Word: hiroshima
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...outside world learned of the Hiroshima bomb--but not of its gruesome effects--from a terse White House announcement approved by President Truman, who was steaming home from Potsdam on the U.S.S. Augusta. The big news was saved for the beginning of the third paragraph: "It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East." This was the first public announcement anywhere indicating that nuclear weapons even existed...
Japanese radio offered its citizens, few of them presumably listening in Hiroshima, a more tentative report: "Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. Our enemies have apparently used a new type of bomb. The details are being investigated...
...truth, Tokyo initially knew almost nothing about what had happened in Hiroshima. As General Marshall noted later, "What we did not take into account was that the destruction would be so complete that it would be an appreciable time before the actual facts of the case would get to Tokyo." As Washington waited impatiently for word of surrender, the Japanese Cabinet tried to find out what on earth had happened to Hiroshima. Since the first reports seemed unbelievable, some Japanese leaders wanted desperately not to believe them. Others decided that even if Truman's announcement was true--that Hiroshima...
...city to be hit by an atomic bomb. Fat Man exploded 1650 ft. above the city of some 240,000 people on the western coast of Kyushu at 11:02 on the morning of Aug. 9. In many ways, the event was a carbon copy of the horrors of Hiroshima: flash, heat, blast, radiation; permanent shadows cast by bombshine; thirsty, mortally burned people, emerging from the smoke and dust, trailing strips of their skin behind them. Some in Nagasaki had been afraid that their city would be attacked by the new weapon. Hideo Matsuno, then 27, a reporter with...
...Supreme War Council was meeting in a military building on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo at the moment of the Nagasaki bombing. A military aide entered the meeting at 11:30 a.m. with word that Nagasaki had been hit with the same sort of bomb as Hiroshima. This news was bad enough, but it only added to the council's bleak agenda, which was headed by the announcement, received in Tokyo the night before, that the U.S.S.R. had abruptly and unexpectedly declared war on Japan. Already, on the morning of Aug. 9, some of an estimated...