6 Aug 1945 Jahr - U.S. atom bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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august 6 and 9

By early 1945, President Roosevelt was a sick man. The sixty-three-year-old had long suffered from high blood pressure and heart failure, and each successive photograph or newsreel image seemed to document his decline. He summoned his strength for a 14,000-mile round trip in February to meet with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, but his presidency was cut short. On April 12, 1945, during a short visit to his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

With victory in Europe at hand, Roosevelt journeyed in February 1945 to Yalta, on the Black Sea, and met for what would be the final time with Churchill and Stalin. The leaders discussed the important and controversial issues of the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, the creation of the United Nations, and Russian entry into the war against Japan. The Yalta agreements mirrored a new balance of power and set the stage for the Cold War.


manhattan project: The research and weapons development project, authorized by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 that produced the first atomic bomb.

When Harry Truman assumed the presidency, he learned for the first time about a top-secret project to develop a devastating new weapon: the atomic bomb. As early as 1939, the acclaimed physicists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, refugees from Nazi Germany, persuaded FDR to fund research on atomic weapons, warning that German scientists were also working on nuclear reactions. Not long after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president brought scientists and military personnel together under a single initiative, code named the Manhattan Project, to carry out research and weapons development. Working at the University of Chicago in December 1942, Szilard and Enrico Fermi, a physicist who was himself a refugee from fascist Italy, produced the first controlled atomic chain reaction using highly processed uranium. The path to an atomic bomb had been established.

The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, employed 120,000 people, and involved the construction of thirty-seven installations in nineteen states — with all of its activity hidden from Congress, the American people, and even Vice President Truman. Directed by Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves Jr. and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nation’s top physicists assembled the first bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and successfully tested it on July 16, 1945. Overwhelmed by the frightening power of the first mushroom cloud, Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great texts of Hindu scripture: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

Three weeks later, President Truman authorized the use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities: the specific targets, chosen by military commanders rather than the president, became Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Truman’s rationale for this order was straightforward. The new president and his advisors, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, believed that Japan’s military leaders would never surrender unless their country faced utter ruin. Moreover, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allies had agreed that only the “unconditional surrender” of Japan was acceptable — the same terms to which Germany and Italy had agreed. Winning such a surrender seemed to require a direct invasion of Japan. Stimson and Marshall told Truman that such an undertaking could result in as many as one million Allied casualties.

Though the atomic bomb had been dropped on the port city of Hiroshima six months prior to this photo being taken, the devastation is still apparent. The U.S. Army report on the bombing described “a blinding flash in the sky, and a great rush of air and a loud rumble of noise … followed by the sounds of falling buildings and of growing fires, and a great cloud of dust and smoke began to cast a pall of darkness over the city.” The human toll of this weapon was unprecedented: of the estimated population of 350,000, 100,000 were likely killed by the explosion, and many tens of thousands more died slowly of the effects of radiation poisoning.


Before giving the order, Truman considered other options. His military advisors rejected the most obvious alternative: a nonlethal demonstration of the bomb’s awesome power, perhaps on a remote Pacific island. If the demonstration failed — not out of the question, as the bomb had been tested only once — it would embolden Japan further. A detailed advance warning designed to scare Japan into surrender was also rejected. Given Japan’s tenacious fighting in the Pacific, the Americans believed that force alone would compel Japan’s military leadership to surrender. After all, the deaths of more than 100,000 Japanese civilians in the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo and other cities in the spring of 1945 had brought Japan no closer to surrender. Although Truman’s decision is still the subject of scholarly and popular debate, the atomic attacks seemingly achieved their immediate objective. Following the deaths of 100,000 people at Hiroshima on August 6 and 60,000 at Nagasaki on August 9, the Japanese government surrendered unconditionally on August 15, and signed a formal agreement ending World War II on September 2, 1945.

The atomic destruction of August 6 and 9 were not alone, however, in prompting Japanese surrender. Two days after the Hiroshima bombing, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and more than one million Soviet troops launched an invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, as well as Sakhalin Island and other Japanese territories north of the Sea of Japan. Japan’s Supreme War Direction Council, whose members set the nation’s war policy, feared a Soviet invasion, and potential occupation, of their home islands as much or more than they feared an American one. Caught between these two advancing powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, from opposite sides of their contracting empire, Japan relented and surrendered.

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