National Security: Paul Tibbets

Today is the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the nuclear age. An atom bomb, dropped from a single B-29 (the Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother), demolished the city of Hiroshima and killed 80 thousand civilians. Three days later, a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki and a week following, earth’s most destructive war ended. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally without the invasion that America was dreading (we expected more than a million casualties).  The Manhattan Project, b