The Atomic Bazaar

Chapter One THE VANGUARD OF THE POOR Hiroshima was destroyed in a flash by a bomb dropped from a propeller-driven B-29 of the U.S. Army Air Corps, on the warm morning of Monday, August 6, 1945. The bomb was not chemical, as bombs until then had been, but atomic, designed to release the energies that Einstein had described. It was a simple cannon-type device of the sort that today any number of people could build in a garage. It was bulbous and black, about ten feet long, and weighed ninety-seven hundred pounds. It fell nose-down for forty-three seconds and, for maximum effect, never hit the ground. One thousand nine hundred feet above the city it fired a dull gray plug of highly enriched uranium down a steel tube into a receiving lump of the same refined material, creating a combined uranium mass of 133 pounds. In relation to its surface area, that mass was more than enough to achieve "criticality" and allow for an uncontrollable chain of fission reactions, during which subatomic particles called neutrons collided with uranium nuclei, releasing further neutrons, which collided with other nuclei, in a blossoming process of self-destruction. The reactions could be sustained for just a millisecond, and they fully exploited less than two pounds of the uranium atoms before the resulting heat forced a halt to the process through expansion. Uranium is one of the heaviest elements on earth, almost twice as heavy as lead, and two pounds of it amounts to only about three tablespoonfuls. Nonetheless the release of energy over Hiroshima yielded a force equivalent to fifteen thousand tons (fifteen kilotons) of TNT, achieved temperatures higher than the sun's, and emitted light-speed pulses of lethal radiation. More than 150,000 people died. Their executioner was an ordinary pilot named Paul Tibbets, who was twenty-nine then and is still alive now, in Ohio. He neither abhorred nor enjoyed the kill: he was a flight technician, removed from the slaughter by altitude and speed, and coddled by a pressurized, well-heated cockpit. That morning the sky was quiet, with no sign of enemy opposition. The B-29 cruised thirty-one thousand feet above the city in smooth air. It lurched and nosed upward when the bomb fell clear. Tibbets banked steeply to get away and turned the airplane's tail on the destruction. When the bomb ignited, now far behind and below, it lit the sky with the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen. The first shock wave came shimmering through the atmosphere and overtook the airplane from behind, causing a sharp bump measured at 2.5 g's by a cockpit accelerometer. The bump felt about like the near miss of an antiaircraft burst, or the jolt of crossing a pothole in a jeep. A second shock wave then hit, but it was a reflection off the ground, like an echo of the first, and therefore even less intense. Tibbets tasted the fillings in his teeth. He saw the cloud rising over Hiroshima, and, as must be expected, he felt no regrets. Still, Hiroshima was not good for him. Though he became a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force, and later the chairman of an executive-jet company, he suffered from the stigma of having killed so many, and he grew bitter about any implication that what he had done was wrong. It was unrealistic and probably unfair to expect him to repent, but over the decades American elites did just that, having first required him to drop the bomb. In his retirement he took to traveling around the country giving talks to war buffs and like-minded reactionaries. He showed up at air shows, I suppose to shake hands. In the 1990s, he waded angrily into a minor controversy about the Smithsonian's display of the forward section of his airplane, the Enola Gay, and accused the elites of manipulating public opinion for their self-interest. He said heLangewiesche, William is the author of 'The Atomic Bazaar', published 2008 under ISBN 9780374531324 and ISBN 0374531323.