ABSTRACT
At 02:45 hours on the sixth of August 1945 three combat planes, a bomber and two escorts took off from Tinian Atoll in the South Pacific, six and a half hours flying time from the main Japanese islands. They reached the main island at approximately eight a.m. local time and while the two escorts dropped back, the lead plane, a B-29, the Enola Gay (named after the pilot’s mother Enola Gay Haggard) went on by itself. At 08:16:02 the payload exploded at just about nineteen hundred feet above the Shima Hospital in Hiroshima. It was a uranium bomb, ‘little boy,’ with an equivalent yield of approximately twelve thousand five hundred tons of TNT. The population of the city at the time was between two hundred and eighty and two hundred and ninety thousand civilians and some forty three thousand military personnel. Seventy eight thousand people were killed at once by blast and fire; thirty seven thousand were subsequently missing. By the end of 1945 a total of one hundred and forty thousand were dead and at the end of a five year period, some two hundred thousand deaths were directly attributable to the bombing. As an analyst of the United States Army Institute of Pathology put it ‘little boy’ produced casualties including dead six thousand five hundred times more efficiently than ordinary high explosive bombs. The press release from the White House in Washington, at mid-day August 6, 1945 (local time) called the bombing “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”
