Nagasaki

Today (in Japan) is the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The bomb used on Nagasaki was a plutonium implosion bomb - "Fat Man", the bomb my dad worked on at Los Alamos. As a mechanical engineer, and a "snuffy" (low-ranking enlisted man in the Army), his job was to help design and place the high explosive shape charges used to cause the implosion of the plutonium core. He worked on both "Fat Man" and the Trinity bomb.

When I was out in March, helping my sister arrange things as my dad settled into the nursing home, we went through a lot of his stuff and I got a lot of books that he had accumulated about the Bomb. Shortly after we got home, my sister's husband found a letter to my dad written by Oppenheimer thanking my dad for his work on the Bomb. She made copies for me and I made copies which I passed around to my students in my "A-Bomb" course.

An estimated 60,000 Japanese were killed immediately in the Nagasaki bombing, and more died of radiation poisoning in the days following. People still die from the after-effects of the Bomb to this day, and that of course is what distinguishing atomic weapons from conventional weapons (which can have the same or greater initial impact).

As I said in my August 6th post, my dad always felt the Bomb had to be used to end WWII - and I think the evidence supports him on this, though one certainly gets lots of arguments from the other side. I would recommend reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb (pretty technical, but very interesting) and Day One: Before Hiroshima and After to see at least some of the evidence. Emperor Hirohito had to take the unheard of step of directly intervening in the government to get the militarists to stop - and even at that a plot by the Japanese militarists to bomb the ship where the surrender was being signed on Sept. 2, 1945, was foiled at the last minute.

I would also recommend watching the documentary White Light, Black Rain. Let's all hope we can find a way out of this cycle of violence - and soon.