History blog: World War 2- The Atomic Bomb

At 5:29:45 (Mountain War Time) on July 16, 1945, in a white blaze that stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the still-dark skies, "The Gadget" ushered in the Atomic Age. The light of the explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at 360 feet per second, reddening and pulsing as it cooled. The characteristic mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor materialized at 30,000 feet. Beneath the cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade green radioactive glass created by the heat of the reaction.
The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would swear that the sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishing is that a blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away.
On August 2, 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify uranium-235, which could be used to build an atomic bomb.
At the time, uranium-235 was very hard to extract. In fact, the ratio of conversion from uranium ore to uranium metal is 500:1. Compounding this, the one part of uranium that is finally refined from the ore is over 99% uranium-238, which is practically useless for an atomic bomb. To make the task even more difficult, the useful U-235 and nearly useless U-238 are isotopes, nearly identical in their chemical makeup. No ordinary chemical extraction method could separate them; only mechanical methods could work.

Michiko Benevedes, who survived the Nagasaki bombing at age 13, talked about her experiences. “I’m not supposed to be here … I was buried under the house. Lucky I didn’t stay outside. Otherwise I’m burned like my cousin and die … I fainted … I don’t know how long … All of a sudden I woke up … I smell smoke because house is burning. I start screaming, ‘Mother, help me! I’m here!’ ”

Despite being injured, her mother, “a skinny lady,” was able to move the wreckage and dig her out, Benevedes said. “Incredible, the power she had.”

The family took shelter in a cave, where her cousin, who had been burned beyond recognition, died after taking a sip of water. Many survivors have told stories of burn victims who begged for water, only to die the moment they were given some; it was apparently too much of a shock to their systems.

“We have to sleep in the cave, same place with dead people,” Benevedes said.

The family sought shelter at her grandmother’s house in the Goto Islands, a three-hour boat trip from Nagasaki. “On the way … my mother died. Just drink spring water. She said, ‘Oh, delicious.’ That’s the last word. She finally found peace that day.”

Shortly thereafter, Benevedes showed symptoms of radiation sickness. Her hair fell out, she was vomiting blood, and there were purple spots all over her body. When she was taken the hospital, “doctor says, ‘Give up. We cannot save you. We have no medicine to cure.’ ”

She lived through it, but within one month she had lost six family members, including her father and a sister. One sister survived, “but she was handicapped for all her life.”

Benevedes, who later married an American and moved to the U.S., added, “I don’t have children. I cannot give birth to children. (It was a) defect from when I was 13 … from the atomic bomb. Doctor told me, ‘You cannot have no children.’ … I don’t have nobody now, but I keep going.”

Below are images of the victims of the Hiroshima bombing;