Fat Man and Little Boy, 75 Years Later: How Destruction Was Built and the World Was Changed Forever
Steve Leonard | August 6, 2020
Chris Wallace with Mitch Weiss, Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days that Changed the World (Avid Reader Press, 2020)
At 4:05 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, 1945, President Harry S. Truman received the formal surrender of Japan, thus ending the Second World War. “I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration,†Truman said to reporters that evening, “which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.†The news sparked jubilation, but the cost of victory was enormous. America had lost 405,799 dead and 670,864 wounded, but in global terms the sacrifice was even more unthinkable—seventy-two million dead, including forty-seven million civilians. Bringing an end to the slaughter meant more slaughter, on a scale and in a manner never before seen. First Hiroshima, then three days later, Nagasaki. The world would never be the same.
The story of Fat Man and Little Boy isn’t new. Those names have long been burned into the historical conscience of the world. Combined, the two atomic bombs caused as many as 220,000 deaths and most certainly brought a climactic end to a bloody war. In the seventy-five years since, their use has been questioned, debated, and rebuked. The people involved in their development and employment have been interviewed and studied in depth, their lives documented, and their legacies cast in concrete. The events themselves have been memorialized, with monuments marking ground zero in both cities.
https://mwi.usma.edu/fat-man-and-little-boy-75-years-later-how-destruction-was-built-and-the-world-was-changed-forever/
