The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb by Dennis D. Wainstock

Author:Dennis D. Wainstock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enigma Books
Published: 2011-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

5.

The Atomic Bombings

Background

On July 14, 1945, a closed black truck, escorted by seven cars filled with heavily armed security agents, left Santa Fe for Albuquerque, New Mexico. Disguised as field artillerymen, Major Robert R. Furman from General Groves’s office and Captain James F. Nolan, a radiologist at the Los Alamos base hospital, were inside the truck guarding a large box, about the size of two orange crates, and a small metal cylinder. Inside these holding devices were the final assembly parts, including the crucial uranium 235, for the atomic bomb.

The motorcade speeded into Albuquerque, where two air force C-54 cargo planes waited for the flight to Hamilton Field outside of San Francisco. After military men lifted the holding devices into one of the planes, the pilots were “flabbergasted” to learn that two C-54s were needed to carry only a few hundred pounds of cargo and in only one of the planes. Groves, however, had insisted on two planes. If the one carrying the uranium 235 crashed, the other would spot and radio the location of the crash site.1

After landing at Hamilton Field, military men took Furman, Nolan, and their cargo to Hunter‘s Point, where they boarded the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis for the trip to Tinian Island in the South Pacific. Because their mission was the “most important assignment of the war,” Oppenheimer had instructed them to keep an eye on their cargo at all times. If torpedoed by the Japanese, the captain was under orders, before rescuing survivors, to have the first motor launch or life raft save the “special cargo.”2 However, the trip was uneventful.

On July 26 the Indianapolis arrived at Tinian, discharged its cargo the same day, and then left for the Philippines. However, for all the precautions taken, the Indianapolis was a poor choice to carry the uranium 235 to Tinian. It had no underwater sound equipment, and its design was so poor that a single torpedo could quickly sink it.3 Four days out to sea, on July 30, a Japanese submarine torpedo sank it with some 900 of its crew.

At Tinian, a small island in the Marianas taken from the Japanese in 1944, the army had built an airfield with four parallel 8,500-foot runways. Far away from the other military personnel, the government had built a small cluster of Quonset huts where the scientists and technicians, led by Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, were assembling the atomic bomb. Most of its parts had arrived by air transport. The Indianapolis had brought the last of the fissionable material needed to complete the assembly. Called Little Boy, the atomic bomb was fourteen feet long, five feet in diameter, and weighed 10,000 pounds. The scientists set it to go off at 1,850 feet above ground. At that moment, a small chunk of uranium 235 would move forward at 5,000 feet per second and strike another piece of uranium. In an instant, a space of time too small to measure, the bomb would explode.4

Once assembled, the scientists concealed Little Boy under canvas, and technicians took it to a loading pit where soldiers kept it under armed guard.

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