Years ago I read a book by Richard Rhodes called The
Making of the Atomic
Bomb, which remains one of my favorite books of all time. It took a deep historical, and sometimes pop-scientific
look at the people who came up with the most frightening man-made device of all time. It still perplexes me how all of
these great minds, probably some of the greatest brains in the history of mankind, came together to create a device so
deadly that for the first time the total annihilation of mankind was a real possibility.
The first bomb that was intentionally dropped on people detonated over the city of Hiroshima almost 60 years ago.
August 6 is the anniversary. Now, you can debate until you’re blue in the face whether this was a good thing, whether
thousands of American lives were saved by avoiding an invasion of Japan. But you can’t deny the awful devastation
caused by these bombs. It was, literally, the shot heard round the world.
Surely there will be several online packages about the Hiroshima bomb, and I’ll try and post about some of them as I
find them. But here is one that I thought was particularly good because it is so visual.
Time Magazine is running a photo essay about the
August 6 detonation that contains some jarring images. Whle they could have gone ever more gruesome (I’ve seen some
nasty ones), there are still some intense images that show the structural destruction wrought by the bomb, as well as
one particularly gruesome photo of a man burned by the blast. With all the stories about places like North Korea
acquiring nuclear weapons, it is always good to remember what these bombs actually do to human populations.