million citizens going about their daily lives, just as they’ve done for more than three centuries.
Humans, appearing as small as ants from the bomber’s exalted height, scamper around as the city bursts into life. A train, looking from the sky like a toy, twists its way through some green rice paddies beyond the city. Buses and motor vehicles putter around. Tiny fishing boats bob in the bay, ferries bustle with their miniscule passengers, while merchant vessels sail slowly into a tranquil harbor.
Weighing about four tons, “Little Boy” is heavier than any pick-up truck. And its cylinder of armored steel is ten feet long. That’s bigger than giants, taller than the world’s tallest man. On second thoughts, perhaps the bomb should’ve been called “Giant”. The nickname must be some kind of white lie. For it’s going to release an unknown, new energy of exponential chain reactions caused by splitting atoms apart.
Unbeknown to Hiroshima, a new science has been dis-covered.
The soft drone of a B-29 bomber can just be heard in the far distance, coming from the south.
A laboratory in Los Alamos, tucked away on a remote, pine-forested plateau of New Mexico in the United States, designed the bomb as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. Their goal was to produce the most explosive military bomb of all time. For their country was at war with Germany in the West and Japan in the East.
Upon detonation, “Little Boy”, hanging now in the bomb bay, will be triggered by a gun-like action. That’s how it was figured out at Los Alamos. It’ll fire a projectile, containing a mass of enriched uranium 235, at a second mass of uranium stored at the other end of the six-foot long bomb barrel. The two masses of uranium on their own won’t cause an explosion but when they collide they’ll reach critical mass and produce a nuclear chain reaction. Rapid-fire neutrons bombarding the nucleus of a uranium atom will split it and force it to divide, and then divide again – and then again, doubling, at each division, the total number of neutrons produced: two triggers four, four triggers eight, eight triggers sixteen, sixteen triggers thirty-two, and so on. In this way, the amount of energy that can be released multiplies quickly into massive proportions as the chain reaction is unleashed.
The sheer energy that is going to be produced in this process will heat up the purified uranium. Little Boy contains about 50 kilograms of highly purified U235. In less than a millionth of a second, the material will reach a temperature of billions of degrees Celsius. At that point, the metal will become a gas. In addition, great degrees of pressure will build up, expanding the boiling gas. We’re talking about ten million times the energy released in typical fires or explosions. It will explode over the city of Hiroshima with an immense blast-yield equal to around 20,000 tons of TNT explosives. This is the Dark Force.
As Kiara kisses her son goodbye and heads back for home, the bomber is approaching Japan’s coast, big engines droning.
CHAPTER NINE
THE COMPONENTS OF “LITTLE BOY” were assembled in a corrugated, semi-circular shaped metal hut, doubling up as an improvised laboratory, on the humid Pacific island of Tinian, about 2,526 km from Japan. Scattered all over the island’s shore and sea floor are 50-caliber machine gun bullets left behind after the US invasion at the end of July last year when a 9,000-man Japanese garrison was defeated there. Bullets, sand, sea shells and coral intermingle across this disturbed tropical paradise.
After assembly, the bomb was loaded onto the Boeing B-29 four-engine Superfortress, or heavy bomber, called “Enola Gay”. It’s named after the pilot’s mother. His name is Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr, commander of the 509th Composite Group of the United States Army Air Forces.