At 8.15 on August 6, 1945, a Tazzo and Panciuto device, three meters long, 4 tons heavy and by the mocking nickname of Little Boy, boy, was released in the clear sky of Hiroshima by the B-29 Enola Gay (The name of the mother of the pilot Paul Tibbets). It was not of the conventional type, but atomic, designed to release the energy from matter, according to the famous Einstein equation. When it was triggered, 500 meters high, it caused a series of uncontrollable chain reactions in a millionth, equivalent to 15 thousand tons of chopped. The sky shone like a flash of pink and blue. A huge ball of fire burned alive any living being within one and a half kilometer. The immediate victims of that apocalypse – incinerated or peeled alive – were 70 thousand, But over the years for the consequences of wounds and radiation they reached 150 thousand, condemning the survivors to a slow and painful death for vomiting, diarrhea and for intestinal, gum and nasal hemorrhages. August 9 was Nagasaki’s turn.
The two bombs – initially intended for the third Reich – had been manufactured in the Los Alamos laboratories, in the new Mexico, under the direction of Berkeley’s physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, At the head of a host of the most illustrious scientists in the world (the first chain reaction was created by the Italian team Enrico Fermi in a disused Chicago stage). As Richard Over writes in the lucid and careful reconstruction of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Rain of destructionEinaudi), the American president Roosevelt first received the importance of the Manhattan project, while Churchill underestimated his destructive potential.
The two bombs, developed just as the allies were gathered at the conference in the Castle of Potsdam, Germany, from 17 July to 3 August, had been designed to fall “on cities, not on armies”, such as the English premier revealed to his personal doctor, Lord Moran. It was a luhnOn August 10, on the radio, a few days later Hiroshima, Harry Truman, who took over from Roosevelt, guaranteed that they had been released on military goals. It was a lie. In reality, the strategy of hitting civilians to weaken the morale of the population and the military had already been in place for some time: it would be enough to mention the terrible attacks with incendiary bombs on Dresden and Tokyo (the latter had caused 100 thousand victims and one million displaced persons). The first question we ask ourselves about Hiroshima is: “Was it necessary?”. Or rather: “Why was it thought at the time it was necessary?” If we analyze the testimonies and documents of the time, the first concern was to accelerate the end of the war and avoid a future blood bath of the US soldiers. The only campaign of the Okinawa archipelago had caused 12,520 dead marines. In the event of an invasion of Japan, the estimates varied from 500 thousand to one million American victims between deaths and injured.
In fact, a yield of the Japanese army was unthinkable, who had already moved 600 thousand men to the island’s coastal bands waiting for an American landing. That of surrendering was not even an option considered. All civilians considered themselves ready for the final battle based on a national mobilization plan: “There are no civilians in Japan”, explained a report by the American secret services. The kamikaze represented a model of the natural and fanatic vocation of dying for the emperor. And so, when the Potsdam conference ended with the request for an unconditional surrender, under penalty of the “immediate and total destruction” of Japan, Tokyo ignored it and Truman confirmed the operation.
For historians there is also a geopolitical cause. Russia was about to invade the Rising Sun in turn. It was necessary to act as soon as possible to limit Soviet ambitions on the Asian chessboard. In May 1945, the Target Committee, the military commission of the Manhattan project, stilled a list of objectives: Hiroshima, Kyoto, Yokohama, Kokura and Niigata. Subsequently Kyoto was removed for artistic and cultural reasons at the request of the secretary of the war Henry L. Stimon, who had been on a honeymoon, and Nagasaki was added. Why also Nagasaki? The Americans had never thought of a single bomb but a series of nuclear attacks until Japan surrendered. A ruthless strategy, in which military needs and geopolitical calculations were intertwined and which reveals the endless abyss of madness and brutality in which the man falls into war, although disguised as to be rational. The final decision sent to Truman. The nuclear era began, which Churchill in a speech in Parliament described how “the horrendous era in which security will be a robust daughter of terror and survival the twin sister of annihilation”.
(Photo Ansa: a child walks in front of an image of Hiroshima devastated by the atomic bomb in the Peace Memorial Museum)
