“Enola Gay” is carrying her Little Boy in her big belly and she’ll shortly give birth to the first atomic bomb. A mile-high mushroom cloud will soon be seen above Hiroshima.
At their altitude of 30,000 feet, the crew can make out the coastline of Japan between a few clouds which have broken up. Soon, they’ll start the four-minute bomb run. A special manoeuvre has been planned for the plane to turn away in time to avoid being blown to pieces after the explosion.
They left under the cover of darkness earlier this morning.
The typed-out operations order, dated the day before, had stated simply: Breakfast at 2 a.m., Takeoff at 3 a.m. It was signed by Major James Hopkins, Jr, Operations Officer for the Air Corps. Under the category Bomb, the order read: Special.
Nearing the end of their mission, conditions are now stable. Deep below, Japan’s Inland Sea looks calm as a mirror.
The Dark Force is locked and ready inside the approaching bomber. Its power will be greater than a tsunami, hurricane, earthquake or even a stray asteroid from outer space. By the end of this day, the people of Hiroshima will either be dead or will have become hibakusha: “bomb-affected persons”.
The Dark Force has been created by many people. Its time has come. It’s an instrument of anger and revenge because the top-secret Manhattan Project was authorised by President Franklin Roosevelt after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. At a meeting on October 9, 1941, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and head of all scientific wartime projects, was instructed to develop the atomic bomb. Back in 1939, the President had received a letter from Albert Einstein explaining that it had become physically possible to generate nuclear energy and to create a nuclear bomb. The Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff of the Army were part of a Policy Group appointed by the President to oversee the project. Then, in June 1942, Winston Churchill had warned Roosevelt about the German progress on creating a nuclear bomb for the Nazi regime. In August, 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Quebec Agreement, a formal Anglo-American collaboration on weapons employing the new nuclear energy.
Upon receiving his commission, Bush had ordered the US Army Corps of Engineers to construct the necessary facilities for bomb development. In the end, over 600,000 took part in the project.
Arthur Compton, a middle-aged Nobel prize-winning physicist, was assigned overall responsibility for the physics of bomb development. He oversaw the production of the nuclear reactors of the Manhattan Project. In June 1942, he appointed Dr. Robert Oppenheimer to be his scientific director.
Later that year, in September, bustling Major-General Leslie “Dick” Groves, of the Army Corps of Engineers, took overall control of the top-secret project. He, in turn, reported directly to the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and to General Marshall. And the top-secret nature of the Manhattan Project, allied to the direct chains of command operational during a war, gave Groves unparalleled latitude in decision-making.
Well-girthed, bossy, and always managing to look a tad shabby, even in uniform, Groves was a relentless man. He had a military approach to management, namely: toe the line or else. Black or white: shades of grey don’t exist. His blunt style was a reflection of his directness, honesty and domineering personality.
Groves set up and ran three atomic bomb research and production plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at Hanford in Washington and at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He wanted enriched uranium and plutonium as the fuel for his atomic weapons. The Major-General was going to mastermind the biggest leap forward in weapons technology in history.
Within moments, “Little Boy” will be pouring out a vast array of gamma rays, a form of radiation, over the people of Hiroshima.
The most violent explosion in history is imminent.
Oppenheimer, a cultured liberal democrat from Berkeley, had arrived with a few of his staff to begin their momentous work on March 15, 1943 at Site Y in Los Alamos.
He and Groves are polar opposites. There isn’t much that’s endearing or gracious about the General, who is often tactless. He possesses little that is soft in his nature or character. Both men are intense individuals. Both are, in different ways, huge personalities. While Groves is a machine of military efficiency, with an almost superhuman capacity for work, Oppenheimer, by contrast, is a complicated, nuanced, sensitive, thoughtful, subtle scholar. He is brimming with intellectual brilliance.
Oppie, as he is known, is dark-haired, tall and thin, even gaunt, with distinctive bushy eyebrows framing bright, blue eyes. He nearly always carries with him a vague, Bohemian sense of style disguising a strong character and deliberate social persona. As a younger man, he’d written poetry and short stories and had dabbled in other languages, including Sanskrit. He possesses literary aspirations and refined tastes.
It wasn’t long before Oppenheimer felt overwhelmed, and even a touch depressed, by the sheer scale of the project, combined with its national importance. Sometimes, Los Alamos became like a prison to him, especially after Groves stopped him from flying and driving due to the risks these activities carried for such a critical figure.
Oppie wrestled with the notion of applying the new science of nuclear fission to weapons of mass destruction, even though he understood that Hitler’s war machine was an existential threat to Jews and to the free world. This whole situation was a shattering reality to process in his mind. He also struggled with the project’s military secrecy which was anathema to most scientists who truly wished to share knowledge for the good of the world, to give some of its intrinsic value back to humanity.
He will bear in his soul a terrible historic burden.
This was a world at war, a world perpetually on edge.
Oppenheimer had his hands full keeping his scientists happy while trying to balance the two worlds of theoretical physics and the military. Shortly after his appointment, he’d hired his old friend from university, Dr. Bob Serber, as his principal assistant.
At the time, Serber had just heard news about Pearl Harbor on his car radio, not realizing just how much this news would change his life, the fate of his country, and the course of the world.
“I’m taking over bomb development,” Oppenheimer had told his laconic colleague. “Why not come and work with me on this?”
The goal of Oppenheimer and Serber was to determine the feasibility of the A-bomb. Within two months, they’d figured out that the bomb was, indeed, theoretically feasible.
Bob was completely reliable and sincere. From head to toe, he was a no-nonsense man of science, complete with a dry sense of humor and a practical approach to life. A reserved, scholarly man, he quietly and stubbornly went about getting down on paper the mathematics and physics of optimal A-bomb design. He’d worked out the critical mass calculation. That was to control stray neutrons released by the explosion. Enough of them had to be reflected back through a tamper device to prevent their escape through the surface of the bomb. In that way, the re-directed neutrons would feed the nuclear fission process, instead of dissipating it.
Serber had also figured out the exponential shock wave effect when pressure increases at a rapidly multiplying rate. Finally, the theory of how things blow up, especially on that scale, was part of their calculations, too.
In no time his team had come up with core calculations for the critical mass of uranium required for the bomb, all by using mechanical desk calculators. Then, the impurities in natural uranium had to be stripped away through electromagnetic separation and enrichment to get to the fissile core of the element. After that, they had to design a bomb, its shell made of tungsten carbide, with double the density of steel, to house this explosive material. Finally, they needed denotation. For that, they’d decided that a uranium bullet would be fired down the bomb’s barrel at 3,000 feet per second.