THE ATOMIC BOMB Plymstock School history department

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THE ATOMIC BOMBPlymstock School history
department
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PART ONE OPERATION OLYMPIC
By the early summer of 1945 Nazi Germany had been
defeated.However, WWII was more than a European
war. Japan had conquered an area much larger than
Germany and still remained defiant, though on the
retreat. Battle fought across the Pacific and
the introduction of Kamikaze pilots convinced the
Allies than Japan would have to defeated to the
last man. Millions of men who had fought in
Europe were therefore shipped to the East in
readiness to invade Japan.
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Part TWOTrinity
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Silence reigned on the desert. Observers not at
S-10 lay down in assigned trenches dug in a dry
abandoned reservoir, faces and eyes directed
toward the ground and with the head away from
Zero. They waited. A voice like the voice of
the Creator spoke from above the black clouds
Zero minus ten seconds!. A green flare
exploded in the darkness, illuminating the clouds
before it vanished. Zero minus three seconds!
The silence deepened. In the east was the first
faint pink blush of dawn. And then out of the
bowels of the earth there shot into the sky the
herald of another dawn, the light not of this
world but of many suns in one. Within a fraction
of a second it flashed to a height of more than
8,000 feet, a great greenish glare rising ever
higher until it pierced the clouds, lighting the
desert with a pure brilliance never before
witnessed by human being. It was a great ball of
fire a mile in diameter.
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Shooting upward, ever upward, growing wider as it
rose, it kept changing colours like a giant
chameleon, changing shape like a monster genie,
first an enormous mushroom and then fleetingly
a Stature of Liberty magnified many times. At
last it reached its apex 41,000 feet above the
earth, 12,000 feet higher than the highest
mountain in the world, seeming to lean slightly
to gaze down upon the pygmy peaks of the Sierra
Oscuro Range. Having seen the flash, transfixed
with awe and wonder, the men gathered on the
desert that momentous morning next heard the
sound. It came with a mighty roar like the
simultaneous explosion of thousands of
blockbusters. Its thunder reverberated among the
Sierra Oscuros and made the desert floor shake as
though convulsed in the grip of an earthquake.
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Suddenly some of the scientists and science
writers began to caper and dance, like primitive
man celebrating the discovery of fire. They
laughed and clapped their hands. The sun cant
hold a candle to it, someone said. Another felt
it was as though the Creator had said Let there
be light. To Prof. George B. Kistiakowsky of
Harvard it was the nearest thing to doomsday
that one could possibly imagine. I am sure, that
at the end of the world in the last millisecond
of the earths existence the last man will see
what we have seen.
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But perhaps the most intuitive and ominously
prophetic remark came from Dr. Oppenheimer. A
scientist of the West who had helped to produce
this greatest and most fearful achievement of
Western scientism, he retreated into the Eastern
mysticism which had nourished another side of his
extraordinary intellect. A student of Sanskrit,
the ancient language of India, he quoted two
passages from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred epic
of Hinduism. The first If the radiance of a
thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that
would be the splendour of the Mighty One . . .
The second I am become Death, the shatterer of
worlds.
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Part Two Hiroshima
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August 6, 1945, dawned a cloudless blue day with
a light breeze blowing from the south.
Visibility was almost perfect for ten or twelve
miles. At 707 in the morning an air-raid siren
blared. Four B-29s were visible high in the sky.
The air-raid shelters filled quickly. But then
two of the Superforts flew away and the other
pair seemed to vanish. At 731 the all-clear
sounded. People quickly left the shelters,
secure in the belief that this this was one of
those strange but frequent appearances of three
or four Superforts dropping but a single almost
harmless bomb.
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Suddenly an unearthly light of a whitish-pinkish
cast engulfed the city, followed by an awful
blast like a hundred simultaneous thunderclaps.
A horrible, howling wind arose, succeeded by a
wave of suffocating heat. Within a few seconds
the centre of the city vanished. Thousands of
people on the streets or in the parks and gardens
were instantly killed. Thousands more lay
writhing in their death throes.
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Everything standing in the path of the explosion
walls, houses, apartment building, temples,
stores, everything was swept away and
annihilated. Trains loaded with commuters were
hurled from the tracks. Trolley cars were flung
from the streets like gigantic toys. For three
quarters of a mile from the centre of the blast
nothing was left erect or alive. What had been
living beings animals as well as humans were
frozen in attitudes of indescribable agony.
Trees were uprooted and flung into the air like
flaming spears. Green rice plants turned tan and
the grass became straw.
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Beyond the central circle of death even the most
solidly built structures collapsed in
simultaneous rows, and falling debris of beams
and bricks, glass and girders, were seized by the
wind and hurled about the city like missiles,
killing and wounding many thousands more. Other
homes built of wood and straw simply flamed and
fell. Almost everyone inside these buildings
died or was wounded. Those who escaped perished
two or three weeks later from the delayed effects
of deadly gamma rays.
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Reservoirs and rivers were stuffed with corpses.
People unable to bear that awful heat rushed into
them hoping to cool their bodies, only to be
boiled to death. Everywhere were dead and dying
soldiers. They must have had their coats off
before the explosion because they were burned
from the hips up. Beneath the burned-off skin
the flesh was wet and mushy. They also must have
been wearing their military caps the black hair
on their heads was unsigned, making it appear as
though they wore black-lacquered bowls. But
their faces were hideous. Their features had
been burned off and their ears melted off. It
was not possible to tell which way some were
facing.
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Some were left with only their white teeth
protruding, as though bared like those of a
horse. Everywhere among those still living there
arose a piteous crying for water. Chaos reigned
at those hospitals that had survived the blast.
The corridors were jammed with mothers seeking
their children, husbands searching for wives,
their anxious cries mingling with the screams of
the afflicted. Some hospitals caught fire in the
general conflagration that swept the city and had
to be evacuated.
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Half an hour after the explosion, beneath a
still-cloudless sky, a gentle rain began to fall.
Some Japanese believed that the gods had
intervened. But the rain had been caused by the
rise of overheated air to a great height, where
it became condensed and fell back as water. The
rainfall lasted but five minutes, after which the
wind rose again and the fires spread with
frightening speed. By nightfall, the flames began
to subside. But there was really not much left
to burn. 60 of Hiroshima had been destroyed and
150,000 people died or received their death
wounds.
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Thus the Atomic Age had dawned, not in the benign
brilliance of a thousand radiant suns, but in the
malignance of a black mushrooming cloud and a
wrathful, spreading fireball. Death, the
shatterer of worlds, had come upon the Earth.
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What Happened?
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1/3 Mile From GROUND ZEROWind Speed
980mphTemperature 7000 C
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2/3 Mile From GROUND ZEROWind Speed
620mphTemperature 500C
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What would happen to us?
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http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
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