A COLD WAR

A COLD WAR

By Cameron Reilly & Ray HarrisHistory

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A COLD WAR episodes

June 22, 2018 #85 - The Decision Part 3
* Truman met often with Byrnes in the first few months of his Presidency.
* But there are almost no records or notes of what they discussed.
* And that was apparently Byrnes’ preference.
* He was known as being paranoid about leaks.
* a very devious politician
* Truman referred to him as his “conniving” secretary of state
* Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who liked Byrnes and found him personally charming, nevertheless had no illusions about him: “He was an operator. He was a kind of prior Lyndon Johnson.”
* Throughout this period Byrnes spoke with the authority of—and personally represented—the president of the United States on all atomic bomb-related matters in the Interim Committee’s deliberations.
* It is also quite clear that by early July 1945 when he was sworn in as secretary of state, Byrnes was firmly in control of U.S. foreign policy.
* And as we’ve seen before - while Truman seems to have looked up to Byrnes as a mentor, Byrnes privately didn’t like Truman.
* One of Truman’s close friends and advisers, his appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, later said that Byrnes thought Truman was "a nonentity, with no abilities to speak of, no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy, or much else for that matter.”
* Matthew Connelly later described Byrnes without reservation as “a very Machiavellian character,” adding that “I never trusted him.”
* Similarly, Robert G. Nixon—who served as White House correspondent for the International News Service at the time—would later remark that “Byrnes looked down on Truman. He had a superior attitude.… He, in a sense, despised Truman … he looked upon Truman as an accident of history and not a very good accident at that.”
* According to Clark Clifford, Admiral Leahy, who initially was favorably disposed towards Byrnes, came to regard him as a “horse’s ass.”
* Bernard Baruch, the financier who presented Truman’s first nuclear arms control proposal at the United Nations in 1946, regarded his friend Byrnes as “power-crazy—that he wants to decide everything himself.…”
* Averell Harriman recalled that after Potsdam, “I was through with Jimmy Byrnes … I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.”
* Almost immediately after taking office, Truman demonstrated his great trust in Byrnes by informing him of his intention to appoint him secretary of state sometime that summer—as, of course, he did. It should be kept in mind that the position of secretary of state carried far more weight in 1945 than it does today.
* At the time, before the post of national security adviser was established, it was the premier Cabinet office.
* Under then-existing law—with no vice president in office once Truman succeeded Roosevelt—the secretary of state was next in line of succession.
* If anything happened to Truman, Byrnes would become president.
* And of course, everyone knew that Byrnes *should* have been President.
* He was going to be FDR’s Veep in the 1944 election - up until the very last moment, when Truman was picked instead.
* Byrnes also appears to be a logical candidate for the adviser who convinced Truman to postpone meeting Stalin until the atomic bomb had been tested—one of the truly fundamental strategic decisions of the spring and summer.
* Although our information is even more sketchy in this area, we have seen that his mandate—and his alone—included both atomic and diplomatic issues.
* Moreover, all the other top advisers directly involved in diplomacy were pressing for an early meeting with Stalin, Thus, either Truman made the decision against their advice on his own or some other highly placed adviser concerned with the atomic bomb convinced him the new weapon would be critical in his approach to Stalin.
* So everything points to Byrnes as the man who made the decision to bomb Japan.
* Not to win the war - but as a message to

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58 min
June 14, 2018 #84 - The Decision Part 2
* By June 18 events had progressed to the point where Admiral Leahy was able to note privately in his personal diary:
* It is my opinion that at the present time a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against any future trans-Pacific aggression.
* This is two months before Hiroshima.
* But also on June 18, when Grew spoke to Truman about brokering peace with the Japanese, The President shut him down.
* He said he wanted to hold off until the Potsdam meeting.
* Which, as we know, he was putting off to coincide with the Trinity test.
* About 5000 American troops died between May and August. (page 22)
* A total of 24,000 casualties during that period.
* The Battle of Okinawa 1 April until 22 June, 1945.
* If saving American lives was the objective, why not talk peace with the Japanese during this period?
* Unfortunately we don’t know much about what Truman was thinking during these months.
* Contemporaneous documents concerning Truman’s attitude at this time are scarce.
* We have far fewer hard facts illuminating his calculations than we have concerning the thinking of Marshall, Stimson, and Grew.
* Truman did give a public speech in June where he said his main priority was minimizing the loss of American lives.
* And yet the invasion was set for November 1, 1945.
* Which everyone knew was going to be a bloodbath.
* Admiral Leahy said that he could not agree with those who said to him that unless we obtain the unconditional surrender of the Japanese that we will have lost the war.
* Which suggests at least some people were worried about the optics.
* McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, claims that at the June 18 meeting, he strongly advocated to Truman that they should spell out terms of surrender to the Japanese, assuring them that they could keep the Emperor,
* The President said that is just what I have been thinking about. “Why don’t you draft something and take it to Jimmy Byrnes.”
* Byrnes, as we know, was acting as a special advisor to Truman and was soon to become the Sec of State.
* He also thought HE should be the President.
* And he disliked Truman.
* When McCloy took his proposal to Byrnes, it was shot down because Byrnes thought it would be considered a weakness on America's part to conclude the war without a total surrender.
* So twice on June 18, Truman told people that he agreed with the idea of offering the Japs a deal.
* But then Byrnes said no.
* And it never happened.
* Like the official Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, the internal War Department report concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war.
* Its assessment of the impact of the Soviet declaration of war paralleled that of American historian Ernest May: It was a “disastrous event which the Japanese leaders regarded as utter catastrophe and which they had energetically sought to prevent at any cost.…”
* Had the atomic bomb not been available or not been used, the study concluded, it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.…”
* The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies.
* The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext, and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable.
* And, as we know, American leaders had been trying to get the Soviets to engage with the Japanese since a few days after Pearl Harbour.
* General George C. Marshall, June 18, 1945: "An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact of Russian entry on

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1 hr 8 min
June 08, 2018 #83 - The Decision Part 1
* On 15 August 1945, about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, Truman tasked the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to conduct a study on the effectiveness of the aerial attacks on Japan, both conventional and atomic.
* Did they have an effect on the Japanese surrender?
* The Survey team included hundreds of American officers, civilians and enlisted men, based in Japan.
* They interviewed 700 Jap military, government and industrial officials.
* And had access to hundreds of Japanese wartime documents.
* Less than a year later they published their conclusion - that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without it, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion.
* “It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor."
* It goes on to say that there wasn’t a unanimous agreement amongst the military, especially the War Minister, and the Army and Naval Chiefs of Staff.
* They wanted to fight on.
* But that’s why the Emperor was brought into the discussions to accept the Potsdam terms.
* According to the report:
* “So long as the Emperor openly supported such a policy and could be presented to the country as doing so, the military, which had fostered and lived on the idea of complete obedience to the Emperor, could not effectively rebel."
* The report says the only thing the atomic bombings achieved was that they sped up the process.
* The War Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff were looking for a way to surrender without losing face.
* And the nuclear attacks gave them that.
* Because the military were able to conclude that there was no way of defending the home islands against further atomic attacks.
* So they could surrender without losing face.
* But the report strongly suggests the Japanese would have surrendered anyway and probably pretty quickly after the Emperor got involved.
* They had been trying to get the Soviets to intercede with the United States.
* The Soviets, as we know, kept stalling until the Potsdam Declaration on 25 July.
* Then they declared war on 9 August.
* The made the decision to surrender on August 10 and they publicly accepted the Potsdam terms on August 15.
* But in the 73 years that have passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified—and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.
* 56% of Americans according to a poll in 2015.
* Which is down from 85% in 1945.
* But it’s a lot considering that the Strategic Bombing Survey concluded as early as 1946 that it wasn’t necessary to get Japan to surrender.
* And considering senior American military leaders from Admiral Leahy to MacArthur, Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson all said they didn’t think the bombing was necessary.
* So if it wasn’t necessary, why did it happen?
* WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
* In 1990, J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:
* The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.
* But does this mean dropping the bombs was wrong?
* Not necessarily.
* We obviously can’t put ourselves in the shoes of American leaders in 1945.
* But I think there are two questions we CAN ask.
* 1. Did American military and government leaders in 1945 think they had to use, or should use, th

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1 hr 3 min
May 29, 2018 #82 - Alex Wellerstein
Our guest today is Alex Wellerstein, a self-described "historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons". He's a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He blogs here and is on Twitter here. He is also the creator of the NUKEMAP. Alex joined us to talk about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Did Truman know Hiroshima contained civilians? Did he know the military were going to bomb Nagasaki a few days later? How much deliberation went into the question of whether or not the bomb should be used? And was it necessary to end the war with Japan? These questions and more on this episode.
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1 hr 2 min
May 18, 2018#81 - GROUND ZERO
Kistiakowsky and his team armed the device shortly after 5am and retreated to the control bunker.
Their final task was to switch on a string of lights on the ground that would serve as an ‘aiming point’.
The air force wanted to know what the effect of the blast would be on a B-29 30,000 feet up and some miles away.
In case of an accident, Groves left Oppenheimer in the control bunkers and joined Bush and Conant at base camp another 5 miles to the south.
There they picked up the countdown by FM radio.
Those in shelters heard it over the PA system.
Some of the scientists were with a party of onlookers 20 miles away on Compania Hill.
Teller said, ‘We were told to lie down on the sand, turn our faces away from the blast and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.’
However, though it was not yet dawn, they smothered their faces with suntan lotion.
Teller himself wore a pair of dark glasses and heavy gloves and pressed a welder’s glass to his face.
At precisely 5:30am on Monday, 16 July 1945, the atomic age began.
As the firing circuit closed, 32 detonators fired around the outside of the high-explosive shell.
The shockwave produced hit the tamper, squeezing and liquefying it.
The plutonium sphere inside shrank to the size of an eyeball.
In the centre, polonium alphas kicked neutrons from the beryllium – one, two, maybe as many as nine of them.
This was enough to start a chain reaction in the plutonium.
It went through 80 generations in millionths of a second, generating millions of degrees of heat and millions of pounds of pressure.
The X-rays given off super-heated the air, generating another shock wave.
The explosion vaporized the tower and turned the asphalt around the base into green sand.
The bomb released approximately 18.6 kilotons of power, and the New Mexico sky was suddenly brighter than many suns.
Some observers suffered temporary blindness even though they looked at the brilliant light through smoked glass.
Here’s an eyewitness account:
Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 Eyewitness Report by Victor Weisskopf, an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist, one of the giants of 20th century physics.
He died in 2002, aged 93.
You have asked me to submit to you an eye witness account of the explosion. I was located at base camp and watched the phenomenon from a little ridge about 100 yds. east of the water tower. Groups of observers had arranged small wooden sticks at a distance of 10 yds. from our observation place in order to estimate the size of the explosion. They were arranged so that their distance corresponded to 1000 ft. at zero point. I looked at the explosion through the dark glass, but I have provided for an indirect view of the landscape in order to see the deflected light.
When the explosion went off, I was first dazzled by this indirect light which was much stronger than I anticipated, and I was not able to concentrate upon the view through the dark glass and missed, therefore, the first stages of the explosion. When I was able to look through the dark glass I saw flames and smoke of an estimated diameter of 1000 yds. which was slowly decreasing in brightness seemingly due to more smoke development. At the same time it rose slightly above the surface. After about three seconds its intensity was so low I could remove the dark glass and look at it directly. Then I saw a reddish glowing smoke ball rising with a thick stem of dark brown color. This smoke ball was surrounded by a blue glow which clearly indicated a strong radioactivity and was certainly due to the gamma rays emitted by the cloud into the surrounding air. At that moment the cloud had about 1000 billions of curies of radioactivity whose radiation must have produced the blue glow.
The first

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1 hr 6 min
May 11, 2018#80 - The Plug & The Hole
Back to Alamogordo.
The army leased a ranch in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto site and converted it into a military police station and field laboratory.
They thoroughly vacuumed it to make a makeshift clean room and sealed its windows with black electrical tape.
Just like Ray’s infamous kill room.
Nearly 2 miles to the northwest, they marked out the spot for Ground Zero.
Three concrete-roofed observation bunkers with bullet-proof glass portholes were dug 10,000 yards north, west and south of Ground Zero.
From there, the test would be controlled and the explosion would be filmed and measured.
Scientists wanted to determine the symmetry of the implosion and the amount of energy released.
They also wanted to get estimates of the damage that the bomb would cause and study the behaviour of the resulting fireball.
The biggest concern was the radioactivity the test device would release.
It was hoped that favourable meteorological conditions would carry the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere.
As they were proposing to do the test in the middle of the thunderstorm season, the army stood ready to evacuate the people in surrounding areas.
Two towers were built.
One was 800 yards south of Ground Zero.
Made of heavy wooden beams, it was 20 feet high, topped with a broad platform like an outdoor dance floor.
One day, the contractors returned to find that it had disappeared.
Harvard physics professor Kenneth T. Bainbridge, recruited from MIT’s radar project, the man in charge of Project Trinity, had loaded the platform with canisters of radioactive waste from Hanford and surrounded it with 100 tons of high explosives.
Before dawn on 7 May, he detonated the largest chemical explosion ever set off to test the instruments and procedures in a practice firing.
The tower at Ground Zero had been prefabricated in steel and was shipped in sections to the Trinity site, where concrete footings had been sunk 20 feet into the rocky desert floor.
The four feet were 35 feet apart and the tower rose 100 feet above the ground.
Near the top was a platform with a removable centre section and corrugated iron sheets on three sides.
The open side faced the camera bunker to the west.
Above the platform was a $20,000 electrically driven heavy-duty winch.
On 12 July, the plutonium core was taken to the test area in an army sedan.
The non-nuclear components of the bomb left for the test site at 12:01 am on Friday the 13th.
The idea was to put a ‘reverse English’ on the ill-luck of that day.
‘reverse English’ - Billiards. a spinning motion imparted to a cue ball in such a manner as to prevent it from moving in a certain direction.
As they rode through Santa Fe in the small hours, the convoy sounded a siren.
At midnight because the army did not want to risk some late-night drunken driver speeding out of a side street into a truck full of high explosives.
Final assembly of "the gadget" - which was its nickname - took place in the ranch house.
Before it began, one of the physcists, Robert Bacher, asked for a receipt from the army.
As Los Alamos was technically part of the University of California, he didn't want the university to be liable for the several million dollars-worth of plutonium they were about to vaporize.
Imagine that conversation - so…. Where’s our plutonium? Ummm we blew it up. You WHAT? That’ll be $2 billion, bucko.
Then the team installed the neutron initiator that would trigger the explosion between the two hemispheres of plutonium.
These were hot to the touch due to the alpha particles they were already giving off.
HOT JAMES BROWN (Bowie FAME riff, Carlos Alomar)
The plutonium ball was then placed inside a cylinder of U-238 tamper.
The core wa

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1 hr
April 27, 2018 #79 - Jeffrey Hogue
Today we have a special guest - Jeff Hogue from the "History of the Cold War" podcast. We invited Jeff on to chat about his thoughts on the bombing of Japan.
HOW TO LISTEN
If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player.
If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll like it before you sign up, you can listen to the first six episodes totally free. You might want to start with Episode 1, unless of course you're an old school George Lucas fan, in which case feel free to start at Episode IV. We don't recommend it though.

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59 min
April 19, 2018 #78 - Alamogordo
On 6 June, Stimson again briefed Truman on S-1.
* The briefing summarized the consensus of the Interim Committee, set up as an advisory group on atomic research.
* It’s job was the advise on the proper use of atomic weapons in wartime and to develop a position for the United States on post-war atomic policy.
* The committee comprised of Bush, Conant, Compton, the Under Secretary of the Navy, The Assistant Secretary of State and the director of the Office of War Mobilization, soon to be Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes.
* Oppenheimer, Fermi, Compton and Lawrence served as a scientific panel, while General Marshall represented the military.
* They had met on 31 May and concluded that the United States should not share its nuclear secrets and should try to retain superiority in nuclear weapons in case international relations deteriorated.
* Most present thought that the US should protect its monopoly for the present, though they realized that the secrets could not be held for long.
* It was only a matter of time before other potentially hostile countries, particularly Russia, would be capable of producing atomic weapons.
* Some thought the Soviets would catch up in 3 or 4 years.
* Groves countered with a twenty-year estimate.
* He was convinced the U.S. Had a stranglehold on the world’ supply of uranium.
* There was also some discussion of free exchange of nuclear research for peaceful purposes and the international inspection system that such an exchange would require.
* Lawrence’s suggestion that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender was discussed over lunch and rejected.
* No one knew whether the bomb would go off.
* If it did not, it would do much to improve Japanese morale.
* If they were warned, the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in populated areas or make an all-out effort to shoot down the plane.
* Besides, the shock value of the new weapon would be lost.
* These reasons and others convinced the group that the bomb should be dropped without warning on a dual target – a munitions factory surrounded by workers’ homes.
* Still no one realized quite how devastating the bomb would be.
* The weirdest thing about the committee meeting?
* There seems to have been no discussion about whether or not they SHOULD use the bomb - only where and when they should use it.
* On 1 June, the committee met with representatives from DuPont, Tennessee Eastman, Westinghouse and Union Carbide to get input from the contractors.
* This further convinced the Interim Committee that the US had a lead of three to ten years on the Soviet Union in making the bomb.
* As a result, in his meeting with the president on 6 June, Stimson told Truman that the Interim Committee recommended keeping S-1 a secret until Japan had been bombed.
* The attack should take place as soon as possible and without warning.
* The president was of course due to meet Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam on 17 July.
* While the British were already on board with the Manhattan Project, Truman and Stimson agreed that the president would stall if asked about atomic weapons by Stalin as it might be possible to gain concessions from Russia later in return for technical information.
* Stimson told Truman that members of the Interim Committee generally held the position that international agreements should be made in which all nuclear research would be made public and a system of inspections would be devised.
* They were even considering domestic legislation to that effect.
* However, if international agreements didn’t get worked out, the US should continue to produce as much fissionable material as possible to maintain its current position of superiority.
* Although the bomb had not yet been tested, a target selection group was set up in late April.

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59 min
April 13, 2018 #77 - Bombing Japan
* Which brings us to April 1945.
* Only weeks before Germany surrendered on May 7, FDR dies.
* And Truman takes over as POTUS.
* He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb.
* He was briefed on it immediately by Sec of War Stimson.
* By the time Truman took office, Japan was near defeat.
* Keep in mind that the bomb was developed primarily to fight the Nazis.
* But now that they are out of the picture, nobody wants a $2 billion white elephant.
* At this stage, American aircraft were attacking Japanese cities at will.
* As we mentioned recently, the B-29 was the world’s first pressurized bomber.
* So it could fly at high altitudes that the few remaining Japanese fighters couldn't reach.
* Although kamikaze pilots did take down quite a few.
* BTW, do you know what the B stands for in B-29?
* Lots of people think it stands for “bomber”.
* But it really secretly stands for the name of the guy who came up with the name of the planes - Barry.
* It’s the Barry-29.
* A single fire-bomb raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over a million.
* On 13 April, the Imperial Army Air Force’s laboratory where early Japanese research on the atomic bomb had been done was hit.
* And that’s something we haven’t talked about - the Japanese attempts to build a bomb.
* In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi released his "atomic physics theory".
* Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created.
* Keep in mind that the West didn’t understand that concept until 1938 when the Germans worked it out.
* Leading Japanese physicist Nishina Yoshio was keen on utilizing nuclear fission as a military weapon, but was also justifiably concerned that other countries like the U.S., were also trying to create a nuclear weapon.
* Before the war, he was apparently friendly with Einstein and Neils Bohr
* Nishina had previously established his own Nuclear Research Laboratory to study high-energy physics in 1931 at RIKEN Institute (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research), which had been established in 1917 in Tokyo to promote basic research.
* BTW, Ricoh, the Japanese camera company, also came out of Riken.
* In 1936 Nishina constructed a 26-inch (660 mm) cyclotron, and a 60-inch (1,500 mm), 220-ton cyclotron in 1937.
* In 1938 he also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.
* After meeting Japanese director of Japan’s Army Aeronautical Department's Technical Research Institute, lieutenant-general Yasuda Takeo (surname first), Nishina told him about the possibility of Japan building its own nuclear weapon’s arsenal.
* In April of 1941, Army Minister and later Prime Mininster Tojo Hideki (yeah, that Tojo) ordered Yasuda to look further into the possibility of Japan being able to create nuclear weapons.
* Yasuda then passed the order down to viscount Ōkōchi Masatoshi director of the RIKEN Institute, who then passed the order down to Nishina.
* By this time, Nishina had over 100 nuclear researchers.
* Japan’s Army and Navy were always in competition with one another, so perhaps it would come as no surprise that the Imperial Japanese Navy's Technology Research Institute had been looking in to the possibility of creating nuclear weapons, too.
* They had been in talks with scientists from the Imperial University in Tokyo, for advice on constructing and possible use of nuclear weapons.
* This resulted in the formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met 10 times between July 1942 and March 1943.
* It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, "it would probably be difficult even for the

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54 min
March 28, 2018#76 - Operation Alsos
Of course, while the bomb was being designed, they had to figure out how they were going to deliver it.
And WHO was going to deliver it.
Way back in March 1944, the US Army Air Force, with William Sterling "Deak” Parsons and his team at Los Alamos, developed two bomb models and began testing them with B-29 bombers.
Thin Man, named for President Roosevelt, was the design carrying the plutonium gun, while Fat Man, named for Winston Churchill, was an implosion prototype.
Emilio Segrè, Italian-American physicist, had designed a lighter, smaller uranium bomb was later dubbed Little Boy, Thin Man’s brother.
Thin Man, the one named for FDR, was eliminated four months later because of the predetonation problem.
Which is ironic, because FDR himself also was eliminated a few months after that.
The problems with figuring out how to create a reliable chain reaction meant the estimates of when a bomb could be delivered that Bush had given the President in 1943 would have to be revised.
The new timetable was presented to Roosevelt’s Army Chief of Staff General Marshall by Groves on 7 August 1944, two months after the Allied landings on Normandy on 6 June.
It said that small implosion weapons using uranium or plutonium would be ready in the second quarter of 1945, if experiments proved satisfactory.
Groves was more confident that a uranium gun bomb could be delivered by 1 August 1945, and another one or two more by the end of that year.
Marshall and Groves acknowledged that German surrender might take place by summer 1945, making it likely that Japan would be the atomic bomb’s first target.
Expenditures on the Manhattan Project had reached $100 million a month by mid-1944.
No one was sure that Groves’ deadline of 1 August 1945 could really be reached.
The Germans were by then in retreat on all fronts and the Japanese were being pushed back in the Pacific
it wasn't certain that a weapon would be ready for use in the war at all.
Meanwhile, just in case a bomb was ready in time, they needed to start working out how they would deliver it.
The US Army Air Force started training in September 1944 at Wendover Field Air Force Base in western Utah
Where Chrissy won at craps when she was 21.
On the border of Nevada and Utah.
Near the Bonneville Salt Flats Raceway, about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City.
BTW, Wendover Air Base is still there today.
It’s a civil air base.
But it’s one of the most intact World War II training airfields.
Numerous films and television shows have been filmed using Wendover Field, including The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), Con Air (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), Independence Day (1996), Hulk (2003) and The Core (2003).
Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets began drilling the 393rd Bombardment Squadron of the 509th Composite Wing in test drops with 5500-pound orange dummy bombs, nicknamed pumpkin bombs, on the Great Salt Lake.
Not to be confused with the pumpkin bombs thrown by the Green Goblin.
These had the same ballistic characteristics as Fat Man.
Tibbets was recognized as the best bomber pilot in the Air Force.
He had led the first B-17 bombing mission from England over occupied Europe.
Then he had flown Eisenhower to his command post in Gibraltar before the Allied landings in northwest Africa and conducted the first bombing raids there afterwards.
More recently, he had been a test pilot for Boeing’s new B-29 Superfortress and worked with the physics department of the University of New Mexico to determine how well the B-29 could defend itself against fighter attack.
BTW - the Superfortress was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion.

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1 hr 1 min

About A COLD WAR

From the publisher's feed

A NSFW, detailed and funny long-form podcast about The Cold War.