Atomic Bombs

One of the First Letters to the Editor in Favor of the Bomb (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Apparently the arguments that we still hear today concerning whether or not use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 was justifiable popped-up right away. The following is a letter to the editor of Yank Magazine written by a hard-charging fellow who explained that he was heartily sick of reading the

-pious cries of horror [that] come from the musty libraries of well-fed clergymen and from others equally far removed from the war.

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Hiroshima (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Walking into Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling.


After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.


The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of ’45. Click here to read more on this topic.


Click here to read General Marshal’s opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.

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The Atomic Age Begins – in Hiroshima (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

On Sunday morning, August 5 (Washington time), an American airplane flew over Hiroshima, a Japanese army base [!] on the Inland Sea. It dropped a single bomb. When that missile struck the earth, it blew up in the greatest man-made explosion in the history of the world. The United States had loosed an atomic bomb on Japan.


Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

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Towards a Nuclear Strategy (Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

Here is the Pathfinder Magazine article about Air University; established in 1946 by the U.S. Department of War in order to train senior American Air Force officers to serve as strategic thinkers in the realm of national security. In 1949 that meant conceiving of ways to implement a successful strategy in which the Soviet Union would be defeated with nuclear weapons:

At AU’s apex is the Air War College. To its senior officer-students the question of destroying an enemy’s will to resist is grimly real. Killing ten million citizens of an enemy nation is no haphazard problem to the Air War College. In the statistics of modern war, a loss of approximately 4% of a nation’s population saps its will to resist…


Six months after this article was first read, the Soviets tested their first Atomic bomb; click here to read about that event.

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The Atomic Bomb (Dept. of the Army, 1956)

In ten lines the U.S. Army history section succinctly outlined Japan’s grim situation and the events that led up to the dropping of the bomb:

By the summer of 1945 it was obvious to most responsible leaders in Japan that the end of the war was near. For the first time those who favored ending the war came out in the open and in June, Japan sent out peace feelers through the Soviet Union. The rejection of the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, however, sealed the doom of Japan…

Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years

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The Atomic Crusade (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1948)

Attached is a 1948 article by the Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton (1892 – 1962) concerning the widespread understanding among nuclear physicists to wrestle control of atomic energy away from the military and firmly in the hands of civil authorities, where it’s benefits can be put to general use and harnessed as positive force in the lives of all mankind.

Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1927, the SCRIPT MAGAZINE editors believed that Arthur Compton, more than anyone else, deserved the title Daddy of the Atomic bomb. When the U.S. Government decided to proceed with the research and development of this weapon, Compton was assigned the double task of attempting a nuclear chain reaction and of designing the bomb itself.


Compton is remembered as the senior physicist at the Manhattan Project who hired Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.

Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years.


Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Yank Magazine, 1945)

The Manhattan Project was the code name given to the allied effort to develop the Atomic Bomb during World War Two. The research and development spanned the years 1942 through 1946 and the participating nations behind the effort were the Unites States, Great Britain and Canada. Within the United States, there were as many as three locations where the Manhattan Project was carried out however this article concerns the goings-on at the uranium-enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The article presents the point of view of your basic PFC on the base; how he had to maintain the necessary secrecy, what was it like living among such a plethora of pointy-headed slide-rule jockeys and how grateful they were to be living the comfortable life, while so many other draftees fared so poorly.

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