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5 days ago
- General
- Atlantic
The New Nuclear Arms Race
Keiko Ogura was just 8 years old when the atoms in the Hiroshima bomb started splitting. When we met in January, some 300 feet from where the bomb struck, Ogura was 87. She stands about five feet tall in heels, and although she has slowed down some in her old age, she moves confidently, in tiny, shuffling steps. She twice waved away my offered arm as we walked the uneven surfaces of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, first neutrally and then with some irritation. Ogura can still remember that terrible morning in August, 80 years ago. Her older brother, who later died of cancer from radiation, was on a hilltop north of the city when the Enola Gay made its approach. He saw it shining small and silver in the clear blue sky. Ogura was playing on a road near her house; her father had kept her home from school. 'He had a sense of foreboding,' she told me. She remembers the intensity of the bomb's white flash, the 'demon light,' in the words of one survivor. The shock wave that followed had the force of a typhoon, Ogura said. It threw her to the ground and she lost consciousness—for how long, she still doesn't know. Like many people who felt the bomb's power that day, Ogura assumed that it must have been dropped directly on top of her. In fact, she was a mile and a half away from the explosion's center. Tens of thousands of people were closer. The great waves of heat and infrared light that roared outward killed hundreds of Ogura's classmates immediately. More than 20,000 children were killed by the bomb. In Focus: Before and after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima Ogura told me that after the initial explosion, fires had raged through the city for many hours. Survivors compared the flame-filled streets to medieval Buddhist scroll paintings of hell. When Ogura awoke on the road, the smoke overhead was so thick that she thought night had fallen. She stumbled back to her house and found it half-destroyed, but still standing. People with skin peeling off their bodies were limping toward her from the city center. Ogura's family well was still functional, and so she began handing out glasses of water. Two people died while drinking it, right in front of her. A black rain began to fall. Each of its droplets was shot through with radiation, having traveled down through the mushroom cloud's remnants. It stained Ogura's skin charcoal gray. In the days following the bombing, Ogura's father cremated hundreds of people at a nearby park. The city itself seemed to have disappeared, she said. In aerial shots, downtown Hiroshima's grid was reduced to a pale outline. More than 60,000 structures had been destroyed. One of the few that remained upright was a domed building made of stone. It still stands today, not far from where Ogura and I met. The government has reinforced its skeletal structure, in a bid to preserve it forever. Circling the building, I could see in through the bomb-blasted walls, to piles of rubble inside. Ogura and I walked to a monumental arch at the center of the Peace Memorial Park, where a stone chest holds a register of every person who is known to have been killed by the Hiroshima bomb. To date, it contains more than 340,000 names. Only a portion of them died in the blast's immediate aftermath. Tens of thousands of others perished from radiation sickness in the following months, or from rare cancers years later. Every generation alive at the time was affected, even the newest: Babies who were still in their mothers' wombs when the bomb hit developed microcephaly. For decades, whenever one of Ogura's relatives took ill, she worried that a radiation-related disease had finally come for them, and often, one had. From the October 1946 issue: That day at Hiroshima As time passed, news that more countries had built nuclear arsenals reached Japan. Meanwhile, the hibakusha —the Japanese term for survivors of the nuclear attacks—were stigmatized as mutants. Ogura told me that girls in her summer camp looked for burn scars on her body in the shower. Some of her friends' weddings were called off by prospective grooms who feared that birth defects would affect their future children. Ogura worried that her own wedding would be canceled right up until the ceremony. Since the Hiroshima attack, Ogura and her fellow hibakusha have told and retold their stories of the bombing and its long aftermath. But even the youngest of them are now in their 80s, and soon they'll all be gone. The horrific reality of an atomic attack is fading out of living memory—even as a new turn toward rapid nuclear armament makes the possibility of a full-blown nuclear war more likely. For all the recent focus on Iran, in a cruel irony, East Asia is where the world's fastest buildups are unfolding, in China and North Korea. A dangerous proliferation cascade may be about to break out, right in the shadow of Hiroshima. It would likely start in South Korea, and spread first to Japan. It might not stop there. The decades-long effort to keep nuclear weapons from spreading across the planet may be about to collapse. One cold, windy morning in Seoul, a week before I met Ogura, I surrendered my phone at the gates of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government brain trust that advises South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff. Inside the gray brutalist building, the nuclear strategist Heo Tae-keun was waiting for me. Heo had recently served as South Korea's deputy defense minister for policy. In that role, he had led the country's delegations in nuclear talks with the United States. He is a former brigadier general with a rugby player's build, a sturdy presence in every sense. And yet, that morning, he seemed deeply troubled. President Donald Trump had just begun his second term, but already he was showing less restraint than in his first. Almost immediately, he had threatened Denmark with military force, and he seemed content—delighted, even— to let Russia decide Ukraine's fate. His disdain for old alliances unsettled Heo. 'I am not sure what will happen in Trump 2.0,' he told me. In Korea, he said, in the cautious way of a diplomat, 'he is perceived as more unstable in his decision making' than previous U.S. presidents. From the July/August 2022 issue: We have no nuclear strategy Stability is prized by nuclear strategists, who by dint of their profession have had to envision, with disturbing vividness, what instability looks like in the nuclear realm. As America's dependability as an ally comes into question, Heo, like many other South Koreans, is looking around nervously at the dangerous neighborhood where his country is located. South Korea hangs like an earlobe off the eastern edge of Eurasia. Not even a tiny moat like the Taiwan Strait separates it from the three nuclear-armed autocracies immediately to its north. The first of them, North Korea, is still technically at war with South Korea, and Seoul's 9 million residents are attuned to its closeness. From the city center, where skyscrapers stand alongside old palaces preserved since the Joseon dynasty, it takes just 40 minutes to reach the thin strip of land-mine-riddled wilderness that separates the two countries. When North Koreans came pouring over the border at the start of the Korean War, in 1950, both peoples were poor, and still suffering the aftereffects of Japan's brutal 35-year occupation. Then, for three years, that war raged up and down the peninsula, from snowy ridge to snowy ridge, killing more than 2 million people. Heo told me, laconically, that South Koreans have no desire to repeat that experience. He gestured toward the sleek, gleaming city outside his window. 'We overcame the Korean War, and built an economy and way of life,' he said. North Korea has less to lose. Kim Jong Un has ruled as dictator in Pyongyang for 13 years, during which he has often threatened the South with reunification by force, and, more recently, outright annexation, just as Vladimir Putin has attempted in Ukraine. Kim is quickly expanding his nuclear arsenal. He already has dozens of warheads, and has threatened to use them not only as defensive weapons of last resort, but in a first strike that would turn Seoul into a 'sea of flames.' Uri Friedman: A third nuclear age is upon us For decades, the threat of intense U.S. retaliation helped keep Kim's father and grandfather from invading the South. But Kim rules at a time when Pax Americana looks to be winding down. Under Trump, the United States is now reported to be considering pulling troops out of South Korea, though administration officials have denied that. 'The Korean people do not know if the U.S. commitment to them is real,' Heo told me. They may soon decide that to deter Kim, they need nuclear weapons of their own. For the better part of a century, the U.S. has sought to limit nuclear proliferation, with considerable success. American presidents have deployed diplomats, saboteurs, and brute military force to stamp out nascent nuclear-weapons programs in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They have done so because nuclear weapons are dangerous, and because each new nuclear nation further dilutes the awesome power that America had when it was the only one. Just once has the U.S. helped an ally start a nuclear-weapons program, by sharing technical research with the United Kingdom, its junior partner on the Manhattan Project. In 1946, Congress outlawed all such sharing, and in the decades since, U.S. presidents have worked to keep West Germany, Australia, Libya, Brazil, Sweden, and others from building arsenals—and even helped persuade South Africa to dismantle an arsenal that it had already built. Today, of the world's 193 countries, only nine have nuclear weapons. Left to its own devices, South Korea could easily have been the tenth. The country is wealthy and technologically adept, and with North Korea next door, it has sufficient motive. The reason the South Koreans don't yet have an arsenal on hand is that both times they started to build one, an American president found out and persuaded them to stop. The military junta that ruled South Korea in the 1970s launched the country's first covert nuclear program after the U.S. signaled a pullback from Asia that would culminate in the fall of Saigon. The nervous generals were secretly negotiating with France to purchase a reprocessing plant. When Gerald Ford found out, his administration threatened to terminate the U.S.-Korean military alliance, and pushed to cancel the sale. In the end, South Korea ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty instead, in 1975. Only six years later, after North Korea broke ground on a plutonium reactor, Ronald Reagan's administration intervened to halt another such program. It was less serious than the first, but Reagan still wanted it canceled: He assured Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea's president at the time, that U.S. ground troops would remain on the Korean peninsula indefinitely, and Chun agreed to shut weapons research down for good. North Korea has not seen fit to restrain its nuclear ambitions in the same way. During the heady years after the Cold War, George H. W. Bush removed the American warheads that had long been stationed at bases in South Korea, then pressured its president to sign a joint pledge with North Korea to keep the peninsula forever free of nuclear weapons. That pledge proved to be a sham; North Korea tested its first crude nuclear device just 14 years later, during George W. Bush's presidency. Barack Obama, an optimist on all matters nuclear, believed that he could persuade China to lean on North Korea until it gave up its nuclear program. This didn't work either. Chinese leader Xi Jinping's first priority regarding North Korea was and is the stability of Kim's regime: If Kim's rule collapses, refugees will flood into China and Xi will lose the buffer state that separates it from South Korea, America's longtime ally. Xi's willingness to press was limited, and so Kim kept on building warheads. Xi may feel, in any case, that he is in no position to lecture Kim about proliferation. He himself is engaged in the fastest warhead buildup undertaken by any country since the Cold War's peak. For decades, China was fine with having a few hundred warheads on hand as a deterrent. But Xi is now adding about 100 a year. He wants an arsenal as large as the ones that the U.S. and Russia have, if not larger. It's part of his Chinese Dream, the great rejuvenation that he has imagined for his country. And so, in some sense, a destabilizing proliferation cascade has already begun in East Asia, and proliferation often begets proliferation. Julian Gewirtz, who served as the senior director for China and Taiwan affairs on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, told me that China's astonishingly fast and ambitious nuclear buildup has unsettled countries all across Asia. In both South Korea and Japan, he said, these concerns, combined with uncertainties about the Trump administration, 'may lead them to consider ideas that were once unthinkable.' Kim is already estimated to have about 50 warheads, and the material needed to build as many as 90 more. His nuclear ambitions have grown along with China's. He doesn't want to be a nuclear peer of India and Pakistan, who have contented themselves with about 170 warheads each. Kim wants to have about 300, like the United Kingdom and France, sources told me. Heo said that nuclear strategists have developed some notions about how Kim might use an arsenal of 300 warheads if nuclear war were to ever break out on the peninsula. The first 100 of them would likely be reserved for Kim's short-range missiles. They would be able to reach targets in South Korea—military bases, airfields, ports, and perhaps even Seoul itself—in less than two minutes. The radius of the attack could then move beyond South Korea, with another 100 warheads available to strike the country's regional allies, Japan in particular. Kim is trying to build reliable intercontinental ballistic missiles, onto which the remaining 100 warheads would be fastened. They could be launched all the way to the United States, in waves, to overwhelm missile defenses. North Korea's first ICBM test, in 2017, was a 'threshold breaker,' Jake Sullivan, who served as national security adviser under Joe Biden, told me. It showed that Kim's effort to build missiles that could reach the U.S. mainland was further along than previously thought. He may now be getting help from Russia, in exchange for the 14,000 troops and millions of rounds of ammunition that he has sent to Ukraine. If Kim could plausibly put Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles in existential jeopardy, would the U.S. really protect Busan and Seoul? This is the question that haunts Heo. He knows that American presidents have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to protecting South Korea. The mutual-defense treaty between the two countries is vague. When President Dwight Eisenhower negotiated it, South Korea's leaders were still eager to restart the Korean War, to defeat the North once and for all. Eisenhower was willing to station nuclear weapons in South Korea to reassure them, but he refused to promise American military support in every case of conflict between the two countries, because he feared that the South would deliberately provoke a war. The U.S. has always been cagey about its nuclear contingency plans for the region. Even after North Korea acquired nuclear weapons, when Americans conducted tabletop exercises with South Korea, they would often end them just after North Korea launches its first missile, which is right when things get interesting, from the South Korean point of view. The United States Strategic Command, which operates America's nuclear-weapons systems, doesn't like to divulge its contingency plans. The South Koreans tend to 'leak like a sieve, and their systems have been penetrated by the Chinese,' a former senior Pentagon official told me. STRATCOM officials have professed not to understand why South Korea should even require reassurance; their attitude was Our word has been good for decades, and it's still good—just take it. As Trump first rose to power, South Koreans found it more difficult to just take America at its word. In 2016, they watched in horror as he riled up rally crowds by denigrating America's Asian allies as freeloaders. Trump said that South Korea and Japan were ripping off the U.S. in trade and sending only 'peanuts' in exchange for an American military presence in the region. He seemed to take special pleasure in threatening to draw down, or perhaps even wholly remove, the nearly 30,000 troops stationed in South Korea. During his first presidency, Trump flattered Kim, and flew to meet the North Korean dictator at summits in Hanoi and Singapore. In exchange for this sheen of legitimacy, Kim paused his missile tests, but only for a couple of years, during which he reportedly kept adding to his nuclear stockpile. A reminder of Trump's failed policy can still be glimpsed from a border lookout point north of Seoul. When I visited it in January, I could see a pale-gray building a mile or so into the demilitarized zone, beyond wild bush and barbed wire. Trump and Kim met there in 2019, but since then, it has stood mostly vacant, a potent symbol of America's newly unpredictable foreign policy. According to opinion polls conducted in recent years, 70 percent of the South Korean public wants the country to have its own nuclear arsenal. In 2022, voters elected the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol, a hawk's hawk on North Korea, to the presidency. Mira Rapp-Hooper, who served as the senior director for East Asia and Oceania on Biden's National Security Council, told me that she and other officials grew concerned during Yoon's campaign when he called for the return of tactical U.S. weapons to the Korean peninsula. After Yoon assumed power, the Biden administration tried to reassure him that no such arsenal was necessary. Biden's staff proposed a grand gesture, a declaration that would serve as an addendum to the two countries' vague mutual-defense treaty. Phillips Payson O'Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear The Washington Declaration was announced during Yoon's visit to the White House in April 2023. That night, at a state dinner held in Yoon's honor, he and Biden clinked glasses to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance. Yoon, who is not otherwise known for his personal charm, rose to the occasion, singing a few bars of 'American Pie,' by Don McLean, in English, to loud cheers from the assembled guests. A few months later, an American Ohio-class nuclear submarine docked in Busan, as a show of strength. But by then, Biden's presidency, and its policy of reassurance, was close to an end. Over the course of the following year, it became clearer that Trump would be his successor. For the second time in less than a decade, Americans would elect as their leader a chaotic and untrustworthy man who seemed hostile to the very concept of alliances. When Heo and I discussed the possibility that South Korea may need to go nuclear, he emphasized that he wouldn't want an arsenal just for its own sake. Members of the defense intelligentsia would prefer to keep the American alliance the way it is. But they have to prepare, in case South Korea is left to deal with Kim on its own. Like almost everyone I talked with in Seoul, Heo eventually mentioned Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal on its soil, but Bill Clinton helped persuade the Ukrainians to give it up. Not to worry, he said. The U.S. will have your back. Near the end of my time in Seoul, I sat down to lunch with Park Jin, who served as foreign minister under Yoon. We met at a café downtown, just as the morning's snowfall was letting up. Park, 68, has the elegant manners that you might expect of a former top diplomat, and he was stylishly dressed in a black blazer and turtleneck, set off by a gray cashmere scarf. Just a few days earlier, in the hours following Trump's inauguration, the new president had offhandedly referred to North Korea as a 'nuclear power' in response to a reporter's question about foreign threats. Park was focused on that remark. He told me he had initially hoped that it was a simple mistake, but those hopes were dashed when Trump's incoming defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, used the same language in a written statement to the U.S. Senate. From the August 2025 issue: Tom Nichols on what it takes to launch a nuclear weapon This characterization may sound innocuous, given that everyone already knows that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal. But official recognition of a rogue nuclear power is usually a prize to be bargained for in geopolitics. It was not one that any previous American president had been willing to grant Kim, and certainly not for free. Park believes that Trump was using it as a concession to lure Kim to another meeting, one that could hasten his country's abandonment by America. 'The North Korea issue is the unfinished business from his first administration,' Park said. 'And he's a businessman.' Having already conceded North Korea's legitimacy as a nuclear power, Trump won't have many cards to play if he does attempt another renegotiation with Kim. Now that Kim's nuclear arsenal is larger and Russia is his ally, he has more leverage, and may not even wish to meet. In search of a deal, Trump might try to secure a commitment from Kim to stop building ICBMs that threaten the U.S., and then declare victory—leaving North Korea's ability to nuke Seoul entirely intact. Several South Korean security elites told me that a deal like that would be tantamount to abandonment, especially if it were paired with a troop withdrawal. During his first term, Trump asked his staff to set a troop withdrawal from South Korea in motion. James Mattis, his secretary of defense, reportedly slow-walked the request. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Defense Department is reviewing its Korea policy, and a reduction in troops is being considered, although a Pentagon spokesperson denied that there was any 'immediate' plan to draw down forces. If Trump does try again to withdraw troops from South Korea, it's not clear what would stop him. When Jimmy Carter attempted something similar, he was foiled by intelligence assessments that counseled strongly against it. But Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, is an isolationist, and—like the rest of his Cabinet members—a loyalist above all else. She has already fired agents for an inconvenient intelligence assessment. She could make sure that no one stands in Trump's way. It can sometimes be helpful to think of there being two South Koreas. The country is highly, and maybe even dangerously, polarized. The month before I arrived in Seoul, Yoon had declared martial law on false pretenses. Shortly after I landed there, he was charged with insurrection. Walking the streets, I heard dueling mass protests, for and against him. A megaphone call-and-response boomed through the downtown high-rises. In early June, Lee Jae-myung, a liberal candidate, won the snap election to replace Yoon. Normally, the election of a liberal president would quell talk of a South Korean nuclear-weapons program for a while, but now even some of the country's liberals are nuclear-curious. In March, two foreign-policy-establishment figures from the new president's party said that it is time to consider nuclear armament. Months before Trump's reelection, Victor Cha, the Korea chair and president of geopolitics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sent a survey to hundreds of South Korea's national-security elites. Of the 175 that responded, 34 percent said that they were in favor of South Korea acquiring its own nuclear weapons. But that poll is already out-of-date. The nuclear conversation among South Koreans has only grown louder since Inauguration Day, and Cha expects the volume to rise even more in the coming years. If a pro-nuclear consensus took hold among elites, it could all move quickly, because public support is already there, Cha told me. I heard something similar when I visited Yang Uk, a nuclear strategist at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, in Seoul. After giving me a tour of his office—a charmingly boyish space packed with model fighter jets and combat knives in glass cases—Yang told me that he, too, has been hearing more nuclear talk among South Korean strategists, and not only within the small clique that has long supported a homegrown nuclear program. It's happening among lots of mainstream people, he said. If South Korea were to launch a nuclear program, it would probably do so in secret. Its leaders would want to avoid suffering through an American-led sanctions regime, as India did after detonating nuclear devices in 1998. South Korea's export economy would shrink rapidly if Hyundai and Samsung suddenly couldn't sell their cars, smartphones, and chips abroad. 'We would be fucked,' Yang told me. He may have been speaking personally: The Asan Institute is funded by an heir to the Hyundai fortune. South Korea might secretly seek America's blessing. Cha imagined South Korea putting a feeler out to the White House: You don't have to support our nuclear program. Just don't oppose it. Some people in the current Trump administration wouldn't be inclined to oppose it at all. During his 2016 campaign, Trump himself suggested that South Korea and Japan should consider getting their own nuclear weapons. Elbridge Colby, now his undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, has said that the U.S. shouldn't use sanctions to deter Seoul from developing them. Colby has just been put in charge of formulating America's National Defense Strategy. I called Scott Kemp to ask him how quickly South Korea could spin up a plutonium weapon. Kemp, a professor at MIT, is an expert on the industrial mechanics of proliferation who previously counseled the U.S. government on questions of this sort. He told me that in a mad-dash scenario, South Korea would probably need only a year to reprocess enough nuclear waste from its power plants to make a weapon. 'There are plutonium-bomb designs floating around,' he said. 'It would astonish me if South Korea had not acquired some of them.' To build out an entire arsenal that would present a clear deterrent to North Korea would take longer, perhaps 10 years. 'Those would be 10 very dangerous years,' Cha told me. Many of the riskiest scenarios introduced by nuclear weapons arise during these unstable 'breakout periods,' especially when adversaries are operating with limited information. If Kim learned of the program, he might use force to try to prevent its success, as Israel has in Iran. Even if he did not use nuclear weapons, he might try to invade, especially if there were fewer U.S. troops in his way. South Korea would be able to marshal a much more capable military response than Iran, and if a war did break out, it could last years and possibly draw in the neighborhood nuclear powers. Russia would probably back Kim, and China might pitch in too. In 2016, Xi Jinping levied harsh sanctions on South Korea just for installing a single missile-defense system. Xi would be aghast to learn that a new nuclear arsenal was materializing just 250 miles from the Chinese mainland. News of a South Korean arsenal would be consequential throughout East Asia. It would almost certainly spur further proliferation in North Korea and China, but also quite possibly in Japan. Late one night after arriving in Tokyo, I met Cha for a drink on the top floor of the Okura Hotel. Beneath us, the city's elevated freeways curved through a dense matrix of glass towers, giving the Akasaka district its layered and futuristic feel. Cha was in town for a security summit; in a ballroom on a lower floor, he and I had just attended a private speech by Shigeru Ishiba, Japan's prime minister. Less than a minute into the speech, Ishiba had mentioned the threat from North Korea. Cha noted that for all of this public North Korea talk, in private, it was the prospect of South Korea going nuclear that seemed to spook Japanese security experts the most. Japan and South Korea have mutual-defense commitments, but they are not friends. Koreans have not yet forgiven Japan for devoting an entire bureaucracy to the sexual enslavement of Korean women during its violent colonization of the peninsula. Japanese elites will tell you that their leaders have apologized many times for these crimes, and even paid compensation. Korean elites will tell you that the compensation was paltry, and the apologies heavy on the passive voice. They note that Japan's history textbooks still take quite a sympathetic view of its imperial adventures in Korea. Both countries depend on America for their national security, and neither wants to be the junior partner in the region. South Koreans do not like that the U.S. allowed Japan to reprocess uranium into plutonium, starting in 1987, while they still cannot. Japan's conservatives wonder why it was South Korea that received a special Washington Declaration and not their country. You can imagine how tempers in Tokyo would flare if South Korea were to leapfrog plutonium-rich Japan and develop nuclear weapons first. I asked Ken Jimbo, one of Japan's most respected nuclear strategists, what his country would do in that instance. We met in a conference room at the International House of Japan, overlooking the institute's famous garden. Originally owned by a samurai clan, it had, unlike most local Edo-style gardens, survived the Allied firebombing of the city. The red-and-white Tokyo Tower loomed behind it in the eastern sky. Jimbo told me that if South Korea built its own nuclear arsenal, the desire to possess such weapons would surely spill over to Japan. 'We would have to be very serious about what to do next,' he said. Japan has been rearming itself with impressive speed already. As the country's war crimes have receded in historical memory and China has grown stronger, many Japanese have come to feel that the country's pacifist constitution is outmoded. Jimbo told me that he was personally embarrassed when the troops that Japan sent to Afghanistan in 2001 weren't allowed to join combat missions. During the decade following the outbreak of that war, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe led a movement to loosen the constitution. The country's militarization has recently accelerated: By 2027, its defense budget will have surged by 60 percent in just five years. There isn't yet a loud, open conversation about going nuclear in Japan, as there is in South Korea. As the lone people on Earth to have suffered nuclear attacks, the Japanese have so far remained committed to three 'non-nuclear principles,' which require the country not to produce nuclear weapons, possess them, or host others' on Japanese soil. A generation ago, belief in these principles was so strong in Japan that it was hard to imagine the country ever building an arsenal. But antinuclear sentiment has lost potency during the past 20 years, according to Masashi Murano, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. China's rapid nuclear buildup has unnerved the public, Murano said, and so has North Korea's. Japanese media once covered Kim's family as an eccentric sideshow. Now every smartphone in the country gets a push alert when Kim lobs a missile into the Sea of Japan, or over the Japanese archipelago and into the Pacific. I asked Narushige Michishita, a strategist and professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, in Tokyo, if he could imagine the circumstances that would push Japan to go nuclear. He told me that he would pay close attention to what America's president did. I asked what kinds of things he would watch for. A map of East Asia sat unfurled between us. Michishita touched his finger to South Korea and Taiwan. If the U.S. abandoned either of them during a crisis, Japan would probably need to go nuclear, he said. Scott Kemp, the MIT professor, told me that Japan has almost certainly already done the preparatory work. In 1969, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato is said to have signed a secret memo, instructing the government to make sure that Japan would be ready to build a nuclear arsenal should the need arise. That same year, Sato's administration began to put an enormous amount of money into its centrifuge program, which now reprocesses nuclear waste into plutonium. I asked Kemp how long Japan would need to make a single warhead. His answer: Only a month, if speed were of the essence. Nuclear weapons can be thought of as a kind of cancer that started metastasizing through human civilization in 1945. A few times during the Cold War, this cancer threatened to kill off much of humanity, but a partial remission followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. The U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed on a limit of 6,000 deployed warheads each—still enough to destroy most of the world's major cities many times over, but down from the tens of thousands that they'd previously stockpiled. The high-water mark for the disarmament movement came in 2009, when President Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons. For this address, Obama chose Prague, the site of the Velvet Revolution. He cast his eyes over a crowd of thousands that morning, and then over the whole continent. Peace had come to Europe, he said. Now it was time to go further, and negotiate a new arms-control treaty with Russia. The very next year, the two countries committed to cap themselves at 1,550 deployed warheads. At the time, China still had fewer than 300. Disarmament wasn't on the near horizon, but the trajectory was favorable. How long ago that moment now seems. The world's great-power rivalries have once again become fully inflamed. A year after invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin suspended his participation in the capping agreement with the United States. He has begun to make explicit nuclear threats, breaking a long-standing taboo. Meanwhile, the Chinese have slotted more than 100 ICBMs in deep desert silos near Mongolia. The military believes that the U.S. has to target these silos, and Russia's silos, to deter both countries, and doing so eats up 'a big chunk of our capped force,' the former senior official at the Pentagon told me. Nuclear strategists in both of America's major parties are now pushing for a larger arsenal that could survive a simultaneous attack from Russia and China. Those two countries will likely respond by building still more weapons, and on the cycle goes. The writer Kenzaburo Oe has argued that it is the Japanese—and not the American scientists at Los Alamos—who have most had to reckon with the possibility that all of these nuclear weapons could bring about our extinction, or something close to it. This national reckoning has a geography, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are its sacred sites. The day before I met Keiko Ogura in the Peace Memorial Park, I rode the bullet train southwest from Tokyo past the snow-tipped cone of Mount Fuji, then Old Kyoto and Osaka's outer sprawl. In the early afternoon, I arrived at Hiroshima station and made my way to prefecture headquarters to meet Hidehiko Yuzaki, governor of the Hiroshima prefecture. Yuzaki's warm cherrywood office is the size of a small apartment. He has been governor for more than 15 years, and in that time, he has become the global face of Hiroshima. He played a large part in the G7 meeting that the city hosted in 2023, and Obama's official visit in 2016—the first by a sitting U.S. president. Yuzaki is sometimes criticized for what local rivals say is an excessive focus on international affairs, but he sees his work with foreign leaders as continuing a great tradition in Hiroshima, dating back to the second anniversary of the atomic attack on the city. The mayor at the time, Shinzo Hamai, organized a peace festival, and in a speech that afternoon, he argued that Hiroshima should take on a new role in global culture as a mecca for the contemplation of disarmament. Since then, the city has been rebuilt into a wholly modern metropolis, but also an open-air museum that forces the mind out of the abstract realm of grand strategy and into the concrete reality of nuclear war. I asked Yuzaki if he has become disillusioned as the world has again tipped toward nuclear proliferation. Was he troubled that the fastest buildups are occurring in East Asia, in Hiroshima's backyard? He told me that he was frustrated. It was disheartening to him that people hadn't yet grasped the real meaning of nuclear weapons. So long as anyone has them, there is always a risk of proliferation cascades, and no one knows where this new local one may end. The desire for these weapons is contagious, and could spread well beyond nervous national-security types in Seoul and Tokyo. Indeed, the entire Non-Proliferation Treaty regime could unravel altogether. When Israel, India, and Pakistan went nuclear, they were not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (nor are they today), but South Korea is a member in good standing and Japan is, in some sense, the treaty's soul. If those two countries flout the agreement, it will have effectively dissolved. Jake Sullivan, the former U.S. national security adviser, told me that the risk of a global proliferation cascade would rise 'considerably.' The initial regional cascades are easy to imagine. The American pullback in Ukraine has already made Poland and Germany a lot more interested in going nuclear. If the Iranian nuclear program survives Israel's attacks and develops a weapon successfully, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will likely want arsenals as well. The number of countries that have nuclear arms could quickly double. From the November 2005 issue: William Langewiesche on how A. Q. Khan made Pakistan a nuclear power We have some muscle memory for how to manage nuclear rivalries among a few great powers, Sullivan told me. But a strategic landscape of 15 or 20 nuclear powers could be risky in ways that we cannot anticipate. The odds of a nuclear exchange occurring would rise. The most potent current warheads are more than 80 times as destructive as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima's urban core, and they now fly on missiles that can reach their targets in mere minutes. It would take only one of them to all but erase Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, or New York City. The total damage that even a limited exchange of these more powerful weapons would cause is mercifully unknown to us, but it may be vain to hope for a limited exchange. The most elaborate and significant war game in the literature suggests that the cycle of nuclear vengeance would continue until the arsenals of all involved parties are spent. If a nuclear conflict does someday break out, death and destruction might very quickly unfold on a planetary scale. Every moment that humanity spends with these weapons spread across the Earth, pointed at one another, is a foolish gamble with the highest-possible stakes. We are betting every chip that our nuclear-weapons technology and alert systems will not malfunction in existentially dangerous ways, even though they already have, several times. We are betting that no head of state who has red-button access will descend into madness and start a nuclear war, even though we know that leaders run the whole gamut from Marcus Aurelius to Caligula. Before I left the Hiroshima-prefecture headquarters, I asked Governor Yuzaki what people usually overlook when they come to his city. Yuzaki paused for a moment to consider the question. He has personally hosted heads of state who control these arsenals. He said that most people are moved. He has watched foreign dignitaries weep in Hiroshima's museums. He has seen them sitting in stunned silence before the memorials in the Peace Park. People feel horrible about what happened here, he told me. But they don't seem to understand that humanity is now risking something even more terrible. They think that Hiroshima is the past, Yuzaki said. It's not. It's the present.
RTÉ News
06-07-2025
- General
- RTÉ News
Taoiseach 'deeply moved' by story of Hiroshima survivor in Japan
When the US warplane dropped a 4,400kg atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and 43 seconds later it detonated 600 metres above the city, eight-year-old Teruko Yahata was playing in her garden on what was a sunny August morning in 1945. The first indication of the enormity of what had just happened, she told Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Friday, was that the sky was suddenly and dramatically illuminated, in what she described as a blinding "bluish-white" light. The second indication was the rising black/grey nuclear cloud, which Ms Yahata said was "as if the heavens had become a huge flower". Then the force of the blast raced through her district, more than two kilometres from the point of detonation, and knocked her to the ground, causing her to lose consciousness. The atomic bomb dropped by the B-29 warplane, Enola Gay, triggered a powerful shockwave that levelled almost every structure within a radius of 1.5km. The intense heat it generated in-turn set off a firestorm that engulfed district after district. It is estimated that 70,000 people were obliterated immediately by the blast, with another 70,000 dying from 'radiation sickness' over the following months. More than half of the city's population was wiped out. Hiroshima had become the first city in the world to be targeted by a nuclear weapon and, to my amazement, Ms Yahata was steadily relating her incredible eye-witness testimony nearly eight decades later. I had spotted an unassuming, bespectacled woman, wearing a white cardigan and a pearl necklace over her dark dress, slipping into the office of Hiroshima Mayor, Kazumi Matsui, while Mr Martin was speaking with Japanese journalists. I'm not sure whether it was her purposeful stride that caught my attention, or the fact that she then carefully laid out a map of Hiroshima on a table. Either way, something made me enquire about this quiet and stylish woman at the back of the room. An official whispered to me: "She's one of the hibakusha" - a collective term which translates as "bomb-affected-people". Ms Yahata was introduced to the Taoiseach, and she first pointed out on her map where the epicentre, or more correctly hypocenter, of the blast was located, and how that related to her suburb. She had a strong voice and was speaking in English - a language she had mastered at the age of 83, so that she could dispense with translators and reach a wider audience directly. This small detail gave me a big insight into the petite, strong-willed woman sitting in front of us. Ms Yahata said she regained consciousness quickly after the atomic blast on 6 August 1945, and heard her mother's voice calling out for her. Like her city, Ms Yahata's childhood had just been blown to smithereens by the blast, and she'd now been catapulted into a nightmarish nuclear world. She told us that when she saw her mother: "I noticed that there were fragments of glass sticking out of her back, and her white dress was now stained bloody red." She witnessed her father carrying her great-grandmother on his back as he escaped their house. "There was so much smoke in there, that I could barely see the inside of the house. It had been turned upside down, and the shattered glass from the sliding doors was everywhere," she said. Ms Yahata remembered her mother praying as they left their ruined family home: "It was silent outside, and virtually all of the houses surrounding ours were destroyed." There was also fear, if not terror. "We thought that there was sure to be a second and, perhaps, a third bombing." Given that threat, and the intense destruction all around them, Ms Yahata's family decided to flee to the mountains where they had friends. But hunger stalked the land there, as the structures of society as they'd known it, were gone. Her direct testimony of eking out a life in a nuclear winter had a powerful impact on everyone in the room, including the Taoiseach. Mr Martin recounted afterwards how he'd been horrified as Ms Yahata described the hellish scenes she'd witnessed, including encountering people suffering from radiation burns with "skin peeling-off their arms". The Taoiseach said he had been deeply moved when Ms Yahata spoke of how her family, and so many others, faced starvation in those dark months after the bombing. He said she told him how, even to this day, she attaches huge significance to a bowl of rice - as she's never forgotten being given one by a stranger when she was starving as a child. Mr Martin said the purpose of his visit to Hiroshima had been to express sympathy to the victims, such as Ms Yahata, but also to reaffirm Ireland's strong and long-standing commitment to disarmament and denuclearisation. Against the backdrop of the bombing of Iran by Israel and the US, with the stated aim of destroying its capacity to make nuclear weapons, Mr Martin described the world today as "a very dangerous place." "If Iran… was ever to secure a nuclear weapon, then the prospect of proliferation for the nuclear weapons within the Middle East, for example, would grow very significantly," he contended. The Taoiseach suggested that there was a paradox about humanity, given its ability to exhibit both "incredible ingenuity" and "profound stupidity" as evidenced by its ever increasing capacity to develop weapons which could destroy the planet. "I was at the AI [Artificial Intelligence] summit in Paris… one person spoke about the application of AI to warfare, which would really be on a different level altogether, in terms of the destruction that could be wreaked on humankind." While in Hiroshima, the Taoiseach spent most of his time in the company of the city's Mayor, Kazumi Matsui. In blistering midday sunshine, they laid a wreath and stood together at the cenotaph for the victims, a sculptured arc designed to provide shelter for the souls of those killed by the bomb. In the near distance, we could see the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, commonly called the A-Bomb Dome. This iconic building was left ruined by the nuclear strike but somehow is still standing - quite a feat given it was just 160m from the hypocentre of the explosion. The Taoiseach said he learned a lot from Mayor Matsui - not just about what happened in August 1945, but also how the population recovered from the collective trauma. "I think the mayor made a very good point when he said to me… that you have to break the cycle of hate. "And that's the key issue, that the people of Japan had a huge hate visited upon them. You must learn to stop hating, and if you can do that, then you can build peace," he said. But undoubtedly the most memorable person of all those introduced to the Taoiseach in Hiroshima was Teruko Yahata. "The thought that came through, [while] speaking to her, was the resilience of humankind. It's quite extraordinary that she survived," she said. The Taoiseach is among many impressed by Teruko Yahata. In 2013 she was appointed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Ambassador for Denuclearisation - an official recognition of her tireless campaign work. Yet, while she has spoken to any and every nationality about her incredible story, it turns out there was a special reason why Ms Yahata really wanted to talk to Ireland's Taoiseach. Mr Martin told us after their meeting: "As it transpires, her daughter married an Irishman living in the United Kingdom, and she has a grandson, Conor. She said [he was] named after a great Irish King… so the world is indeed a small place." It clearly is a small place, just as it is a vulnerable place, as Ms Yahata has testified for 80 years.
Irish Examiner
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Irish Examiner view: Will we ever learn from history?
In a little over a month, we will mark the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb by the Americans on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, destroying it and killing 100,000 of its citizens. It was August 6, 1945, when the B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the bomb. Just nine days previously, then US president Harry Truman, speaking in Potsdam in conquered Germany, warned Japan to either surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction'. Japan did not surrender and Truman kept his promise. The president's words came eerily to mind last weekend when the current holder of the office demanded pretty much the same thing of Iran. When Tehran failed to comply, a phalanx of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers was dispatched by the White House to strike at Iran's nascent nuclear capability. The two events, although 80 years apart, were both unexpected and had dramatically altered the course of a conflict that had been going on for years. In the case of Japan, the Hiroshima raid presaged the dropping of a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later and capitulation followed. With Iran launching missiles at US bases in Qatar last night, we are on an increasingly unpredictable path with no clear idea of how it might end. Whether or not that will provoke Trump's Oval Office into using its nuclear weaponry remains to be seen. Humankind, we know, learns little from history, but the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have kept us in fear of our darker impulses for each and every one of the 80 years since. Although both Russia and North Korea have explicitly threatened tactical nuclear strikes, and there are nine countries with nuclear weapons (including Iran's rival Israel, which has a policy of neither confirming nor denying it), nobody has used an atomic weapon in anger since 1945. That a war has broken out over widespread concern of Iran's nuclear capability raises fears of an unprecedented global nuclear holocaust once more, and potentially puts our Earth and it peoples in grave jeopardy. History has many lessons to teach us. Will we listen? Challenges for the pub trade There was a time when being an Irish publican was regarded as one of the most solid and profitable jobs in the country. While times change and occupations evolve, the Irish pub trade is going through a sea change few would have ever predicted, having hit an economic black spot. Soberingly, property experts in Cork reckon that, of the 50 pubs for sale in the city and country, roughly 20% are non-viable as pubs because of location, ageing, and demographics. The disappearance hugely popular city bars such as the Swan and Cygnet, Nancy Spains, and The Western Star — as well as the recent closure of The Evergreen in Turner's Cross — have highlighted how great the generational span in the trade has become. Villages and towns across the county — not to mention countrywide — are witnessing a similar trend. Amid a nationwide housing crisis, it is perhaps no surprise that so many traditional watering holes are now being transitioned into residential buildings. Things certainly ain't what they used to be. What's your view on this issue? You can tell us here Scandal in Spain While there has been little focus on Spain in recent days for obvious reasons, the country's socialist government is locked in a battle for survival and its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has seen his reputation as a scourge of corruption shredded. The EU's last centre-left leader is fighting for his political life as events over the past seven days have intensified a national argument that has been ongoing for nearly 12 months about his, and his party's, suitability for government. The dapper 53-year-old and his Spanish Socialist Worker's party (PSOE), who lead the country's minority government, are fighting allegations of grift and corruption. Sánchez's right-hand man, Santos Cerdán, resigned last week after a supreme court judge found 'firm evidence' linking him to kickbacks from public construction contracts. Cerdán, who is also the organisational secretary of the PSOE, is linked with two men — former transport minister José Luis Ábalos and his former aide Koldo García — who were involved in a 2021 scandal involving taking payment for facilitating mask contracts during the covid crisis. Both denied any wrongdoing, but the legacy of the scandal has dogged Sánchez since. The situation worsened last week when leaked evidence handed to the Guardia Civil's anti-corruption unit purported to show Cerdán discussing illegal payments with Ábalos and García, as well as the merits of certain sex workers. If this wasn't bad enough for Sánchez and his government, grift allegations against his wife, Begoña Gómez, and brother, David Sánchez, are also being investigated. The prime minister has dismissed the allegations as a 'fit-up' driven by the far-right groups behind them. Like all senior politicians, Sánchez will be used to the hurly-burly of life in high office, but it appears he is slowly being swamped and if his partners in government, a cabal of small Catalan and Basque nationalist parties, were to decide he and his party are too toxic, the show might be over. Sadly, there is a growing sense that the days of what was once lauded as one of Europe's last beacons of social democracy may be coming to an ignominious conclusion. Read More Irish Examiner view: Cork crime series sheds light on our criminal justice system
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘You don't brag about wiping out 60‑70,000 people': the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
'It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.' I'm sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I'm writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life. We have spent the afternoon looking through wartime logbooks from his 58 overseas combat missions. Now, between servings of dim sum, he is telling me about the 59th, the one that wiped out a city, along with well over 100,000 people. 'The instant the bomb left the bomb bay, we screamed into a steep diving turn to escape the shockwave. There were two – the first, like a very, very, very close burst of flak. Then we turned back to see Hiroshima. But you couldn't see it. It was covered in smoke, dust, debris. And coming out of it was that mushroom cloud.' He stops a moment, awe visibly registering on his face. 'The city was gone. It was only three minutes since we'd dropped the bomb.' Van Kirk died in 2014. In the years since we met, all the other crew members who flew on the missions to Hiroshima, and to Nagasaki three days later on 9 August, have also died. Meanwhile, the numbers of hibakusha, those who survived the attacks, are rapidly dwindling. We are passing into a twilight of history. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, this biological fact seems disturbingly relevant. Twenty years ago, the world was a dangerous place. Today, it's more so. More nations are developing nuclear weapons with few, if any, effective international controls. Tactical nuclear strikes have been explicitly threatened by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. And, just in the last week, war has broken out in the Middle East over fears that Iran may be very close to having a bomb. In such times, perspective matters. The shocked testimony of those like Van Kirk needs to be heard. History has lessons to teach us. It was this thought that prompted me to reopen my files, to reread the transcripts of interviews with some of the crew members of both attacks. Much of this material was untouched for two decades; nothing relating to the Nagasaki mission was published. Here were some of the last testimonies of those who did the unthinkable. They were in their 80s or 90s, nearing the end of their lives. How did they remember it? *** On 4 August 1945, Charles 'Don' Albury, a 24-year-old B-29 pilot, was summoned to a secret briefing on Tinian, a Pacific island 1,500 miles south of Japan. Then the biggest bomber base in the world, Tinian was a jump-off point for a conveyor belt of the almost daily destruction of Japan. About 300,000 people had already died and 9 million were now homeless. But Albury's outfit had yet to take part in the attacks. Known as the 509th Composite Group, they occupied a secret compound on a far corner of the base. 'Security was very, very tight,' Albury told me when I met him at his home in Orlando, Florida. Then aged 83, he grinned mischievously. 'I remember one time the base commander got too near one of our planes. A guard nearly shot him.' Even the 509th's crews knew nothing about their ultimate missions. And they had been training for almost a year. First in Utah, later on Tinian: 'We kept dropping practice bombs and flying these crazy steep turns. We did it day after day. For months.' But nobody told them why, and few dared ask. Those who did could find themselves swiftly dispatched by their leader, Paul Tibbets, a battle-hardened bomber pilot, to hardship posts above the Arctic Circle. 'You learned to keep your mouth shut,' said Albury. But in that 4 August briefing a part of the secret was about to be revealed. Nine days earlier, on 26 July, President Truman had delivered his ultimatum to Japan in the Potsdam declaration: either surrender unconditionally, or face 'prompt and utter destruction'. The means of that destruction was not specified. And Japan had not surrendered. If I live for 100 years I will never get these few minutes out of my mind In the tropical heat of the briefing hut, Tibbets informed his crews that within 48 hours they would destroy a Japanese city with a single bomb unlike any in history, 'and hopefully', recalled Albury, 'win the war'. The bomb, said Tibbets, had been tested in New Mexico on 16 July. Its blast was equivalent to the destructive payload of 2,000 B-29s. The target would be one of three cities, in this order: Hiroshima, Kokura (now called Kitakyushu) or Nagasaki. The deciding factor would be the weather. On explicit orders from Washington, it had to be clear for the drop. 'Nobody and nothing moved in that room,' said Albury. 'We were just stunned.' Tibbets then introduced a quiet, balding naval captain, William 'Deak' Parsons, who would join the mission. Parsons had witnessed the New Mexico test. He told the men that the explosion would be the hottest and brightest thing since the creation. He warned them to wear welders' goggles because its light would be dazzling enough to blind them. But he didn't warn them that the bomb was radioactive. 'Nobody,' said Van Kirk, 'told us this was going to be an atomic bomb.' Van Kirk remembered Tibbets making a final announcement. 'He said anybody who isn't comfortable with this and doesn't want to go, doesn't have to go.' Nobody spoke. 'This was going to be a day history would remember,' Albury recalled. He had left a wife and baby daughter in America. If this bomb was successful, the war might be over. Then he could go home. By midnight the following night, they were ready. One of the men who would be flying was Morris Jeppson, a 23-year-old electronics specialist recruited by the atomic scientists at Los Alamos to work on the bomb's revolutionary fusing system. For two weeks in 1944 the FBI interrogated everybody in Jeppson's life before he found himself sharing a plane ride with Los Alamos's director, J Robert Oppenheimer, 'a real gentleman who talked nuclear physics with me but never talked weapons'. Sitting in his Las Vegas kitchen, Jeppson, then 82, chuckled at the memory. 'Perhaps he was checking me out.' If so, he passed the test. He and Parsons would monitor the electronic wizardry of the bomb – nicknamed 'Little Boy' – all the way to the drop. They would also have to arm it in flight, an exceptionally delicate job that should really have been carried out on the ground. But both men had recently watched too many heavily overloaded B-29s crashing on take-off. 'We saw them burning on the runway,' said Jeppson, 'and we saw it often.' Harold Agnew, a brilliant 24-year-old Los Alamos physicist who would be flying in an accompanying B-29 filled with blast‑measuring instruments, had also seen those crashes. If this happened with Little Boy, the consequences could be horrific. 'That bomb was completely unsafe,' Agnew, then 83, told me when we met at his San Diego home. And he would know. In 1942, as part of a secret team working in Chicago under the Nobel-prizewinning scientist Enrico Fermi, he had witnessed the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. 'If they'd crashed, anything could have happened.' Parsons would need to be able to improvise, fast. In the hours before take-off, he and Jeppson began practising how to arm an atomic bomb in flight. Over and over, the two men ran over the checklist, leaving nothing to chance. Out on the hardstand, the bomb-carrying B-29, now sporting the name of Tibbets' mother, Enola Gay, was bathed in floodlights. 'That was our first surprise,' said Van Kirk. 'The plane was all lit up and there were all these people – photographers, newspapermen – everywhere. It looked like a Hollywood premiere.' The analogy is eerily accurate. Back in May, before it was certain an atom bomb would even work, a secret target committee had stressed the importance of making its 'initial use sufficiently spectacular … when publicity on it is released'. What mattered was 'obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan'. But to Van Kirk, 'all the photos and questions from reporters felt like breakfast for the condemned man'. He was relieved that Tom Ferebee, Enola Gay's bombardier, had earlier cleaned out all the underwear and silk stockings the crew had stashed inside the plane as good luck charms. At last the surreal scrum was over. At 2.45am Enola Gay, along with Agnew's plane The Great Artiste, co-piloted by Albury and carrying blast instruments, and a third camera plane later dubbed Necessary Evil, took off from Tinian's North Field runways, lined with fire trucks in case of the worst. 'I really did have faith in Paul [Tibbets],' said Van Kirk. 'I knew we were grossly overloaded. But he got us off – just a few hundred feet from the end of the runway.' Under a moonless sky, the strike force struck north over the Pacific. Tibbets lit his pipe. One hour ahead, three reconnaissance aircraft also flew towards the three possible targets. In keeping with Washington's orders, their task would be to radio back how much cloud there was over the aiming points. Ultimately the weather would choose which city was obliterated – and which spared. Fifty miles out of Tinian, Parsons and Jeppson clambered into Enola Gay's bomb bay to begin arming Little Boy. 'Parsons knelt by the bomb with a wrench. I held a flashlight,' said Jeppson. The work was fiddly and dangerous. Part of the procedure involved inserting four bags of cordite – a form of gunpowder – into the bomb's breech plug. 'That worried me more than anything,' said Van Kirk. 'Loading all that damn gunpowder while we were on the aeroplane, for Chrissake.' In 15 minutes the checklist was completed. But there was still one final step before the bomb was fully armed. That would come later. Enola Gay sped through the night into a golden dawn.'That morning the sunrise was the most beautiful I'd ever seen,' Van Kirk remembered. He plotted a course to Iwo Jima, an island that had seen appalling battles in early 1945. Now it was the rendezvous point for the three planes. 'My biggest fear was: don't screw this up,' said Van Kirk. But his calculations were spot on. Iwo emerged dead ahead, along with The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil. An hour and 20 minutes from the Japanese coast, Jeppson – now by himself – climbed back into the bomb bay, to replace Little Boy's three green safety plugs with three red arming plugs. He double-checked the red plugs were correctly set, gave the third one a final twist – 'That was a moment,' he remembered – and left. He was the last person to touch or see the bomb. Enola Gay's co-pilot, Bob Lewis, pencilled in his log: 'The bomb is now live. It's a funny feeling knowing it's in back of you. Knock wood.' But on which city would it be dropped? The answer soon came from the weather planes ahead, radioed in code. Conditions were excellent over the primary target. Tibbets switched on the intercom: 'It's Hiroshima.' 'Everybody was getting excited,' recalled Van Kirk. 'I could see the city out the window. We all formally identified it.' Ahead was the point from which Enola Gay would begin its bomb run. 'By this time it was a game for me. I was trying to hit that initial point exactly at nine o'clock.' Van Kirk smiled. 'I'm a punctual person. When I say I'm going to pick my daughter up at five o'clock, that's when I pick her up.' He was punctual now. On cue, Enola Gay swung towards a striking T-shaped bridge that Tibbets later described as 'the most perfect aiming point in the whole damn war'. Ferebee hunched over his bombsight. Unlike almost every other city in Japan, this one, with a population of about 350,000, had almost never been bombed. It had been preserved instead for atomic obliteration. It satisfied every requirement: it had a sufficient military presence to claim it as a valid military target. It had hills on three sides that would concentrate the blast, creating even greater damage. And, as it had been kept intact, it would demonstrate with brutal clarity to the Japanese what an atom bomb could do to a city. It was impossible to imagine that something so inconsequential and light – approximately 6kg – could erase a city Fifteen seconds before the drop, Ferebee flicked a switch. A warning tone sounded across the airwaves. Agnew heard it on The Great Artiste. 'We were flying right beside the bomb plane when the tone went. We opened our bomb bay doors, ready to drop our blast-measuring instruments.' His pilot Albury stared down at the city. 'We could see everything, the bridge, everything. It was a sunny, beautiful day.' Then the tone stopped and Little Boy tumbled out. 'Tibbets went hard into that steep turn,' said Van Kirk. 'Engines going full blast. I started timing.' Oppenheimer had told Tibbets that the shockwave could crush their plane like a giant hand swatting an ant. There were 43 seconds before Little Boy exploded. 'Everybody was counting,' continued Van Kirk. 'Everybody was waiting for that bomb to go off because there was a real possibility it was going to be a dud.' Jeppson counted in his head – too quickly. 'I had a moment of panic. I thought: it's a dud. And then, within two seconds, there was this flash.' Van Kirk was wearing his goggles, but still 'it was like a photographer's flash going off in your face'. 'The whole plane lit up with a white light,' said Agnew. 'I scribbled a note: 'Boy, this thing just went off, it really did.'' On Enola Gay, the tail gunner, George 'Bob' Caron, screamed a warning as the shockwave tore up towards them. 'And then, whang!' continued Agnew. 'We got whacked. And then a few seconds later we got whacked again.' 'The whole plane suddenly bounced hard, twice,' said Jeppson. For a horrified instant he thought the shockwave might smash through Enola Gay's hull. 'Then,' he said, 'we headed to the windows. I watched this churning on the ground. And this cloud started building up, rising, rising, rising. It was awesome.' From his navigator's window, Van Kirk also stared in amazement. 'It was already up to, oh God, 25,000ft and going up rapidly. Anything and everything had been kicked up by that bomb.' The sunlit city he had been looking at moments before was now a huge cauldron of boiling black tar. In The Great Artiste, Albury gazed, transfixed. 'We watched that cloud rise. It had every colour of the world up there, beautiful colours. To me it looked like salmon colours, blues, greens.' Behind him, Agnew's oscilloscopes measured the size of the blast – the equivalent of about 13,500 tonnes of high explosive, four times the tonnage that had wiped out Dresden in February 1945. He grabbed a 16mm cine camera he had smuggled into the bomber before takeoff. He began filming, his hands shaking. 'The city wasn't there. There was just nothing there. That dust cloud covered the whole city.' He didn't know it yet, but Necessary Evil's official cameras would all fail. Agnew's illicit camera would yield the only movie footage of the Hiroshima bomb. 'My God, what have we done?' wrote Enola Gay's co-pilot Lewis in his logbook. 'If I live for 100 years I will never get these few minutes out of my mind.' Then Tibbets spoke to the crew. 'Fellows,' he said, 'you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.' 'You just can't imagine something that big,' said Van Kirk. 'We couldn't see how the Japanese could continue the war. Nobody said anything about the people on the ground. That wasn't mentioned at all.' The same theme rippled across all three crews. 'To me it was a great relief – that it worked,' said Jeppson. 'I was happy. I thought I'd be going home.' 'Did I think the war was over?' asked Albury. 'I was hoping it was. I knew Hiroshima wasn't there any more anyway.' But the mushroom cloud was. They could still see it, even when they were 400 miles away. Enola Gay landed back at Tinian to a heroes' welcome. Hundreds were cheering as they taxied in. 'We got out of the plane,' said Van Kirk, 'and there were more generals than I'd ever seen in my life. We wondered what the hell they were doing there.' They soon found out. Barely had Tibbets stepped from his B-29 before the Distinguished Service Cross was pinned to his chest. It was so unexpected that he was still holding his pipe. Most of the exhausted crew went to bed. Jeppson went drinking with friends. 'I remember one of them asked: 'So what did you do today?' And I said: 'Well, we ended the war.' They thought I was pulling their leg.' But the war didn't end. And three days later, on 9 August, the atomic squadron did it all over again. *** Hiroshima, Van Kirk told me, was 'the perfect mission' where everything went right. But the next one would be 'screwed up', the mission where almost everything would go wrong. Frederick Ashworth went on it. When I interviewed him in Santa Fe he was 92, a long-retired vice-admiral, but in August 1945 he was a young atomic weaponeer who would fill Parsons' role, babysitting the bomb to the target. The primary target wasn't Nagasaki. It was Kokura, 100 miles further north and home to one of Japan's largest military arsenals. With Hiroshima devastated, this number two city had now moved up to the top slot; Nagasaki was the backup, in case Kokura was socked in. 'Originally the second bomb was intended to be dropped on 11 August – five days after Hiroshima,' said Ashworth. A lean, spare man, he spoke quietly with great precision. 'But a typhoon was coming in. So we had this window. And the thinking was: we hit them, bang, with the second one, right off the bat.' The bang would come from a different kind of bomb. Unlike Little Boy, 'Fat Man' was far more sophisticated, utilising plutonium, rather than enriched uranium. 'I actually carried the plutonium core in its funny little case,' Agnew told me. 'I wanted to see what it felt like. And I wanted my picture taken.' He dug out the photo for me. Grinning for the camera, he holds the small case in his left hand. It was impossible to imagine that something so inconsequential and light – approximately 6kg – could erase a city. Agnew wouldn't be flying this time. But at midnight on 8 August, two days after Hiroshima, Albury found himself once again in the briefing room alongside his aircraft commander, Charles 'Chuck' Sweeney. Tonight he would be co-piloting Bockscar, the plane carrying the bomb. 'It was tense,' he told me. 'I hadn't been sleeping too much. I just lay on my bed. I'd written to my wife, telling her I loved her. I just wanted to get on with this mission and get home.' The briefing was short. Conditions at Kokura were forecast clear, but, because of major thunderstorms en route, Bockscar would rendezvous with the instrument and camera planes over Yakushima, an island south of Japan. 'Tibbets reminded us we were under strict orders from Washington to bomb visually,' recalled Ashworth. 'Under no circumstances were we to bomb otherwise.' Then they went out to the ramp. 'And that's when we had the first problem,' said Albury. A fuel transfer pump had broken, meaning there were 600 gallons of fuel on board they couldn't use. Normally they wouldn't need it, but ahead were those storms. Tibbets called a rapid conference. The stakes were tremendous. With their short weather window, any delay might affect the outcome of the war. 'He said: 'Chuck, it's up to you. You're commander of the aeroplane.' And Chuck said: 'To hell with it, we've never used that fuel before: it's just ballast. I think we should go.'' At nearly 4am and running late, Bockscar gunned down Tinian's wet runway, once again lined end to end with fire trucks in case of a catastrophic crash. Thirteen minutes after takeoff, Ashworth's assistant, Philip Barnes, climbed into the bomb bay to replace the green safety plugs with the red plugs. With Fat Man now fully armed, the plane ran headlong into the first of the thunderstorms. 'It was bumpy,' said Albury. 'We flew into some pretty big clouds and we saw typhoons go by.' Back near the bomb bay, Ashworth and Barnes watched their bomb control panel like hawks, monitoring Fat Man's warning lights as lightning stabbed the night skies. 'Then this white light suddenly came on,' said Ashworth. 'That's what you see when you're about to drop the bomb.' There was a silence as I took this in. Did he think the bomb might go off? 'Absolutely. Sure. That was precisely what was concerning us.' His next sentence was a masterpiece of understatement. 'I told Sweeney we were having problems and we were working on it.' Barnes saved the day, coolly tracing the fault to a misplaced switch. The mission continued into a storm‑tossed dawn. But when Bockscar joined up with the instrument plane over Yakushima, the third camera plane – captained by James Hopkins – wasn't there. 'Everybody was looking out the window,' said Albury. 'We were circling all the time but we couldn't see him.' They kept circling. What nobody knew was that Hopkins was 10,000ft too high. 'Fifteen minutes goes by, then another 15 minutes,' said Ashworth. They were using up valuable fuel. 'I said to Sweeney: let's get out of here. We've got to get on with the mission.' 'We were pretty late by now,' said Albury, 'maybe a couple of hours late when we got to Kokura.' The bombardier, Kermit Beahan, started the bomb run. But the winds had changed direction. Thick smoke from a raid on nearby Yahata the previous night was blanketing Kokura. In an appalling irony, American bombs were preventing the use of the atom bomb. 'Kermit said: 'I can't find the aiming point!'' Albury continued. 'We made a second try and it was still the same thing. Now our engineer started talking about fuel.' They tried a third run from a different direction. That failed, too. Flak was bursting below. Each bomb run was taking 20 minutes and tempers were mounting. I will not say I was guilty. Under the same conditions I'd do it again, because I honestly believe it saved a lot of lives Sweeney and Ashworth argued about what to do, finally agreeing to divert. Kokura had been saved by an accident of the weather. Now it was Nagasaki's turn to be attacked. But when they got there, the city was covered in cloud. 'We had to get rid of that bomb,' said Ashworth. With their critically low fuel, they might now not make it to base – which would mean ditching in the sea. Their options were stark: ditch with the atom bomb; jettison it over the ocean; or break direct orders and drop it on Nagasaki through cloud with their primitive radar. They had just minutes to decide. 'By now everybody's talking back and forth,' said Albury. 'There was too much tension.' Then Beahan began the final bomb run. 'There was no other choice,' said Ashworth. 'We had to get that bomb on Nagasaki. But bombing by radar is notoriously inaccurate.' With seconds to spare, Beahan suddenly spotted a stadium he recognised through a cloud gap. Moments later, he yelled, 'Bombs away' – then corrected himself: 'Bomb away'. 'Thank God,' thought Albury as Sweeney threw Bockscar into the rollercoaster turn. 'But we didn't know where the hell that bomb had gone off,' Ashworth said. In fact, in one of the most bizarre coincidences of the war, Fat Man had detonated almost directly over the factory that once made the torpedoes used in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It killed almost 40,000 people instantly. At least another 40,000 would die later from injuries and radiation sickness. This was Albury's second atomic explosion in three days. The same Technicolor images pepper his interview, the same 'greens, blues, pinks' of the mushroom cloud, 'every colour of the rainbow, always changing and moving up pretty fast. I was just thinking: thank God we dropped it safely.' The jarring adverb hung between us. How do you drop an atom bomb safely? But Ashworth was seeing it for the first time. 'This was new to me … It was like nothing you ever saw.' His language became suddenly reluctant as I pressed him further. 'I try to keep a relatively neutral reaction to these things – it's a personal psychological reaction. This is the job I'm here for, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't have time to reflect: should I be worried about those guys down on the ground?' He didn't, perhaps couldn't, answer his own question. Bockscar barely made it back, landing unannounced at Okinawa, the closest American airbase, with a minute's fuel left in the tanks. There were no crowds to greet them, no generals to pin medals on their chests. Nobody even knew they were coming. There also was no official investigation into their breach of orders. In the end, accuracy was irrelevant. The bomb had done its job. And six days later, on 15 August, battered by both nuclear attacks, as well as a crushing Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Japan finally surrendered. *** About 200,000 people ultimately died from the two bombings, and possibly many more. The exact figures will never be known. Eighty years afterwards, arguments still rage about whether these annihilations were justified, avoidable or saved more lives than they ended. But what did the crews themselves believe? 'I will not say I was guilty. I will not apologise for it,' Van Kirk told me. 'In fact, under the same conditions I'd do it again, because I truly, honestly believe it saved a lot of lives.' Most of his crewmates clung to this mantra with the same granite faith. Ashworth, who died in 2005 aged 93, always remained proud of his participation in what he called 'a major contribution to the war'. Agnew, who later became a director of Los Alamos, held the same view until his death in 2013 at 92. 'We had to drop it,' he explained. 'The Japanese began this war. If there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima would never have happened.' Tibbets went several leagues further. In 1976 he caused an international incident when he simulated the nuclear attack, flying a B-29 in a Texas airshow, complete with a mushroom-shaped explosion. He said he'd 'never lost a night's sleep over the fact that I commanded the bombing'. But there are occasional peepholes into troubled consciences. 'You don't brag about wiping out 60‑70,000,' admitted Robert Shumard, a flight engineer on Enola Gay, who died in 1967. And Caron, its tail gunner, confessed to 'a partial feeling of guilt' when he saw photos of burned children from Hiroshima. 'I wish I hadn't seen them,' he added. Jeppson, who died in 2010, once suggested the bomb might have been demonstrated 'without the need for destroying a city'. He personally wrote to me of his 'sorrow' at Hiroshima's 'great tragedy'. And then there was this unexpected postscript. At the end of our interview, Albury told me how he had returned to Nagasaki – barely three weeks after bombing it. Tibbets had decided to fly to Japan with some of his team on the strangest of sightseeing trips. They wanted to visit Hiroshima but the airfield there was badly damaged, so they landed at Nagasaki instead. Van Kirk was also on that trip. 'We arrived two or three days before any American troops,' Van Kirk told me. 'There were maybe 20 Americans in the whole city. Nobody knew who we were. We didn't put a sign on ourselves. It was eerie. Very eerie.' They drove into the city. 'There's all this damage you see from just one bomb. I was amazed,' said Van Kirk. 'It scares the hell out of you.' 'We took pictures,' said Albury. 'The people didn't look very happy, I can tell you.' In the ruins, he saw 'a shadow on the wall, where somebody was probably walking by when the bomb went off'. There was no trace of the body. The thousands-of-degrees heat from the bomb had simply vaporised it. Then, in a hospital, he saw the dead and dying, 'some of the people laying out on the ground outside. It was the only place I saw bodies. They were treating some of the people on the lower floors.' He suddenly stopped. 'It was devastation,' he said finally. 'I can't go back there. I don't dwell on this too much. It's been almost 60 years.' There was a long silence. We ended the interview there and I thanked him. But it seemed his mind was still in that hospital. Then he said, very quietly: 'Never again.' • Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker is published by William Collins.
The Guardian
22-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘You don't brag about wiping out 60‑70,000 people': the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
'It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.' I'm sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I'm writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life. We have spent the afternoon looking through wartime logbooks from his 58 overseas combat missions. Now, between servings of dim sum, he is telling me about the 59th, the one that wiped out a city, along with well over 100,000 people. 'The instant the bomb left the bomb bay, we screamed into a steep diving turn to escape the shockwave. There were two – the first, like a very, very, very close burst of flak. Then we turned back to see Hiroshima. But you couldn't see it. It was covered in smoke, dust, debris. And coming out of it was that mushroom cloud.' He stops a moment, awe visibly registering on his face. 'The city was gone. It was only three minutes since we'd dropped the bomb.' Van Kirk died in 2014. In the years since we met, all the other crew members who flew on the missions to Hiroshima, and to Nagasaki three days later on 9 August, have also died. Meanwhile, the numbers of hibakusha, those who survived the attacks, are rapidly dwindling. We are passing into a twilight of history. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, this biological fact seems disturbingly relevant. Twenty years ago, the world was a dangerous place. Today, it's more so. More nations are developing nuclear weapons with few, if any, effective international controls. Tactical nuclear strikes have been explicitly threatened by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. And, just in the last week, war has broken out in the Middle East over fears that Iran may be very close to having a bomb. In such times, perspective matters. The shocked testimony of those like Van Kirk needs to be heard. History has lessons to teach us. It was this thought that prompted me to reopen my files, to reread the transcripts of interviews with some of the crew members of both attacks. Much of this material was untouched for two decades; nothing relating to the Nagasaki mission was published. Here were some of the last testimonies of those who did the unthinkable. They were in their 80s or 90s, nearing the end of their lives. How did they remember it? On 4 August 1945, Charles 'Don' Albury, a 24-year-old B-29 pilot, was summoned to a secret briefing on Tinian, a Pacific island 1,500 miles south of Japan. Then the biggest bomber base in the world, Tinian was a jump-off point for a conveyor belt of the almost daily destruction of Japan. About 300,000 people had already died and 9 million were now homeless. But Albury's outfit had yet to take part in the attacks. Known as the 509th Composite Group, they occupied a secret compound on a far corner of the base. 'Security was very, very tight,' Albury told me when I met him at his home in Orlando, Florida. Then aged 83, he grinned mischievously. 'I remember one time the base commander got too near one of our planes. A guard nearly shot him.' Even the 509th's crews knew nothing about their ultimate missions. And they had been training for almost a year. First in Utah, later on Tinian: 'We kept dropping practice bombs and flying these crazy steep turns. We did it day after day. For months.' But nobody told them why, and few dared ask. Those who did could find themselves swiftly dispatched by their leader, Paul Tibbets, a battle-hardened bomber pilot, to hardship posts above the Arctic Circle. 'You learned to keep your mouth shut,' said Albury. But in that 4 August briefing a part of the secret was about to be revealed. Nine days earlier, on 26 July, President Truman had delivered his ultimatum to Japan in the Potsdam declaration: either surrender unconditionally, or face 'prompt and utter destruction'. The means of that destruction was not specified. And Japan had not surrendered. In the tropical heat of the briefing hut, Tibbets informed his crews that within 48 hours they would destroy a Japanese city with a single bomb unlike any in history, 'and hopefully', recalled Albury, 'win the war'. The bomb, said Tibbets, had been tested in New Mexico on 16 July. Its blast was equivalent to the destructive payload of 2,000 B-29s. The target would be one of three cities, in this order: Hiroshima, Kokura (now called Kitakyushu) or Nagasaki. The deciding factor would be the weather. On explicit orders from Washington, it had to be clear for the drop. 'Nobody and nothing moved in that room,' said Albury. 'We were just stunned.' Tibbets then introduced a quiet, balding naval captain, William 'Deak' Parsons, who would join the mission. Parsons had witnessed the New Mexico test. He told the men that the explosion would be the hottest and brightest thing since the creation. He warned them to wear welders' goggles because its light would be dazzling enough to blind them. But he didn't warn them that the bomb was radioactive. 'Nobody,' said Van Kirk, 'told us this was going to be an atomic bomb.' Van Kirk remembered Tibbets making a final announcement. 'He said anybody who isn't comfortable with this and doesn't want to go, doesn't have to go.' Nobody spoke. 'This was going to be a day history would remember,' Albury recalled. He had left a wife and baby daughter in America. If this bomb was successful, the war might be over. Then he could go home. By midnight the following night, they were ready. One of the men who would be flying was Morris Jeppson, a 23-year-old electronics specialist recruited by the atomic scientists at Los Alamos to work on the bomb's revolutionary fusing system. For two weeks in 1944 the FBI interrogated everybody in Jeppson's life before he found himself sharing a plane ride with Los Alamos's director, J Robert Oppenheimer, 'a real gentleman who talked nuclear physics with me but never talked weapons'. Sitting in his Las Vegas kitchen, Jeppson, then 82, chuckled at the memory. 'Perhaps he was checking me out.' If so, he passed the test. He and Parsons would monitor the electronic wizardry of the bomb – nicknamed 'Little Boy' – all the way to the drop. They would also have to arm it in flight, an exceptionally delicate job that should really have been carried out on the ground. But both men had recently watched too many heavily overloaded B-29s crashing on take-off. 'We saw them burning on the runway,' said Jeppson, 'and we saw it often.' Harold Agnew, a brilliant 24-year-old Los Alamos physicist who would be flying in an accompanying B-29 filled with blast‑measuring instruments, had also seen those crashes. If this happened with Little Boy, the consequences could be horrific. 'That bomb was completely unsafe,' Agnew, then 83, told me when we met at his San Diego home. And he would know. In 1942, as part of a secret team working in Chicago under the Nobel-prizewinning scientist Enrico Fermi, he had witnessed the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. 'If they'd crashed, anything could have happened.' Parsons would need to be able to improvise, fast. In the hours before take-off, he and Jeppson began practising how to arm an atomic bomb in flight. Over and over, the two men ran over the checklist, leaving nothing to chance. Out on the hardstand, the bomb-carrying B-29, now sporting the name of Tibbets' mother, Enola Gay, was bathed in floodlights. 'That was our first surprise,' said Van Kirk. 'The plane was all lit up and there were all these people – photographers, newspapermen – everywhere. It looked like a Hollywood premiere.' The analogy is eerily accurate. Back in May, before it was certain an atom bomb would even work, a secret target committee had stressed the importance of making its 'initial use sufficiently spectacular … when publicity on it is released'. What mattered was 'obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan'. But to Van Kirk, 'all the photos and questions from reporters felt like breakfast for the condemned man'. He was relieved that Tom Ferebee, Enola Gay's bombardier, had earlier cleaned out all the underwear and silk stockings the crew had stashed inside the plane as good luck charms. At last the surreal scrum was over. At 2.45am Enola Gay, along with Agnew's plane The Great Artiste, co-piloted by Albury and carrying blast instruments, and a third camera plane later dubbed Necessary Evil, took off from Tinian's North Field runways, lined with fire trucks in case of the worst. 'I really did have faith in Paul [Tibbets],' said Van Kirk. 'I knew we were grossly overloaded. But he got us off – just a few hundred feet from the end of the runway.' Under a moonless sky, the strike force struck north over the Pacific. Tibbets lit his pipe. One hour ahead, three reconnaissance aircraft also flew towards the three possible targets. In keeping with Washington's orders, their task would be to radio back how much cloud there was over the aiming points. Ultimately the weather would choose which city was obliterated – and which spared. Fifty miles out of Tinian, Parsons and Jeppson clambered into Enola Gay's bomb bay to begin arming Little Boy. 'Parsons knelt by the bomb with a wrench. I held a flashlight,' said Jeppson. The work was fiddly and dangerous. Part of the procedure involved inserting four bags of cordite – a form of gunpowder – into the bomb's breech plug. 'That worried me more than anything,' said Van Kirk. 'Loading all that damn gunpowder while we were on the aeroplane, for Chrissake.' In 15 minutes the checklist was completed. But there was still one final step before the bomb was fully armed. That would come later. Enola Gay sped through the night into a golden dawn.'That morning the sunrise was the most beautiful I'd ever seen,' Van Kirk remembered. He plotted a course to Iwo Jima, an island that had seen appalling battles in early 1945. Now it was the rendezvous point for the three planes. 'My biggest fear was: don't screw this up,' said Van Kirk. But his calculations were spot on. Iwo emerged dead ahead, along with The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil. An hour and 20 minutes from the Japanese coast, Jeppson – now by himself – climbed back into the bomb bay, to replace Little Boy's three green safety plugs with three red arming plugs. He double-checked the red plugs were correctly set, gave the third one a final twist – 'That was a moment,' he remembered – and left. He was the last person to touch or see the bomb. Enola Gay's co-pilot, Bob Lewis, pencilled in his log: 'The bomb is now live. It's a funny feeling knowing it's in back of you. Knock wood.' But on which city would it be dropped? The answer soon came from the weather planes ahead, radioed in code. Conditions were excellent over the primary target. Tibbets switched on the intercom: 'It's Hiroshima.' 'Everybody was getting excited,' recalled Van Kirk. 'I could see the city out the window. We all formally identified it.' Ahead was the point from which Enola Gay would begin its bomb run. 'By this time it was a game for me. I was trying to hit that initial point exactly at nine o'clock.' Van Kirk smiled. 'I'm a punctual person. When I say I'm going to pick my daughter up at five o'clock, that's when I pick her up.' He was punctual now. On cue, Enola Gay swung towards a striking T-shaped bridge that Tibbets later described as 'the most perfect aiming point in the whole damn war'. Ferebee hunched over his bombsight. Unlike almost every other city in Japan, this one, with a population of about 350,000, had almost never been bombed. It had been preserved instead for atomic obliteration. It satisfied every requirement: it had a sufficient military presence to claim it as a valid military target. It had hills on three sides that would concentrate the blast, creating even greater damage. And, as it had been kept intact, it would demonstrate with brutal clarity to the Japanese what an atom bomb could do to a city. Fifteen seconds before the drop, Ferebee flicked a switch. A warning tone sounded across the airwaves. Agnew heard it on The Great Artiste. 'We were flying right beside the bomb plane when the tone went. We opened our bomb bay doors, ready to drop our blast-measuring instruments.' His pilot Albury stared down at the city. 'We could see everything, the bridge, everything. It was a sunny, beautiful day.' Then the tone stopped and Little Boy tumbled out. 'Tibbets went hard into that steep turn,' said Van Kirk. 'Engines going full blast. I started timing.' Oppenheimer had told Tibbets that the shockwave could crush their plane like a giant hand swatting an ant. There were 43 seconds before Little Boy exploded. 'Everybody was counting,' continued Van Kirk. 'Everybody was waiting for that bomb to go off because there was a real possibility it was going to be a dud.' Jeppson counted in his head – too quickly. 'I had a moment of panic. I thought: it's a dud. And then, within two seconds, there was this flash.' Van Kirk was wearing his goggles, but still 'it was like a photographer's flash going off in your face'. 'The whole plane lit up with a white light,' said Agnew. 'I scribbled a note: 'Boy, this thing just went off, it really did.'' On Enola Gay, the tail gunner, George 'Bob' Caron, screamed a warning as the shockwave tore up towards them. 'And then, whang!' continued Agnew. 'We got whacked. And then a few seconds later we got whacked again.' 'The whole plane suddenly bounced hard, twice,' said Jeppson. For a horrified instant he thought the shockwave might smash through Enola Gay's hull. 'Then,' he said, 'we headed to the windows. I watched this churning on the ground. And this cloud started building up, rising, rising, rising. It was awesome.' From his navigator's window, Van Kirk also stared in amazement. 'It was already up to, oh God, 25,000ft and going up rapidly. Anything and everything had been kicked up by that bomb.' The sunlit city he had been looking at moments before was now a huge cauldron of boiling black tar. In The Great Artiste, Albury gazed, transfixed. 'We watched that cloud rise. It had every colour of the world up there, beautiful colours. To me it looked like salmon colours, blues, greens.' Behind him, Agnew's oscilloscopes measured the size of the blast – the equivalent of about 13,500 tonnes of high explosive, four times the tonnage that had wiped out Dresden in February 1945. He grabbed a 16mm cine camera he had smuggled into the bomber before takeoff. He began filming, his hands shaking. 'The city wasn't there. There was just nothing there. That dust cloud covered the whole city.' He didn't know it yet, but Necessary Evil's official cameras would all fail. Agnew's illicit camera would yield the only movie footage of the Hiroshima bomb. 'My God, what have we done?' wrote Enola Gay's co-pilot Lewis in his logbook. 'If I live for 100 years I will never get these few minutes out of my mind.' Then Tibbets spoke to the crew. 'Fellows,' he said, 'you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.' 'You just can't imagine something that big,' said Van Kirk. 'We couldn't see how the Japanese could continue the war. Nobody said anything about the people on the ground. That wasn't mentioned at all.' The same theme rippled across all three crews. 'To me it was a great relief – that it worked,' said Jeppson. 'I was happy. I thought I'd be going home.' 'Did I think the war was over?' asked Albury. 'I was hoping it was. I knew Hiroshima wasn't there any more anyway.' But the mushroom cloud was. They could still see it, even when they were 400 miles away. Enola Gay landed back at Tinian to a heroes' welcome. Hundreds were cheering as they taxied in. 'We got out of the plane,' said Van Kirk, 'and there were more generals than I'd ever seen in my life. We wondered what the hell they were doing there.' They soon found out. Barely had Tibbets stepped from his B-29 before the Distinguished Service Cross was pinned to his chest. It was so unexpected that he was still holding his pipe. Most of the exhausted crew went to bed. Jeppson went drinking with friends. 'I remember one of them asked: 'So what did you do today?' And I said: 'Well, we ended the war.' They thought I was pulling their leg.' But the war didn't end. And three days later, on 9 August, the atomic squadron did it all over again. Hiroshima, Van Kirk told me, was 'the perfect mission' where everything went right. But the next one would be 'screwed up', the mission where almost everything would go wrong. Frederick Ashworth went on it. When I interviewed him in Santa Fe he was 92, a long-retired vice-admiral, but in August 1945 he was a young atomic weaponeer who would fill Parsons' role, babysitting the bomb to the target. The primary target wasn't Nagasaki. It was Kokura, 100 miles further north and home to one of Japan's largest military arsenals. With Hiroshima devastated, this number two city had now moved up to the top slot; Nagasaki was the backup, in case Kokura was socked in. 'Originally the second bomb was intended to be dropped on 11 August – five days after Hiroshima,' said Ashworth. A lean, spare man, he spoke quietly with great precision. 'But a typhoon was coming in. So we had this window. And the thinking was: we hit them, bang, with the second one, right off the bat.' The bang would come from a different kind of bomb. Unlike Little Boy, 'Fat Man' was far more sophisticated, utilising plutonium, rather than enriched uranium. 'I actually carried the plutonium core in its funny little case,' Agnew told me. 'I wanted to see what it felt like. And I wanted my picture taken.' He dug out the photo for me. Grinning for the camera, he holds the small case in his left hand. It was impossible to imagine that something so inconsequential and light – approximately 6kg – could erase a city. Agnew wouldn't be flying this time. But at midnight on 8 August, two days after Hiroshima, Albury found himself once again in the briefing room alongside his aircraft commander, Charles 'Chuck' Sweeney. Tonight he would be co-piloting Bockscar, the plane carrying the bomb. 'It was tense,' he told me. 'I hadn't been sleeping too much. I just lay on my bed. I'd written to my wife, telling her I loved her. I just wanted to get on with this mission and get home.' The briefing was short. Conditions at Kokura were forecast clear, but, because of major thunderstorms en route, Bockscar would rendezvous with the instrument and camera planes over Yakushima, an island south of Japan. 'Tibbets reminded us we were under strict orders from Washington to bomb visually,' recalled Ashworth. 'Under no circumstances were we to bomb otherwise.' Then they went out to the ramp. 'And that's when we had the first problem,' said Albury. A fuel transfer pump had broken, meaning there were 600 gallons of fuel on board they couldn't use. Normally they wouldn't need it, but ahead were those storms. Tibbets called a rapid conference. The stakes were tremendous. With their short weather window, any delay might affect the outcome of the war. 'He said: 'Chuck, it's up to you. You're commander of the aeroplane.' And Chuck said: 'To hell with it, we've never used that fuel before: it's just ballast. I think we should go.'' At nearly 4am and running late, Bockscar gunned down Tinian's wet runway, once again lined end to end with fire trucks in case of a catastrophic crash. Thirteen minutes after takeoff, Ashworth's assistant, Philip Barnes, climbed into the bomb bay to replace the green safety plugs with the red plugs. With Fat Man now fully armed, the plane ran headlong into the first of the thunderstorms. 'It was bumpy,' said Albury. 'We flew into some pretty big clouds and we saw typhoons go by.' Back near the bomb bay, Ashworth and Barnes watched their bomb control panel like hawks, monitoring Fat Man's warning lights as lightning stabbed the night skies. 'Then this white light suddenly came on,' said Ashworth. 'That's what you see when you're about to drop the bomb.' There was a silence as I took this in. Did he think the bomb might go off? 'Absolutely. Sure. That was precisely what was concerning us.' His next sentence was a masterpiece of understatement. 'I told Sweeney we were having problems and we were working on it.' Barnes saved the day, coolly tracing the fault to a misplaced switch. The mission continued into a storm‑tossed dawn. But when Bockscar joined up with the instrument plane over Yakushima, the third camera plane – captained by James Hopkins – wasn't there. 'Everybody was looking out the window,' said Albury. 'We were circling all the time but we couldn't see him.' They kept circling. What nobody knew was that Hopkins was 10,000ft too high. 'Fifteen minutes goes by, then another 15 minutes,' said Ashworth. They were using up valuable fuel. 'I said to Sweeney: let's get out of here. We've got to get on with the mission.' 'We were pretty late by now,' said Albury, 'maybe a couple of hours late when we got to Kokura.' The bombardier, Kermit Beahan, started the bomb run. But the winds had changed direction. Thick smoke from a raid on nearby Yahata the previous night was blanketing Kokura. In an appalling irony, American bombs were preventing the use of the atom bomb. 'Kermit said: 'I can't find the aiming point!'' Albury continued. 'We made a second try and it was still the same thing. Now our engineer started talking about fuel.' They tried a third run from a different direction. That failed, too. Flak was bursting below. Each bomb run was taking 20 minutes and tempers were mounting. Sweeney and Ashworth argued about what to do, finally agreeing to divert. Kokura had been saved by an accident of the weather. Now it was Nagasaki's turn to be attacked. But when they got there, the city was covered in cloud. 'We had to get rid of that bomb,' said Ashworth. With their critically low fuel, they might now not make it to base – which would mean ditching in the sea. Their options were stark: ditch with the atom bomb; jettison it over the ocean; or break direct orders and drop it on Nagasaki through cloud with their primitive radar. They had just minutes to decide. 'By now everybody's talking back and forth,' said Albury. 'There was too much tension.' Then Beahan began the final bomb run. 'There was no other choice,' said Ashworth. 'We had to get that bomb on Nagasaki. But bombing by radar is notoriously inaccurate.' With seconds to spare, Beahan suddenly spotted a stadium he recognised through a cloud gap. Moments later, he yelled, 'Bombs away' – then corrected himself: 'Bomb away'. 'Thank God,' thought Albury as Sweeney threw Bockscar into the rollercoaster turn. 'But we didn't know where the hell that bomb had gone off,' Ashworth said. In fact, in one of the most bizarre coincidences of the war, Fat Man had detonated almost directly over the factory that once made the torpedoes used in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It killed almost 40,000 people instantly. At least another 40,000 would die later from injuries and radiation sickness. This was Albury's second atomic explosion in three days. The same Technicolor images pepper his interview, the same 'greens, blues, pinks' of the mushroom cloud, 'every colour of the rainbow, always changing and moving up pretty fast. I was just thinking: thank God we dropped it safely.' The jarring adverb hung between us. How do you drop an atom bomb safely? But Ashworth was seeing it for the first time. 'This was new to me … It was like nothing you ever saw.' His language became suddenly reluctant as I pressed him further. 'I try to keep a relatively neutral reaction to these things – it's a personal psychological reaction. This is the job I'm here for, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't have time to reflect: should I be worried about those guys down on the ground?' He didn't, perhaps couldn't, answer his own question. Bockscar barely made it back, landing unannounced at Okinawa, the closest American airbase, with a minute's fuel left in the tanks. There were no crowds to greet them, no generals to pin medals on their chests. Nobody even knew they were coming. There also was no official investigation into their breach of orders. In the end, accuracy was irrelevant. The bomb had done its job. And six days later, on 15 August, battered by both nuclear attacks, as well as a crushing Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Japan finally surrendered. About 200,000 people ultimately died from the two bombings, and possibly many more. The exact figures will never be known. Eighty years afterwards, arguments still rage about whether these annihilations were justified, avoidable or saved more lives than they ended. But what did the crews themselves believe? 'I will not say I was guilty. I will not apologise for it,' Van Kirk told me. 'In fact, under the same conditions I'd do it again, because I truly, honestly believe it saved a lot of lives.' Most of his crewmates clung to this mantra with the same granite faith. Ashworth, who died in 2005 aged 93, always remained proud of his participation in what he called 'a major contribution to the war'. Agnew, who later became a director of Los Alamos, held the same view until his death in 2013 at 92. 'We had to drop it,' he explained. 'The Japanese began this war. If there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima would never have happened.' Tibbets went several leagues further. In 1976 he caused an international incident when he simulated the nuclear attack, flying a B-29 in a Texas airshow, complete with a mushroom-shaped explosion. He said he'd 'never lost a night's sleep over the fact that I commanded the bombing'. But there are occasional peepholes into troubled consciences. 'You don't brag about wiping out 60‑70,000,' admitted Robert Shumard, a flight engineer on Enola Gay, who died in 1967. And Caron, its tail gunner, confessed to 'a partial feeling of guilt' when he saw photos of burned children from Hiroshima. 'I wish I hadn't seen them,' he added. Jeppson, who died in 2010, once suggested the bomb might have been demonstrated 'without the need for destroying a city'. He personally wrote to me of his 'sorrow' at Hiroshima's 'great tragedy'. And then there was this unexpected postscript. At the end of our interview, Albury told me how he had returned to Nagasaki – barely three weeks after bombing it. Tibbets had decided to fly to Japan with some of his team on the strangest of sightseeing trips. They wanted to visit Hiroshima but the airfield there was badly damaged, so they landed at Nagasaki instead. Van Kirk was also on that trip. 'We arrived two or three days before any American troops,' Van Kirk told me. 'There were maybe 20 Americans in the whole city. Nobody knew who we were. We didn't put a sign on ourselves. It was eerie. Very eerie.' They drove into the city. 'There's all this damage you see from just one bomb. I was amazed,' said Van Kirk. 'It scares the hell out of you.' 'We took pictures,' said Albury. 'The people didn't look very happy, I can tell you.' In the ruins, he saw 'a shadow on the wall, where somebody was probably walking by when the bomb went off'. There was no trace of the body. The thousands-of-degrees heat from the bomb had simply vaporised it. Then, in a hospital, he saw the dead and dying, 'some of the people laying out on the ground outside. It was the only place I saw bodies. They were treating some of the people on the lower floors.' He suddenly stopped. 'It was devastation,' he said finally. 'I can't go back there. I don't dwell on this too much. It's been almost 60 years.' There was a long silence. We ended the interview there and I thanked him. But it seemed his mind was still in that hospital. Then he said, very quietly: 'Never again.' Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker is published by William Collins.
