Shortly after Tokyo's capitulation, an advance team of American Army researchers were dispatched to Hiroshima to study the effects that the Atom Bomb had on that city. What we found most interesting about this reminiscence was the narrative told by a young Japanese Army major as to how Tokyo learned of the city's destruction:
"Again and again the air-raid defense headquarters called the army wireless station at Hiroshima. No answer. Something had happened to Hiroshima..." "The Manhattan Project" was the code name given to the allied effort to develop the Atomic Bomb during World War Two. The research and development spanned the years 1942 through 1946 and the participating nations behind the effort were the Unites States, Great Britain and Canada. Within the United States, there were as many as three locations where the Manhattan Project was carried out however this article concerns the goings-on at the uranium-enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The article presents the point of view of your basic PFC on the base; how he had to maintain the necessary secrecy, what was it like living among such a plethora of pointy-headed slide-rule jockeys and how grateful they were to be living the comfortable life, while so many other draftees fared so poorly. Attached is a 1948 article by the Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton (1892 – 1962) concerning the widespread understanding among nuclear physicists to wrestle control of atomic energy away from the military and firmly in the hands of civil authorities, where it's benefits can be put to general use and harnessed as positive force in the lives of all mankind.
Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1927, the SCRIPT MAGAZINE editors believed that Arthur Compton, more than anyone else, deserved the title "Daddy of the Atomic bomb". When the U.S. Government decided to proceed with the research and development of this weapon, Compton was assigned the double task of attempting a nuclear chain reaction and of designing the bomb itself.
Compton is remembered as the senior physicist at the Manhattan Project who hired Dr. Robert Oppenheimer. Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years.
Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
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In ten lines the U.S. Army history section succinctly outlined Japan's grim situation and the events that led up to the dropping of the bomb: "By the summer of 1945 it was obvious to most responsible leaders in Japan that the end of the war was near. For the first time those who favored ending the war came out in the open and in June, Japan sent out peace feelers through the Soviet Union. The rejection of the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, however, sealed the doom of Japan..."
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years Apparently the arguments that we still hear today concerning whether or not use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 was justifiable popped-up right away. The following is a letter to the editor of Yank Magazine written by a hard-charging fellow who explained that he was heartily sick of reading the
"-pious cries of horror [that] come from the musty libraries of well-fed clergymen and from others equally far removed from the war". An anonymous columnist at The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the Atomic Bombs:
"... we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it."
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