Word: bomb
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...Enola Gay left Tinian, in the Marianas chain, at 2:45 a.m. and was scheduled to arrive over Hiroshima, a city at the south end of the Japanese island of Honshu, at 8:15 a.m.; the crew was 15 seconds later than planned. The plane then dropped a single bomb, weighing five tons. Says Van Kirk: "I was timing it with my watch. It was supposed to take 43 seconds, and we all concluded it had been a dud, because it took longer. Then it exploded." The pilot of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul Tibbets, had put the plane into...
...ground, half a mile from where the bomb dropped, Michiko Yamaoka, then a 15-year-old student, saw the same flash. Today she describes it as like a burst of light from an unearthly photo shoot, big enough to cover the sky, "blue-yellow and very beautiful." Yamaoka was blown off her feet. When she came to, she had burns all over her body, and, she says, she could "hear people calling out for help and the crackle of fire coming from burning houses ... people moaning from pain, with eyes popped out and intestines coming out of their stomachs...
Eight days later, it was. Ever since, there has been controversy over when the war would have ended had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima--a second was detonated over the city of Nagasaki on Aug. 9--and how many Japanese and Americans would have died before it did. But, plainly, the most terrible war ever known ended earlier than it would have because of the Enola Gay's mission. The bombs cost tens of thousands of lives--perhaps 120,000 were killed immediately in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with many more dying later from the effects of radiation...
...terrible instrument of war had brought peace. The images from Hiroshima seared the consciousness of a generation, forever serving as an admonishing reminder of mankind's destructive capacities. "In an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future," TIME wrote one week after the dropping of the bomb. And yet the very memory of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of cities being reduced to rubble in an instant, provided an odd hope that such terror would never be allowed to happen again. After Hiroshima, the U.S. and the Soviet Union built thousands of nuclear devices...
...press that logic further, and you arrive at an uncomfortable place. If nuclear weapons are so great at keeping the peace, why shouldn't everyone have them? And what happens when the Bomb falls into the hands of those who don't remember the legacy of Aug. 6--or simply choose not to? Sixty years after Hiroshima, 14 years after the Soviet Union imploded, the great question facing strategists--facing all of us--is less how a nation might array its nuclear forces and more how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons from spinning out of control. The Bush...