Word: atomics
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Whether or not America used the atom bomb solely to effect that surrender is another question. After Europe, the nation had its bellyful of war, and the assumption of the times was if the Bomb could bring peace in one shot, then use the thing. But a strong impulse for retribution must have applied as well. Harold Agnew was not alone in feeling that the Japanese "bloody well deserved" Hiroshima. There is also a theory that the U.S. used the Bomb as much to frighten the Soviets, with whom it was about to divide the world...
...after Hiroshima and before Nagasaki. The Japanese may have concluded that it would be better to surrender to the Americans than to risk prolonging the war and allowing the Soviets to take more spoils. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey conducted just after the war concluded that the atom bombings were not decisive in defeating the Japanese, and in reality may have strengthened their will to resist...
...people realized that the remarkable Bomb that felled an empire and brought the world to rapt attention was not going to be a gift without a price. In the Aug. 20, 1945, issue of TIME, James Agee looked ahead: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split--and far from controlled." Agee was anticipating an opposition between people and their invention that would widen rapidly as the century continued, until eventually Americans would almost come to believe that the Bomb...
...nature. When the Bomb was dropped, much was made of how man had conquered nature, exposed its deepest mysteries; in a sense, how nature, like Japan, had been brought to its knees. Yet it did not take long for the realization to sink in that the splitting of the atom not only gave people no greater authority over nature than they had before, it proved how helpless they were when handling natural forces. Since that time, there seems to have been a general divorce of human life from other natural phenomena. It is as if people concluded that with atomic...
...about the Bomb in the past few years has created a small industry. There have been recent novels about the "end," notably Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, a story of survival in a contaminated world, like Nevil Shute's 1957 best seller On the Beach. A book of drawings by atom bomb survivors, The Unforgettable Fire, had great public impact in 1982 when the first American edition appeared. At least one major poet recently turned his hand to this subject. Robert Penn Warren's New Dawn chronicles the Enola Gay's mission from the takeoff on Tinian, to the flight over...