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, begun four years earlier, produced an atomic weapon, crude by modern day standards, but revolutionary in World War II. America was in competition with the Germans to build the first nuclear weapon. The Nazi “wonder weapon” failed where the American project succeeded. Ultimately, it was Japan, our secondary enemy, that suffered from this scientific discovery.