The Day of the Bomb by Karl Bruckner

Author:Karl Bruckner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THE High Command in the ancient Castle of Hiroshima was alerted in good time by the observation post on Shikoku of the approach of a four-engined enemy bomber. The authorities did not sound an air raid warning. Work in the armaments factories must not be interrupted because of a single plane.

* * * * *

Colonel Tibbets, captain of the B29, Enola Gay, was flying at 31,600 feet over the centre of the town of Hiroshima. In the hold, the bombardier, Major Ferebee, was busy with the mechanism that was to release the bomb.

Now Ferebee took aim at his objective.

The bomb dropped.

With a diabolical whistling scream, the monster hurtled downwards.

The crew of the Enola Gay pulled dark glasses over the eyepieces in their oxygen masks, as they had been told to do. None of the flyers knew the point of wearing these dark glasses. None of them knew what would happen in the next few minutes. They were merely carrying out strict instructions.

And all of them waited, all of them numb. And they listened, and thought they could hear the whine of the falling bomb. But it was not the whining they could hear, it was the rush of blood which their wildly beating hearts sent pounding through their veins. And all of them, with stony faces, stared blankly into space, motionless, paralysed by the faint inkling of a disaster such as the world had never known.

The watch on Colonel Tibbet’s wrist was unaffected by the violent throbbing of his pulse. Inside it, tiny cogs were turning, each revolution sending one second after another into the past. The hands stood at fourteen minutes, thirty-five seconds past eight o’clock.

On the bomb, an ingenious device released a parachute.

The bomb drifted downwards on its parachute.

The hands on the watch pointed to fourteen minutes and fifty seconds past eight o’clock.

At that moment the bomb was 2,000 feet above the ground.

And when, at fifteen minutes past eight, it had dropped a further 500 feet, a scientific device lit a fuse inside the bomb. Neutrons split the atomic nucleus of the heavy metal, uranium 235, and this splitting continued in a series of unbelievably rapid chain reactions.

In the millionth part of a second, a new sun flamed in the sky, a glaring white light.

A hundred times brighter than the heavenly sun.

And this ball of fire radiated several million degrees of heat on to the city of Hiroshima.

At that moment 86,100 people were burned to death.

At that moment 72,000 people were severely injured.

At that moment 6,820 houses were blown to pieces, and the vacuum thus created sucked them several miles into the air as particles of dust.

At that moment, too, 3,750 buildings collapsed, and the ruins began to burn.

At that one moment deadly neutrons and gamma-rays bombarded the site of the explosion over an area of three-quarters of a mile.

At that moment man, made in God’s image, had used his powers of scientific invention to make his first attempt to destroy himself.

The attempt succeeded.

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