The story behind the atomic bomb is a detective story with no Sherlock Holmes for a hero. The number of scientists who took part in the search was without parallel…The dramatic story begins with Dr. Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968), a woman scientist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1938 Dr. Meitner is bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons and then submitting the uranium to chemical analysis. To her amazement…
The Collier’s article attached herein, The Atom Bomb’s Invisible Offspring does not simply track the radioactive illnesses and contamination generated as a result of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also discusses the nuclear testings at Bikini and Alamogordo, New Mexico. Attention is paid to how the devastated people as well as all the assorted flora and fauna in the targeted regions.
Weeks after the atomic blast that took place over the city of Nagasaki, American Journalists were allowed to see the crystalized ground that was the Trinity test site in New Mexico. They pocketed the queer pieces of glass that made up ground zero and openly mocked the Japanese scientists who said the radioactivity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was continuing to kill four weeks later.
Shortly after Tokyo’s capitulation, an advance team of American Army researchers were dispatched to Hiroshima to study the effects that the Atom Bomb had on that city. What we found most interesting about this reminiscence was the narrative told by a young Japanese Army major as to how Tokyo learned of the city’s destruction:
Again and again the air-raid defense headquarters called the army wireless station at Hiroshima. No answer. Something had happened to Hiroshima…
During the Cold war, as many as 400,000 American military personnel were forced to witness Atomic explosions. Having been sworn to secrecy, this veteran wrote his testimony under the penname, Soldier X:
Then I saw the true power and fury of nature as a giant fireball sluggishly rolled upward through the thick layer of dust: I estimated its distance at about 1500 feet up. Surrounding the red mass are twisting white snakes of clouds….This is color as few humans have ever seen it, magnificent, threatening and horrible.
Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn’t possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.
Three years before terms such as Enola Gay and Atom Bomb would become household words, this five page article appeared in an American magazine informing the folks on the home front that this monstrosity was being developed silently behind the scenes.
We have no doubt that the FBI was knocking at the publisher’s door the very second that the issue appeared on the newsstands.
Said Winston Churchill in offering thanks for Divine help in the race for atomic power, ‘By His mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts.’
Thank God, to be sure. But it should not be overlooked that for this work He had an able servant in Lief Tronstad. As saboteur par excellence, the young professor was a ball and chain on Nazi ankles in this race to the atomic finish line.
An anonymous columnist at The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the Atomic Bombs:
… we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it.
The destruction of Nagasaki looks nothing like the debris in Cassino or Leghorn. The strange thing here is the utter absence of rubble. You can see a couple of square miles of reddish-brown desolation with nothing left but the outlines of houses, a bit of wall here and half a chimney there. In this area you will see a road, and the road will be completely clean. It is too soon after the bombing for the Japs to have done any cleaning of the roads and you can’t see a single brick or pile of broken plaster or lumber on any street or sidewalk in town.
