October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: On the brink of World War III

                On 14 October 1962, the United States government found that the Soviet military was installing offensive ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba, less than 100 miles from the shores of Florida. Secret U-2 flights by the CIA revealed the covert introduction of nuclear weapons within striking distance of many of the major cities in the US.

                                             

                When interviewed by Michael Charlton of BBC London in 1985, and asked `why Chairman Khrushchev had challenged President Kennedy with nuclear weapons on America’s doorstep in Cuba, Dean Rusk (US Secretary of State 1961-69) said:

                “I don’t believe that we ever knew with precision just why Mr Khruschev decided to put the missiles in Cuba, or why he thought that he could do so without a very strong American reaction. It may be that he made the judgment that, since President Kennedy had not followed up the Bay of Pigs (the failed invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro in April 1961) with American forces, we would not attach much importance to Cuba. It may be that the advantages to him of getting a hundred of these missiles in Cuba would be so great that it would be worth taking a chance if there were only a twenty per cent chance of success.

                 “Whatever the reasons, we felt that the missiles in Cuba from a military point of view would make it possible for them to knock out our Strategic Air Command bases with almost no advance warning.

                  “From a political point of view, the effects in the Western hemisphere and in NATO would be devastating. So that produced an extraordinarily dangerous crisis.”

                   In a short reflective note on averting the Apocalypse on the afternoon of 27 October (published in the 80^th anniversary issue of TIME, March 31, 2003), Robert McNamara (US Secretary of Defense 1961-68) recalls: “…Fidel Castro had already recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that nuclear weapons be used if the U.S. invaded (Cuba). That’s how close we came. Events were slipping out of control (at 4 p.m. that afternoon the Joint Chiefs recommended to President Kennedy that the US attack within 36 hours and destroy the Soviet missiles for which according to the CIA, the nuclear warheads had not been delivered)…”

                    McNamara wrote that the US did not learn until 30 years later (30 years after the confrontation that had brought the US and the Soviet Union to the edge of a nuclear conflict, and the world to the brink of World War III) that “the Soviets already had 162 (nuclear) warheads in Cuba…” The SS-4 missiles each carried a 1 MT (one megaton) warhead, and Washington was within their deadly range.

                    Why then did Khrushchev blink?

                     McNamara told Charlton in 1985: “It was our tremendous conventional power in the region (backed up by “tremendous US strategic nuclear superiority”) which forced the Soviets to take those missiles out (of Cuba)…”

                      According to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a presidential aide and policy adviser, President Kennedy prepared for all options to counter the Soviet attempt to alter the balance of power and to test the will of the United States. American military forces were fully mobilized. A worldwide alert was ordered and aircraft readied to attack Cuba.  Troops were deployed for an invasion if necessary, while an amphibious landing force of 40,000 marines and 180 ships moved into positions in the Caribbean. Nuclear weapons were loaded in strategic bombers, kept constantly in the air ready to head for Moscow and other key targets in the Soviet Union.

                                                    

                       According to nuclear historian Richard Rhodes, the Strategic Air Command put 7,000 megatons aloft and tried to provoke a Soviet alert that would justify a US preemptive first strike.

                       Curtis Le May, USAF Chief of Staff, challenged Kennedy to invade Cuba. Kennedy cautiously, and wisely, refused. “Not until 1989 did the Soviets reveal that there were two dozen nuclear warheads on hand in Cuba during the crisis; invasion would have started nuclear war,” Rhodes has recorded.

                         “For some dramatic weeks the world feared an imminent nuclear war between the two superpowers,” Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s former Minister of Disarmament wrote in 1976. “Khrushchev backed down, the missiles were withdrawn (from Cuba)…”

                         In 1985 Rusk elaborated for Charlton: “I think he (Khrushchev) recognized that the United States had overwhelming conventional superiority in the vicinity of Cuba (our state of Florida was about to sink under the sea with the weight of military power we assembled there), and that his only response would almost have to be in the nuclear field. We did not believe that Chairman Khrushchev would launch a nuclear strike because of Cuba, but we could not know it for certain. So we had to take that into account . But, fortunately, Mr Khrushchev kept his wits about him and did not allow that matter to escalate into general war…”

                         When asked by Charlton whether Rusk subsequently came to the view that the Soviets had attributed their failure in Cuba not just to the reality of America’s conventional superiority, but, also, in the end, to their own nuclear inferiority, Rusk answered: “We had some reason to believe, afterwards, that the Soviets thought we had counted missiles at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, we had not. Apparently they thought so, because shortly after that crisis a high Russian official (Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetzov) said to Mr John J. McCloy (an American negotiator) in New York, ‘Well, Mr McCloy, you got away with it this time. You’ll never get away with it again!’

                 “If you take into account the lead time required for making decisions and doing all the preparatory work and so forth, much of their further deployment of nuclear weapons in later years undoubtedly came from decisions made shortly after the Cuban missile crisis.”

                   The Soviets were to increase tenfold their nuclear weapons within the next couple of decades. The Soviet Union reached nuclear parity with the US by 1978, and shortly afterwards forged further ahead.

                   Harold Brown (US Defense Secretary 1977-81) said: “When we build, they build – and when we don’t build, they build…”

                  Jimmy Carter (US President 1977-81) said to Charlton in 1985: “One interpretation to be placed on it is that the Soviets were so far behind in nuclear weaponry, and they were deeply embarrassed by the Cuban missile crisis when they were branded as inferior to us in nuclear capability… So I think they proceeded aggressively to make sure that they were at least equal to us…”

Joe One’ sparks the nuclear arms race

Standfirst. Joseph Stalin lost his temper when he was told that the US had dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. He was very angry because he didn’t have the bomb. On 7 August 1945, he appointed Lavrenti Beria, the chief of Soviet secret police and wartime deputy premier, to head his A-bomb project. This crash programme led to the explosion of ‘Joe One’ (Stalin’s first A-bomb named after him) in the early morning of 29 August 1949 (Monday, year of the Ox).

                    “No one had expected a Soviet bomb so soon,” said Stanislaw Ulam, Polish émigré mathematician at Los Alamos. “it was quite a successful shot and it really shocked people.”

                    Harry Truman, who had earlier refused to believe that “those asiatics” could build one, now decided to pursue – “to go to it and fast” – the development of a much more powerful thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, which his scientists called the “Super.” One bomb then led to another. Within a decade, the US had more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union over 1,000 of them

                    Joe One broke the American four-year monopoly of atomic firepower. Slightly more than a month later, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Peking on 1 October 1949, sealing the Communist victory in mainland China.

                     Following the North Korean invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950, Truman adopted the NSC (National Security Council) 68 – America’s official statement on its Cold War strategy of containing Soviet power and the spread of Communism while continuing to consolidate American military strength – always viewed by the hawks in Washington to be woefully inadequate. To quote Henry Kissinger, the American guru on the global balance of power, commenting on the NSC 68 document at the time of its inception: “…American strength was, for a brief moment, unprecedentedly supreme, despite the fact that America had convinced itself that it was relatively weak militarily…”

                     On 1 November 1952 the US tested the world’s first thermonuclear bomb, and Mike exploded with a force of 10.4 megatons, one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The explosion vapourised the tiny island of Elugelab, and left behind a crater two hundred feet deep and more than one mile across.

                     The staged, radiation-imploded hydrogen bomb was co-invented by S. Ulam and Edward Teller, Hungarian-born theoretical physicist as well as a superhawk in the scientific community.

                     Nuclear historian Richard Rhodes has written that the American first staged thermonuclear Mike ”would change the course of history – but not in the direction of decisive US advantage that the H-bomb enthusiasts had fantasized.”

                

                             The Soviet Union had started work on the thermonuclear in 1946, even before the scientist spy Klaus Fuchs had passed information on the concept of the American superbomb to Soviet intelligence. A member of the British scientific team attached to the Manhattan project in Los Alamos, Fuchs had attended the secret conference held in mid-April 1946 to review the wartime work (begun in 1942) on the theoretical development of the thermonuclear bomb. In May the group of American scientists strongly in favour of the H-bomb reported that “a super bomb can be constructed and will work…” They also called for a proof of the pudding “by a test of the completely assembled super-bomb” (Mike successfully tested on 1 November 1952).

                              Stalin’s ambition to have the H-bomb as well had subsequently been rudely aroused by the nuclear threat in the 1948 Berlin crisis, the first major confrontation between East and West in the burgeoning Cold War. At that time only the US had atomic weapons, and in early May 1948 the US Air Force had planned to use 50 A-bombs (the entire American stockpile that spring) and to drop all of them on 20 Soviet cities. Truman, however, was reported to be extremely wary: “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to…”

                              Although the Soviet Union responded promptly by staging its own thermonuclear debut on 12 August 1953 (about ten and half months after Mike 1), Joe 4 had a yield of 400 kilotons – less than half a megaton, and was considered to be a boosted fission bomb, not quite a fusion bomb in the megaton category – not yet in the top class of a Super.

                              Nevertheless, I.V. Kurchatov, nuclear physicist and scientific director of the Soviet nuclear project (1943-60) promptly thanked and hailed A.D. Sakharov, theoretical physicist, as “the saviour of Russia.”

                              On 22 November 1955, three years after Mike, the SU had finally made it by testing a 1.6 MT H-bomb – co-invented by Sakharov and fellow theoretical physicist Y.B. Zeldovich. Their first fully-fledged H-bomb was technologically a younger cousin of the American Mike.

                              In 1953 the US had more than 1,400 nuclear weapons when the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear device Joe 4 on August. The Soviets had over 100 – only about one-tenth of the American atomic stockpile.

                             After touring the US Strategic Air Command bases in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Mississippi Senator John Stennis of the Senate Armed Services Committee reported on October 1953 that “we now have tremendous striking power on our own, which is growing daily, and any nation that commits an atomic attack on us, in my opinion, is committing a suicidal act unless it should wipe us out at the first blow. This is, of course, impossible.

                             “Great as our problems of defense may be, Russia’s problems are far greater and our own striking power is far greater than hers. She is bound to recognize our overwhelming power of retaliation.”

                               His assessment of the preponderance of American nuclear might later proved to be right when the Soviet leader Chairman Khrushchev involuntarily blinked and retreated in the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. For all his brashness and bravado, he had the goodness as well as survival instinct to shy away from a nuclear showdown that could well engulf the whole of humanity in its apocalyptic flames. 

                             “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms?” asked President Ronald Regan when he addressed the British Parliament at Westminster Palace in London on 8 June 1982.   11.01.2014 17:57

         

                              Towards the end of 1953, a group of top intelligence analysts in Washington came to the conclusion that the Soviets were also developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). “This proved to be the military intelligence of the greatest consequence since the end of World War II,” Simon Ramo has written. In 1953 he was asked by the Eisenhower administration to serve as the chief scientist to develop the American ICBM.

                              “It triggered a major shift in the nation’s national-security plans and brought about a crash effort to develop an American ICBM, a project that became the largest technical development ever attempted by the U.S. military, even exceeding in assigned resources the wartime Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb…”

                                Towards the end of 1957, the US tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) known as the Atlas, two months after the launching of Sputnik I on 4 October. This first man-made satellite signaled the capability of Soviet rocketry to deliver nuclear-armed missiles thousands of miles across the oceans to targets deep in the American heartland. Inevitably, it also triggered a space race between the two superpowers, and marked the start of the militarization of the high ground in the ‘coastal seas’ of near-Earth space.     11.01.2014 18:07

                              In 1960 the US started to deploy its first ICBM – the Atlas with a single warhead (2-5 MT), as well as its first SLBM (sea-launched ballistic missile) – the Polaris A-1 with a warhead of one megaton. The very same year, the Soviet Union also started deploying its first ICBM – the SS-6 with a single warhead (4 MT), and its first SLBM as well – the SS-N-4 with a single warhead (1 MT).

                              Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs published in the summer of 1953, Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and wartime director of Los Alamos Laboratory which designed and made the world’s first atomic bombs, lambasted the hawks for demanding ever-larger and more powerful arsenals. He wrote: “The very least we can conclude  (looking ten years ahead) is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic   sense offset their (Soviet) two-thousandth.”

                               At the time of the Cuban missile crisis on October 1962, the US had more than 27,000 nuclear warheads, and the Soviet Union had over 3,000.

                               John Wheeler, another American theoretical physicist and a hawk to boot, didn’t agree with Oppenheimer. Wheeler had in 1939 developed and elucidated fission theory with Niels Bohr, Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, and then directed thermonuclear research at Princeton in 1950-51. Wheeler wrote: “Anybody who says 20,000 weapons are no better than 2,000 ought to read the history of wars.”

                               Was Wheeler right? Don’t forget that Oppenheimer was writing about atomic weapons with their awesome power of mass destruction. Director of the Manhattan project which produced the world’s first atomic bomb, he had opposed the development of the far more powerful and destructive hydrogen bomb – the thermonuclear, Teller’s so-called ‘Super’.            11.01.2014 18:25

                               “But nuclear weapons are not cannonballs; how many times could either country be destroyed?” Richard Rhodes has cogently commented. “And who would venture war in the face of total and redundant destruction?”       9.7.2009 2002 2018 11.01.2014 18:27                    

                                According to nuclear historians Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, more than 128,000 nuclear warheads have been built since 1945, about 98 percent of the total built by the two nuclear superpowers. The US has built about 55 percent of them (over 70,000 nuclear warheads), and the Soviet Union/Russia about 43 percent of the total number (some 50,000 nuclear warheads).

                             “Was that arms race necessary? By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well as weapons, it cost the United States $4 trillion – roughly the US national debt (government debt) in 1994 (about US$10 trillion in 2009). Soviet costs were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that triggered the USSR’s collapse,” nuclear historian extraordinary Richard Rhodes wrote in January 1995.

                               “Cold warriors have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and educational neglect.

                             “The potlatch theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers took of omnicidal war…” 

                             In a warning message written in 1981 calling for a new sense of responsibility for global survival, Aurelio Peccei, the eminent president of the Club of Rome, wrote with philosophical calm and hard-headed acuity:

                              “In the military sphere, we have the power to unleash apocalyptic forces, but we must only hope that we are never forced to start using them, because we would not be able to stop.

                               “Indeed, while we have acquired the ultimate power to destroy ourselves with weapons of ultramodern technology, we still reason with a pre-technological mentality. We have remained at a tribal and barbaric level in many of our concepts.

                               “Face to face with new realities, we find ourselves in such a frightening state of mental confusion that we run the risk, before we know it, of being crushed beneath the weight of our stockpiled weapons, or annihilated in a nuclear holocaust launched by accident, outside of all projected scenarios…”

DAWN OF THE NUCLEAR AGE

Standfirst.  After the discovery of fission in late 1938, the nuclear scientists attained their breakthrough in the crucial process of initiating and sustaining a chain reaction early December 1942 at the world’s first nuclear reactor in the University of Chicago. If fission was the original nuclear seeding, the chain reaction was its conception, and the successful explosion of the world’s first nuclear device in mid-July 1945 marked the birth of a new era in human history. At 0529.45 hours, a blinding flash of overwhelming white light that filled the sky, then a powerful blast wave that sounded like bouncing thunder, signaled its fateful arrival.

                       By the early spring of 1941, two young and highly talented scientists working together at Birmingham University in England had calculated the critical mass of uranium required to make a bomb. They had also found that it was possible to produce enough uranium 235 to make a truly explosive chain reaction to fire an atomic bomb. Recalling his work with Rudolf Peierls, Otto Hahn wrote: “…At that point we stared at each other and realized that an atomic bomb might after all be possible.”

                        Their findings were subsequently examined by a committee of scientists, known as the MAUD Committee. The scientific experts reported on July 1941 their conclusion that “the scheme for a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the war (World War II having started in Europe with the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939). They also recommended that the highest priority be given to continue the work “to obtain the weapon in the shortest time possible…”

                         On 9 October 1941, Vannevar Bush, director of the newly-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) personally took the MAUD report to President Roosevelt.

                         “Roosevelt had instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself,” historian Richard Rhodes has commented.

                          “The United States was not yet committed to building an atomic bomb. But it was committed to exploring thoroughly whether or not an atomic bomb could be built. On man, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that commitment – secretly, without consulting Congress or courts. It seemed to be a military decision and he was Commander in Chief.”

                           The eventual decision to develop the A-bomb, as well as American participation in World War II, was triggered shortly after the Japanese bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941.

                            On 19 January 1942, FDR signed his “OK” in a brief and pointedly crisp note to Bush, handwritten on White House stationery and penned in black ink with a broad-nibbed instrument.   

                 In mid-1942 the US launched an all-out programme to develop the 

A-bomb. Although further experimental work was needed to establish the chain reaction process for a very powerful bomb, the truly formidable task was to build very large plants to separate uranium and produce plutonium as the active materials for bomb-making. The US Army Corps, under General Leslie Groves, was in charge of this huge secret undertaking, codenamed “Manhattan Project.” 

                              Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and regarded as a scientific genius, directed the Los Alamos laboratory responsible for both the experimental work and development of the bomb. The project involved some of the best scientists and engineers in the world and  a workforce of over 100,000. The Manhattan project took nearly three years of highly intensive work to complete, and cost a bomb – US$2 billion.

                               The experimental breakthrough came on the afternoon of 2 December 1942 when Enrico Fermi, Italian theoretical and experimental physicist as well as Nobel laureate, successfully set the pile of uranium fuel on a self-sustaining chain reaction. The pile had gone critical for 4.5 minutes before he gave the instruction for it to be stopped.

                                Fermi showed that he could control the nuclear fission and its chain reaction. According to one report, half of Chicago could be destroyed in a nuclear explosion if this experiment in the University of Chicago should go wrong.

                                Arthur Compton, experimental physicist, Nobel laureate and director of Metallurgical Laboratory of University of Chicago, was standing next to Fermi when the Italian scientist raised his hand and said: “The pile has gone critical!”

                                Slightly over a year and half earlier on 17 May 1941, Compton had reported that the chain reaction, if produced and controlled, “may rapidly become a determining factor in warfare….” And he added: “That nation which first produces and controls the process will have an advantage which will grow as its applications multiply.” That is, with the making of more and more nuclear weapons.

                                 On 12 April 1945, President Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 63. Harry Truman, his successor, had no knowledge of the bomb project before becoming president.

                                  On 25 April, Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, briefed Truman and started by reading from a memorandum:  “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city…”

                                     Then the distinguished 77-year-old Stimson tried to impress his new boss, saying “The world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”

                                     According to Truman, he had been also briefed by James Byrnes, who had been quite close to FDR, and who became the new Secretary of State on 3 July. In his memoirs, Truman wrote: “Byrnes had already told me that the weapon might be so powerful as to be capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale…” Byrnes, described as the politician’s politician, subsequently influenced and supported the decision of Truman, described as the man of the people, to use the new weapon of mass destruction on innocent people in two Japanese cities.

                                     Following the fall of Berlin on 30 April 1945 and Hitler’s suicide, Germany surrendered unconditionally on 9 May 1945. World War II had ended in Europe, but not yet in Asia.

                                     In the early morning of 16 July 1945, the US tested its first plutonium bomb at a site called Trinity in the desert near Alamogordo in New Mexico. The “Trinity” bomb exploded with a force equivalent to 20,000 tons (20 KT) of TNT, all of this violent energy released in a few millionths of a second. The steel tower which was used to mount the bomb was completely vapourised.

                                    “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark,” Truman noted in his diary. (About four decades later at the height of the Cold War, President Reagan believed in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon (the battlefield of the Old Testament in North Palestine) – a divine message of future nuclear war, a nuclear Armageddon.)

                                      “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now (post-Trinity) and August 10^th,” Truman wrote. “I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capital (Kyoto) or the new (Tokyo).

                                        “He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender (unconditionally) and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” 

1279 words 15.6.2009 0927 16.08.2014 03:53 21.08.2014 07:55

HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI NUKED: CITIES OF THE DEAD

Standfirst. On 6 August 1945, a uranium bomb (“Little Boy”) of about 15 kilotons (15,000 tons) devastated Hiroshima, the port city and industrial centre on the main Honshu island in SW Japan. On 9 August, a plutonium bomb of about 20 KT destroyed the shipbuilding city of Nagasaki on Kyushu island to the very south. On Ground Zero (directly below the centre of nuclear explosion), thousands of people were instantly killed – vapourised in the blinding flash of heat and thermal radiation.

                     After the nuking of Hiroshima, the Soviet dictator Stalin also wanted to have the atomic bombs urgently. In 1945 only the United States had the A-bombs – only a handful of them. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the US had about 27,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union about 3,000 – each of them many times more powerful than the first-generation nukes.

                      The first two shots of nuclear firepower in World War II unfolded “the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind” (to quote the Japanese study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

                       When “Little Boy” exploded at 8.15:17 on the morning of 6 August 1945 about 1,800 feet directly over the heart of Hiroshima, the city had more than 280,000 civilians (about 100,000 having evacuated earlier) and about 43,000 soldiers. According to official statistics, 70,000 died in August (most of them on the day of the bombing), not counting those missing. There were 130,000 wounded, 43,000 of them severely. A total of 140,000 died by the end of 1945, and the number of the dead rose to 200,000 by the end of the fifth year.

                        Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima, 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. The official Japanese study reported that “the whole city was ruined instantaneously.”

                        On the morning of the day after the atomic holocaust, a German Jesuit priest recalled:

                         “The bright day now reveals the frightful picture which last night’s darkness had partly concealed. Where the city stood, everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of ashes and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned out in the interior remain. The banks of the rivers are covered with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses. 

                          “On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked, burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are still alive. A few have crawled under the burned-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse…”

                          Dr Michihiko Hachiya, director of Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recorded in his diary (published in 1955):

                           “The streets were deserted except for the dead. Some looked as if they had been frozen by death while still in the full action of flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant had flung them to their death from a great height…

                            “Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced concrete… For acres and acres the city was like a desert except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile. I had to revise my meaning of the word destruction or choose some other word to describe what I saw. Devastation may be a better word, but really, I know of no word or words to describe the view…”

                            According to the history professor interviewed by American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, two decades after the atomic bmbing:

                            “I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared…I was shocked by the sight… What I felt then and still feel now I  just can’t explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that -- but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima – was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt…Hiroshima didn’t exist – that was mainly what I saw – Hiroshima just didn’t exist…”

                             In Nagasaki, “Fat Man” exploded with an estimated force of 22 KT about 1,800 feet above the city at 11.02 on 9 August 1945. The surrounding steep hills confined and tempered the impact of the atomic explosion, and protected the city from the full force of the blast, radiant heat, and nuclear radiation.

                            About 40,000 people died within a month of the bombing, and 70,000 by the end of 1945. A total of 140,000 died in the first five years.

                            A Japanese news agency reported:

                            “Nagasaki is now a dead city, all areas have been literally razed to the ground. Only a few buildings are left, standing conspicuously amongst the ashes…” 

                            On 10 August, Strategic Air Force commander Carl Spaatz proposed targeting America’s third atomic bomb on Tokyo (what Truman had ruled out about a month earlier after the Trinity test). Preparations were being made to deliver and drop another plutonium bomb on Japan by mid-August.                        

                     On the morning of 10 August, Truman received Japan’s acknowledged acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration calling for its surrender. The president then gave orders to halt further atomic bombing, but not the detonation of conventional explosives. Henry Wallace, Secretary of Commerce, noted in his diary: “…He (Truman) said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids”…”

                     On 13 August, Truman ordered the Air Force to resume area incendiary attacks. Six thousand tons (6 KT) of high explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese on the eve of Japan’s unconditional surrender on 15 August.

                     Henry Stimson, US Secretary of War, reflected:

                     “The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly spectre of a clash of great land armies (in an invasion of Japan)…”

                       “In this last great action of the Second World War we were given the final proof that war is death…”

                        To Winston Churchill. England’s wartime prime minister, it was “a miracle of deliverance” as well as “a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions…”

                         Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff at the White House, described the A-bomb as “this barbarous weapon” and questioned the morality of its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won (morally) by destroying women and children…”

                         On the military significance of the A-bomb, Carson Mark, Canadian theoretical physicist with the Los Alamos laboratory (who subsequently led the theoretical work on America’s first full-fledged hydrogen bomb called Mike I and tested on 1 November 1952) has written:

                         “The toll of death and injury at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – appalling as it was – was not the most meaningful measure of the significance of the new weapon. In the massive fire-bomb raid on Tokyo on March 8 (9 in Japan), 1945, for example, the Japanese suffered more fatalities (over 100,000) than at Hiroshima. But the attack on Tokyo engaged a fleet of many hundreds of bombers (334 B-29s dropping over 2,000 tons of incendiaries) for many hours (a six-hour orgy of intensive bombing). The awesome difference was that damage on this scale could be inflicted by a single bomb carried in a single plane.”

                      Philip Morrison, a nuclear physicist who flew with the “Fat Man” mission to Nagasaki and observed its destructive power from the air, and who subsequently walked through the ruins of Hiroshima, wrote in 1946:

                      “The bomb is a weapon; the most deadly and terrible weapon yet devised. Against any city in the world from New York and London to the hundreds of large towns like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb is a threat. In any of man’s cities a strike from a single atomic bomb will claim some hundred thousand deaths and some square miles of blackened ruin…”

                       And, looking ahead (what could possibly transpire with the development of thousands of nuclear weapons one and half to two decades after Hiroshima), he wrote:

                        “And the bombs, if they come again, will not come in ones or twos, but in hundreds or thousands. Their coming will wreck not cities, but whole nations…”