May 4, 2018 ▸ War & Conflict

Episode 294: Hiroshima: True Nuclear War

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On this episode of The Sofa King Podcast, we travel back to (Dave’s favorite) World War II and talk about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. After the creations at the Manhattan Project, the US government knew that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s creation was a success. The Trinity Test Explosion exceeded all expectations, and the military was ready to use their new dark toy. Shortly after the test, the president issued something called the Potsdam Declaration, which promised utter destruction from the air on all of Japan if there was not an immediate surrender. The Japanese, of course, did not surrender, so the bomb was prepped.

After an exhaustive and brutal screening committee met at the Manhattan Project and the Pentagon, four cities were determined to be the perfect targets. They had to still be intact (no major damage from previous US bombing runs); they had to have symbolic importance for the Japanese people; they had to have manufacturing; they had to be modern and have a military presentence. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two of four picked, and that point, it was just a matter of weather patterns to determine where the bomb would drop.

So, weather told the generals it was Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945, when the bomb was finally set to drop. It got loaded on the B29 Superfortress called The Enola Gay, and it was dropped at 8:15 AM. The bomb called “Little Boy” missed its target by 500 feet but did plenty of damage regardless. The initial blast was thought to have killed 70,000 people, and the radiation of coursed killed easily 100,000 more over the next year.

But why did we have to drop this bomb? After all, Germany had just surrendered, and the US was certain to win this war against Japan. The common story is that it would cost an estimated 1 million deaths to win the war in Japan, so the bombs, terrible as they might be, were worth it. However, some historians claim this isn’t the truth. Was Japan actually poised to surrender anyway? If so, what did the US stand to gain by detonating these awful devices and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians? Where did the Soviets come to play? Listen, laugh, learn.

Original New Yorker Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

Target Selection Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/hiroshima-nagasaki-atomic-bomb-anniversary/400448/