Facing an Atomic Attack

Just before dawn on an August morning in 1945 an intense light called flashed across the New Mexican desert from a site called Trinity. It was bright in the pre-dawn darkness but had it been high noon on a clear day the flash of light would momentarily have eclipsed the sun. With that flash, atomic explosion moved from theory to reality. And like the burst of energy at creation called the big bang, in that flash, the nuclear age was born. This was a fission explosion, the splitting of the heavy atoms of Plutonium (p-239) into smaller atoms.

The weapon produced the explosive power of twenty kilotons or forty million pounds of TNT. A flight of a thousand B-17’s could carry only about one tenth of that explosive power. The bomb that exploded at Trinity was the second generation of nuclear weapons, an implosion bomb. Many explosive charges around a spherical core of Plutonium imploded it to make a non-critical mass into a critical one which would explode.

The Uranium gun bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima was an untested but far simpler concept that used far more material. There was only enough Uranium for the two pieces of this bomb, a target and a bullet that was fired down a “gun barrel” to make a critical mass. There was enough plutonium for two of the more efficient bombs, the other was detonated over Nagasaki.

It would be a few years till we learned three more terms, thermonuclear weapon, megaton and hydrogen bomb. The latter was a bomb that fused two atoms of Deuterium or heavy hydrogen, an isotope of hydrogen that unlike regular hydrogen has a neutron in the nucleus to produce one helium atom and a very small parcel of energy but with many of these fusions the energy released was phenomenal. Instead of measuring yield in kilo tons or thousands of tons of TNT, with the hydrogen bomb it was measured in megatons or millions of tons of TNT. The explosive power of a bomb had increased by a factor of one thousand in less than ten years! It was in this environment that the Cold War was fought.

I realize I am in the minority, but I personally believe the World War II attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. Sure they ended the war. But the destruction of those two cities brought on thinking that pervaded the minds of the decision makers in 50’s and 60’s, possibly into the 70’s and 80’s. If you have seen the short segments that show the civil defense “duck and cover” public service announcements of the 50’s on TV Land showing children in schools ducking under their desks, you have probably laughed. I didn’t when I saw it again for the first time in probably forty years. But you would not have laughed if you were there. I was.