If you define a Cold War
as a state of conflict with a nuclear-armed opponent
where you can't get at each other,
even though you are functionally hostile to each other,
then we're in a new Cold War with the Russians.
More Russian forces on the move.
Surface-to-air missiles in the country's far east
due to join what Moscow says are military exercises near Ukraine.
It's easy in some ways to say that the Cold War ended
in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But if you open the newspaper on any given day,
we're still living with the aftermath of the Cold War.
What we're seeing is still that story playing out.
Columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles
are reported to be pouring across the Ukrainian border tonight.
Swarms of helicopters flying in low over the countryside,
creating panic and terror for the people living there.
After months of preparations, the Russian president Vladimir Putin
has launched a major military operation against Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has begun.
Oh. It's close.
Putin is obsessed with Ukraine.
He does not want to recreate the Soviet Union.
He wants to recreate the Russian Empire.
They see Ukraine as part of their empire,
a part of the Soviet Union.
They consider it their legacy,
their property, which they want to take back.
Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
For him, winning the war in Ukraine is not just, you know,
destroying Ukrainian Statehood.
I think it's a war to basically replay results of the Cold War.
The Cold War did end,
but now we are living through a new edition of the Cold War.
And it's a very dangerous Cold War.
How can they threaten the boundless Russia with nuclear weapons
when they are only a small island?
The island is so small
that one Sarmat missile is enough to sink it once and for all.
These people showing films of London
being vaporized by a nuclear weapon and laughing about it on the nightly news.
These are shocking, shocking situations.
Organizers of any provocation
threatening the fundamental interests of our security will regret it,
like they haven't regretted anything for a long time.
We are not seeking a new Cold War.
It is something that we thought that we would never see again.
The pictures that we saw from the Second World War...
I mean, right now, how can this be happening?
The Cold War, which began in phases,
ultimately became a global existential struggle
between the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies.
At its peak, the Cold War touched every continent,
with the exception of Antarctica,
and practically every country in the world.
It shaped the decolonization
of great, large European empires.
It shaped domestic politics in the great capitals of Europe...
...North America,
and Asia.
For many, many people around the world,
it affected their daily lives.
And in some cases, it killed them.
It created a need for intelligence services,
for secret activity, that never went away.
Vladimir Putin cannot be understood without reference to the Cold War.
His worldview is a product
of the way in which the Soviet Union collapsed in the late '80s and early '90s.
It set off an arms race that changed virtually everything about American life,
but also really destabilized global relationships
and caused infinite amount of harm around the globe
for most of the 20th century.
It seemed so obvious and so clear.
We were so good.
We were the country that finally was virtuous,
in addition to being powerful.
Everybody in America was supposed to embrace this single narrative.
And it was logical that we would then be threatened by a hostile,
evil force that wanted nothing but destruction and nihilism.
The Cold War was the first war in history
that held the possibility of ending in apocalypse.
That's what made it different.
And that's what made it so psychologically threatening.
If you got it wrong, we weren't talking about the loss of a thousand people.
We weren't talking about the loss of, God forbid, 10,000 people.
We were talking about the potential loss of millions of people,
perhaps a billion people.
That was a scale of awfulness that was never before
within the power of statesmen.
Why was it there? Because of nuclear weapons.
The arrival of nuclear weapons is what helps the Cold War to play out.
They can't be disentangled from one another.
The question of when to use nuclear weapons
has always haunted every country that has them.
I'm not sure that there would be a Cold War without nuclear weapons.
Over the history of nuclear weapons,
we've gotten very close to catastrophe numerous times.
We survived that not because we were smart.
It was because we were lucky.
Einstein supposedly said,
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
So, that's the nuclear world we live in.
Once humans stop seeing other humans as human,
the most horrific acts are possible.
There seems to me to be evidence that lessons that we thought were learned
were not learned,
and that history is not history, but we are in an ongoing tide.
Nuclear fission, splitting heavy elements,
was discovered just at Christmastime in 1938 in Nazi Germany,
Berlin,
by two, curiously, chemists and a physicist.
And they were experimenting with bombarding a solution
of uranium nitrate with a particular kind of subatomic particle, called a neutron.
When a neutron enters the uranium nucleus,
it's rather as if the Moon hit the Earth.
Even if it's just flying at normal room temperature,
when it goes in, everything goes crazy.
It's sufficient energy from one fission of one atom
to make a grain of sand visibly jump.
It's enormous.
It's very exothermic, in physics terms.
Puts out a lot of energy for very little input.
German scientists published a paper in a British journal, Nature.
And the whole world woke up one day
to headlines in the New York Times and the London papers.
They split the atom!
One of the more brilliant scientists in American history, Robert Oppenheimer,
started thinking, "Well, what can you do with the energy
that comes out of this amazing reaction?"
Within a week, he had a drawing on the blackboard of an atomic bomb.
If you could get this reaction to cause another reaction
and another reaction, and another reaction,
until you had like 80 generations,
you could blow up a city.
Oppenheimer saw that immediately.
Almost all the physicists did.
History provides us with a cast of monsters.
Hitler was a one-person show.
Today, we must remove undesirable elements proven to be bad.
What is bad has no place among us!
Hitler was the worst that mankind had ever created.
The idea that Hitler would have his Thousand-Year Reich
powered with atomic bombs terrified people.
Particularly those who were Jewish
and had escaped what was already beginning to be the Holocaust.
And, of course, the United States was not yet at war.
This nation will remain a neutral nation.
Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist in the world at the time,
drafted a letter
that would go under Einstein's signature to President Roosevelt.
Essentially, the letter said that
we believe it will be possible, in a relatively short time,
to build weapons of remarkable destructiveness,
and we want you to be aware of that
and to take action so that we, the Western world, have this weapon first.
The fear is a Nazi atomic weapons program.
And the sense is that this is a race with Berlin.
British scientists, Canadian scientists, and American scientists,
they are convinced that smart physicists in Germany
are trying to give Adolf Hitler the ultimate weapon
to win his war of conquest.
When World War II started in Europe,
Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union,
and the Soviets and the Nazis were allies.
The Hitler-Stalin pact resulted in a carving up of Eastern Europe.
The Soviets gained the Baltic States.
They also gained the eastern part of Poland.
And they also gained a piece of Romania.
They misunderstood Hitler
as much as the Western democracies misunderstood Hitler.
In 1941, Hitler betrays his new Soviet allies
by invading the Soviet Union.
Initially, it looked like the Nazis would beat the Soviets.
The Soviets were caught by surprise.
Stalin actually can't even bring himself to talk publicly
to the Soviet people for days.
He is so distraught at his own strategic stupidity of trusting Berlin.
And the war was not only what was happening in Europe,
but also what was happening in Asia.
The Japanese sought empire in Asia.
It wanted to control China.
They ultimately would control Southeast Asia.
They would control the Philippines.
They even had their sights on India.
Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, was the leader.
In Japan at that time,
the Emperor was the judiciary,
legislation, and administration,
as well as the supreme commander of the Japanese army and navy.
However, many Japanese believed
that the Emperor's ancestors could be traced back to a god.
In 1940, the Japanese entered an alliance with Berlin and Rome.
The Americans mistakenly assumed
that the Japanese would never attack a territory of the United States.
Some of the committee that was going to plan the Manhattan Project,
the program to build the first bombs,
met on December 6th, 1941 in Washington,
and woke up the next morning to Pearl Harbor.
It took Pearl Harbor to bring America into the war.
Yesterday, December 7th, 1941...
a date which will live in infamy...
the United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
No matter how long it may take us
to overcome this premeditated invasion,
the American people in their righteous might
will win through to absolute victory.
During World War II we basically have the Axis powers,
which are Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan.
And the Allies...
...being the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
The United States did assist the Soviet Union by giving them weapons.
By coordinating to a certain extent on military campaigns.
But the one thing the United States was not going to do
was to share its scientific secrets with the Soviet Union,
particularly when it came to the Manhattan Project.
The Army takes over the Manhattan Project in 1942.
That's when General Dick Groves was chosen to run the Manhattan Project.
I must endeavor to conduct this program
in such a way as to serve the best interests of the United States.
Groves was a military engineer.
Before the Manhattan Project,
he had been in charge of making sure the Pentagon got constructed.
So he knew how to do big projects.
Pentagon was the largest office building in the entire world at the time.
He's gruff.
His number-two person described him as the biggest SOB he had ever worked for.
He was incredibly arrogant, thought he knew more than everybody.
He says, "I need this project to have the number-one priority
of the entire war," formally.
And what this high-level priority means is he can get any resource he wants.
He can get any scientist or person he wants.
He put together a program that eventually involved
a number of sites around the country where uranium would be separated
into the rare isotope that chain-reacts.
Plutonium would be bred in giant graphite fuel reactors
in eastern Washington
where there was plenty of cold water to keep the reactors cool,
and where it was far enough away from anywhere that if they blew up,
nobody would be killed.
Except the people who worked there, of course.
He put this whole program together and hired some 600,000 people.
Groves saw something in Oppenheimer and chose him to direct this laboratory.
When they were looking for a place where the bombs themselves
would be designed and built,
Oppenheimer said, "Let's go look in New Mexico."
Los Alamos became a secret lab cut off from the rest of the world.
It was surrounded by barbed wire.
People who worked there had to get a special pass to go in.
The children who were born in the hospital there
were given the post office box address
because the location could not be revealed.
The people who were there during the war remember it as an amazing place,
almost like the Olympian heights of the Gods.
When you think about what they were doing, it's really ironic.
They were working on a weapon, whatever their good intentions,
that was gonna kill a lot of people.
It would really be its only use.
But they knew that they were working on something that,
if the Germans got it first, would destroy the world.
The task of defeating Hitler may be long and arduous.
There are a few appeasers and Nazi sympathizers
who say that it cannot be done.
They even asked me to negotiate with Hitler,
to pray for crumbs from his victorious table.
This course I have rejected,
and I reject it again.
Franklin Roosevelt began the atomic weapons program.
He expected to live long enough to decide whether or not to use atomic weapons.
We'll never know if he would have dropped bombs on anyone.
He dies in April of 1945.
His vice president, Harry S. Truman,
knows nothing about the Manhattan Project.
So that there can be no possible misunderstanding,
both Germany and Japan can be certain
beyond any shadow of a doubt...
...that America will continue the fight for freedom
until no vestige of resistance remains.
It was about ten days afterwards that the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,
thought it was time that the new president should know about the bomb.
Stimson's memo is all about the diplomatic questions
raised by the Manhattan Project.
What is the world gonna look like after an atomic bomb is used?
He's trying to impress upon Truman this is not just a weapon.
This is the most important turning point of the human race.
1945, military progress in Europe
was edging further than scientific progress on the bomb.
The British, the American, and the Red armies begin the last battles
with a common front in a broken and dismembered Germany.
Hitler was largely alone, shaking in his bunker.
In 1945, that man shot himself
after killing his wife.
The threat posed by Adolf Hitler was over,
though Nazi ideology did not, sadly, disappear.
German men and women,
soldiers of the armed forces.
Our leader, Adolf Hitler,
has fallen.
Much remains to be done.
The victory won in the West must now be won in the East.
The whole world must be cleansed
of the evil from which half the world has been freed.
The question became, how do we secure a victory against Japan?
And there was a great deal of concern
that the war against Japan could last for months, if not years,
beyond the defeat of Germany.
Even after Pearl Harbor,
and the rage and the shock that that event brought...
you know, the US government still had to galvanize public opinion...
to involve it in another world war.
There was still the enormous task of making Americans
hate the Japanese enough
to fight them in the way that they needed to be fought for defeat.
There was an enormous information and propaganda campaign
to portray the Japanese in a certain way.
You say you can destroy us by outfighting us.
You cannot. You cannot outfight us because the path ahead of you
lies straight up the steep and rocky mountain of Japan.
And it is slippery with blood.
Your blood!
And there was, you know, a heavy racial overtone to it.
I mean, Germans, when they were depicted, they were sinister enemies.
They were, you know, to be killed. They were targets.
But they were still seen as icy human beings.
But the Japanese were often portrayed almost as a subspecies.
There really is a sense for the American public
that the Japanese are subhumans.
There can be no peace in the world
until the military power of Japan is destroyed.
There was a firebombing raid on Tokyo, March 9th and 10th, 1945.
It killed 87,000 people.
And it was just horrendous.
Bomber pilots eviscerated 16 square miles of Tokyo
in one night air raid.
Japanese civilians were being killed.
People burned like matchsticks.
They tried to flee to rivers, and the rivers caught on fire.
But there was no sign yet that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
And then the Battle of Okinawa happens.
The Battle of Okinawa ended on June the 22nd.
And Okinawa was an extraordinarily costly battle for American troops
and American ships and American sailors.
We lost something like 12,000 men at Okinawa.
They lost about 200,000.
It was a terrible, bloody slaughter the closer we got to the home islands.
And there was great concern in the military
that we would have to invade the home island of Japan.
We're going to destroy Japan's armies,
Japan's navy, Japan's air forces, Japan's war factories.
Japan's whole power to wage war.
After Okinawa, it became even more clear
that we needed to find a way to end a war without an invasion.
Truman faced the responsibility for finding a way to end a war
against Japan on American terms
at the lowest possible cost in American lives.
Sixty-five million people killed in the Second World War.
The worst war in human history.
Anything that would end such a war,
you can see why people thought of it as a deliverance.
At the moment,
when the US military was making plans for the invasion of the home islands,
the scientists at the Manhattan Project said,
"We're about to test this idea."
Because implosion was such a new technology,
nobody really quite knew how this would work.
It was clear that they had to test it before they used it in the military.
In order to, uh, test the bomb, you had to find a place that was remote...
where the bomb could go off,
and you could have some plausible deniability
as to tell people what it was.
They didn't want the radioactive fallout to be going down toward a populated area,
so they looked around, and they decided that Alamogordo,
what is now the White Sands test area out in the New Mexican desert,
would be the best place to do it.
This test was scheduled for the morning of July 16th, 1945.
They didn't want to stir up a bunch of dirt and make it radioactive,
so they put the bomb up on top of a tower, 100 feet high.
It was just the innards of the weapon,
a tangle of cables and wires.
They didn't have the radar on it and all the other-- The tail and so forth.
This assembly was put in a little tin corrugated iron cabin
up on top of a steel tower,
and one of the scientists was delegated to sit with it all night
after it'd been completely put together.
There was a storm front that was passing through
that made him a little nervous
because he thought, "Well, if lightning hits this tower, I'm dead."
"Bomb goes off and I'm vaporized."
Fortunately, the rain stopped about 4:00 a.m., and the sky cleared.
The scientists had come down from Los Alamos in large numbers.
All the scientists who'd worked at Los Alamos
wanted to be at Trinity to see the results of their labor.
There was quite a whole delegation out there.
The scientists were on a hillside about 20 miles away.
There were some big, massive bunkers buried in the ground
almost 10,000 yards away.
One of the concerns was,
would the bomb have a higher-than-anticipated mushroom cloud?
Would it carry contaminated fallout throughout populated parts of the country?
For them, it was a real possibility, but they tested it anyway.
Nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four,
three, two, one.
Now.
We knew the world would not be the same.
Few people laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu.
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
People jumped up and started looking at it.
There was a general sense of real relief
because this technology
that they had invented in a period of about eight months,
this brand-new technology had worked.
It was thought that the area surrounding the Trinity test site
was largely uninhabited.
But in reality, nearly half a million people
lived in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico,
within 150-mile radius of the Trinity test site in 1945.
About 40 miles away, there's a camp, a girls' dance camp.
About ten girls who were about 13 years old
were fast asleep in their bunks.
Suddenly, boom.
An enormous explosion shakes their bunkhouse
and throws the girls out of their bunks.
They and their dance instructor run outside,
and one of them later recalled that the sky was just painful to look at.
It was so bright. She said, quote,
"It was as if the sun came up. Tremendous."
And then a few hours later, these girls look up
and there's white ash falling from the sky,
and they think that it's snow.
So they put on their bathing suits and they go to a local stream
to play in the snow, and they're pressing it into their faces.
And they said, "It's hot instead of cold. Why is this snow hot?"
And in their reasoning, they said, "It's hot because it's summer."
And only one of them survived to 30.
The New Mexicans had not been told ahead of time
that the test would take place.
They were not evacuated ahead of time,
nor were they evacuated or told afterwards.
In fact, the government put out a press report
that a munitions dump had exploded nearby,
and that's what these people had experienced.
It didn't do much to explain why this snow was falling from the sky,
or why all their family pets were dying all of a sudden,
or their livestock was starting to turn white in patches.
The blast in the Trinity test
literally turned the sand into green glass.
Truman got news
that this test had been successful during the Potsdam Conference.
Truman and Stalin and Churchill were trying to work out
what the balance of power was going to be
among the Allies, who were expecting to win the war.
The big three meetings are held in Kaiser Wilhelm's former palace.
Here, the fate of Germany and the end of Japanese aggression will be settled.
They are meeting the Soviets for the first time, Truman and Stimson.
Truman is meeting Stalin in person.
The West certainly didn't understand
whom they were dealing with when it comes to Stalin.
He had a lot of charisma.
He made a good impression on people, and he wanted to make that impression.
It was at this historic conference
that the dividing of Germany into four zones of occupation took place.
The American officials are very distressed at Potsdam
because they're starting to realize that the world is being divided up
in a way that they didn't quite anticipate.
That these allies, who were always sort of enemies of my enemy,
were actually quite paranoid, and expansionist, and hard to trust.
It was becoming clear that once the Soviets took over territory,
they essentially kept the territory.
The Russians were going to enter the war against the Japanese
on the 15th of August.
And Truman was hoping that he could get the war over with
before Stalin entered the war in the East,
so that Japan wouldn't be divided the way Germany was going to be divided.
Truman was notified about the test of the plutonium bomb
at Alamogordo,
and how powerful it was, and how it exceeded expectations.
And that was great news for Truman because he thought it might help him
in his negotiations with Stalin.
And so one question that came up was,
"So, do we tell Stalin about the bomb?"
The recommendation to Truman was, "Tell Stalin."
It would be important for the two of them to discuss how the bomb should become
somehow an instrument of peace rather than of war.
But Truman ignored that advice.
Truman was very bucked up by the news of the successful test,
and Churchill waxed eloquent about it, saying,
"Now we can tell the Russians where to get off."
Truman went over to Stalin and said,
"We have a weapon of unusual destructive force."
Stalin said nothing, just nodded.
And that was the only official exchange
between the US and the Soviet Union.
Even while we celebrate victory in Europe,
British and American chiefs of staff plan strategy for victory in Japan.
And their heads of government prepare an ultimatum to the people of Japan.
Truman sought unconditional surrender from Japan.
We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim unconditional surrender.
The alternative is prompt and utter destruction.
The Japanese didn't want to surrender,
and they certainly didn't want to surrender unconditionally
because they feared that that would mean the end of the empire,
and that the Emperor would be forced to abdicate.
There was a division within the Japanese government
between those who wanted to seek peace,
as long as the Emperor could remain on his throne,
and those who wanted to fight on for as long as possible
in order to hopefully get better surrender terms.
And there was, in fact, paralysis within the Japanese government
about what to do.
My grandfather, Shigenori Togo,
was foreign minister of Japan.
Throughout the beginning of his tenure
until the very end, he had only one motive.
Avoid unconditional surrender.
Because if you agree to unconditional surrender,
Togo might run the risk of the fate of the Imperial family becoming dubious.
That, he couldn't.
There is a group
of conflicting opinions inside the government,
also inside the military groups,
that it's better to fight to the end, to the death.
On the other side, there are rational people
that said we faced such casualties.
It is time to end the war.
When the Potsdam Declaration reached Togo, 26th of July,
the hardliners in the military said that this is not good.
We should make the world know that Potsdam is not acceptable.
We're really angry at the Japanese
for not surrendering when we knew they had been defeated.
The hatred between the United States and Japan
was unparalleled.
I was born in Los Angeles.
In 1940, we went to Japan to visit our ailing grandparents.
My parents had to go back to the States
because they still had some business there.
They left my older brother and me in the care of my grandparents.
Here we were in the middle of Hiroshima, living with our grandparents.
And then, before my parents could come back for us...
the war started.
And we were in the middle of Hiroshima for the duration of the war.
More than 100,000 men, women, and children, all of Japanese ancestry,
removed from their homes in the Pacific Coast state.
Two-thirds of the evacuees are American citizens by right of birth.
Shortly after they returned to the United States,
my parents were sent to a concentration camp,
along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans.
There were ten of them, I believe, altogether,
scattered around the United States.
They suffered tremendously in the camp.
I mean, they lost everything.
Can you imagine somebody telling you, you have to get out of your house?
You got two suitcases full of things you can carry with you,
and the police throw you in the concentration camp
for three, four years.
The entire community bounded by a wire fence
and guarded by military police,
symbols of the military nature of the evacuation.
Maybe somebody would have said,
"Well, you know, maybe it's not right to use a weapon this powerful
against a civilian population" if we'd had it against Germany.
But the racial factor against Japan, I think,
prevented any real second thoughts.
It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction,
that the ultimatum of July the 26th was issued at Potsdam.
Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum.
If they do not now accept our terms,
they may expect a rain of ruin from the air,
the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
Here we have a bomb more powerful than anything ever before developed.
If it worked the way scientists thought it would work,
if, in fact, an atomic bomb could wipe out a city with one bomb,
hopefully the shock of that would finally be enough
to convince the Japanese government that it was time to surrender.
Also, the Red Army was coming into Manchuria.
It's very clear that American policymakers
were rushing to get the war over with before the Russians came in.
We didn't want them to get very far into Manchuria,
and we certainly didn't want them in Japan.
Leslie Groves had been charged with creating the atomic bomb
and getting it ready for wartime use.
And he pursued this with relentless determination.
And by mid-July, the first bomb was nearly ready for use.
In order to have a good target, a few cities were set aside.
You want a city
that is going to really have a good before and after picture,
so that you can show what this weapon is capable of both to scare the Japanese,
and scare the rest of the world about the power of this thing.
Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, and Kyoto were on the list,
and Stimson famously vetoed Kyoto
because it was kind of the intellectual center of Japan.
He insisted that Kyoto be taken off the list.
He goes to Truman, and the framing he uses is, essentially,
that Kyoto is a civilian target.
Hiroshima is a valid military target.
The Japanese will never forgive us if we destroy a major civilian target.
He refers to Hiroshima repeatedly as a purely military target.
This is not totally correct.
Hiroshima, yeah, it has a military base in it,
but it's 90% civilians.
It's a real city. It's not just a military base.
It's not clear Truman understands all this.
We woke up early in the morning, the morning of August 6.
Put on our school clothes because school was in session.
And on our way to school,
we were told that school was canceled that day because enemy aircraft,
that would be American aircraft,
was still in the area.
And they were afraid of, you know, additional bombing.
We were 0.8 miles from the hypocenter,
which is considered pretty close.
My brother, he saw the airplane and the secondary,
he saw something was in the distance.
A very small, tiny block.
That was atomic bomb.
It didn't come down straight.
And then for a while, it went with the airplane
and then made a curve and dropped.
And then he turned back, and it exploded.
There was a flash.
Everything I was seeing turned white.
Couldn't see anything. No color at all.
And then there was a strong blast.
I felt like I was, like, in a tornado or a typhoon.
And then unconscious. Everybody became unconscious.
And then when I opened my eyes, everywhere was just broken.
I had been looking at the koi fish.
My mom called for me, and I went inside the house.
It was at that moment the atomic bomb was dropped.
Had I still been outside at the time the bomb went off,
I would have been killed instantaneously.
My mom went to the closet, it looked like it was about to collapse,
and yanked a large futon out of it.
She threw it over the family, who had all gathered together.
So she said, "Let's die here as a family," and wrapped us into a bundle.
It's a feeling that I can never forget, not even decades later.
For as long as I live, I will never forget that moment.
I don't recall seeing the flash, nor hear the boom.
I was knocked out instantaneously.
When I came to, the bathhouse was on top of me.
I was buried alive.
I wanted to call out, "Mom! Help me!"
But I couldn't speak.
There was something like a blast wave,
and then all the walls and stuff were blown out.
After the blast, my body just floated,
and then hit the ground.
Then I realized...
my back...
was burnt.
Just remembering it, I hate to remember anything about those days.
The atomic bomb exploded at a height of 600 meters
above the ground in the sky over Hiroshima City,
with a population of 350,000.
The fireball had a core temperature of several million degrees.
Ferocious heat rays, like those generated by burning magnesium,
were unleashed over the entire city.
About two or three seconds after the blast,
the people who had been exposed to those heat rays
were severely burned and many of them died.
The rivers were filled with corpses.
So many corpses in the river, there was no space in between.
One could not gather the bodies of the dead.
The remains turned to ash, so you couldn't collect them.
The bones had turned to ash.
We saw the hordes of people from the inner city
with tremendous injuries.
Skins on their body would be dripping from their bodies.
The pattern of clothes would be etched on the bodies.
People that were directly exposed to the rain,
they were burned so terribly,
to get some relief, they would jump into the river,
only to die.
The elementary school I attended
is on the other side of this mountain.
That's where I got exposed to the radiation.
I went down this road,
and the sky was completely dark when I got here.
And it started raining when the radiation fallout was coming down.
The large raindrops pelted down and drenched us.
We were soaked.
We didn't know it at the time,
but it was black rain, contaminated with radioactive material.
Then when the evening came,
we looked back toward the city from the mountains.
It was burning so ferociously that it could almost scorch the night sky.
And I think about how so many people were burned alive in those flames,
and it tears me apart.
Young children,
you know?
Older parents,
all those people who couldn't escape
and were burned alive, so many of them.
The smoke was filled with the smell of burning bodies.
So even today,
in the heat of the summer, when it's sizzling hot,
or when it's so hot you can feel it on your skin,
that smell of burning bodies,
and the screams,
it all rushes back to me, in all five senses.
Even now.
Seventy thousand people died within the first hour.
One hundred and forty thousand, twice that number,
who have died by December of 1945.
Three days later, on August 9th, Nagasaki was bombed.
The initial target for the second bomb was actually not Nagasaki, it was Kokura.
But because of cloud cover,
the crew decided that they couldn't drop it on Kokura.
So they went to the secondary target.
The second bomb's called Fat Man.
The Hiroshima bomb was the uranium bomb, and it yielded about 15 kilotons,
15,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
The Fat Man was a plutonium bomb,
and it yielded about 22,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
It actually gets dropped on Urakami,
which is a district of Nagasaki just north.
Urakami, historically, has been the kind of center
of the Catholic community in Nagasaki.
There were 8,500 Christians killed in the cathedral.
There were two priests hearing confessions,
and a couple dozen parishioners immediately killed.
The cathedral's destroyed.
We don't know exactly how many people died in Nagasaki.
The most recent estimate's about 80,000.
The deaths are calculated as of December 1st
because about 15 or 20% died from acute exposure to radiation.
When Truman initially hears about the Hiroshima mission,
he's thrilled.
And he stays unambiguously positive about it
until Stimson gives him the first damage reports of Hiroshima.
This is unambiguously a city. This is not a military base.
Truman had just gotten back from Potsdam,
and Stimson came to see him, and he had some photographs of Hiroshima.
And he said, "As far as we can tell, the bomb killed 100,000 people."
Truman was shocked by that.
Truman starts to report having these, like, stress headaches
and other sort of physiological symptoms of stress and discomfort.
He starts describing the atomic bomb from this moment on
not as the greatest thing in history,
but as a weapon that should not be used as a regular military weapon of war.
It's a real turning point, the learning about these casualties.
On August 10th, 1945,
General Groves sends a memo to the chief of staff, General Marshall.
And he says, you know, we were planning to have a third bomb on Japan
by the end of the month,
but we've had some real success in speeding it up,
and we're gonna be ready to drop that bomb in a week.
Truman went to a cabinet meeting and he said,
"I have ordered that no further bombs be used without my express authorization."
It's literally a scrawl on a piece of paper in handwriting.
"You can't do this without the president's authorization."
This is the beginning of presidential control
of nuclear use in the United States.
I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government,
in reply to the message forwarded to that government
by the Secretary of State on August 11th.
I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration,
which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.
There's a lot of dispute about Truman's motives in using the bomb in Japan.
You have the dominant narrative being the bomb ended the war,
it saved American lives.
The Japanese would not have surrendered without it.
It was ultimately a good, right, that was used.
But then you had a counternarrative.
We didn't need to use the bomb. Japan would have surrendered.
We didn't need a land invasion in order to be victorious.
Some have said the atom bomb wasn't the end of World War II,
but it was the first strike in the Cold War.
Why'd they use the bomb against two non-military targets?
Civilian cities.
I mean, there's very small, tiny little military installations,
but they were not military bases.
You can't get the precise answer, but you can get pretty close to it.
It seemed very clear to policymakers that the war could end
so long as you told the Japanese that they could keep their god-like figure
in a powerless role.
And secondly, the war would end when the Russians came in.
That will collapse the politics. That'll be the turning point.
This is a letter from Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson to President Truman,
July 2, 1945.
He's basically saying that the United States
is totally in control of the Japanese war,
and that we have capacity to deal with them in any way we want.
Which is true.
So, it was not a question of whether the war would go on.
It's a brutal question of using the atomic bombs
in order to end the war without the Russians.
Many American policymakers knew the Japanese couldn't face
the great powers when the Russians came in,
and that the Russian attack would end the war.
They desperately wanted to end the war before the Russians got to Japan,
and better if they could end it before they got far into Manchuria.
So it's a diplomatic and political use at that point in time,
and it's a major tragedy.
Some would say a war crime.
What do you make of this, that we didn't need to drop the bomb?
You know...
I find that truly scurrilous for someone to say all these years later.
We didn't know. We didn't know if the bombs would work.
We didn't know if they would force the Japanese to surrender.
We didn't know if Stalin was gonna come in when he came in,
or when he would come in, or if he would come in.
We didn't know any of that. What we did know
was that the Japanese were prepared to sacrifice
every one of their human beings who lived in those islands to fight.
The closer we got to Japan
as we marched up the islands in the South Pacific one by one,
the harder they fought.
There was no indication that the war was just suddenly going to end.
The Japanese were gonna say, "Oh, sorry! Time to stop."
It didn't work that way.
In the United States, there was overwhelming support for the bombs.
Ecstatic support.
The vast majority, over 75% of people polled,
said that they approved of the use of the bombs.
In one poll that was conducted shortly after the bombings,
23% of those polled said that they wished that even more atomic bombs
could've been used on Japan before that country had surrendered.
That's how strong the feeling of vengeance was.
It really wasn't until John Hersey's bombshell reporting in The New Yorker,
where The New Yorker gives over an entire issue of the magazine
to his first-person reporting from Hiroshima,
that brings the power and the awful horror of the bomb
home to the American public.
Americans really began to reckon with the cost and the horror
of what they had unleashed on the world.
End of 1946, you're starting to see more voices
that go against the Manhattan Project narrative,
that are starting to say things like, "Maybe the bombs weren't necessary."
A lot of those voices are senior military officials.
It's Admiral Leahy.
It's General Eisenhower.
The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union
was in some ways a marriage of convenience,
and it broke down more quickly, I think, than anyone anticipated.
The Soviet Union thought, "We won the war with Germany."
"We occupy half of Europe."
"Our standing now is great."
"Our power is so much greater than it was before the war."
And suddenly, the bomb comes and introduces
a whole new element of uncertainty into the balance of power.
So on the 20th of August,
so two weeks to the day after Hiroshima,
Stalin signs a decree.
"Build the bomb as soon as possible."
The invention of nuclear weapons changes everything that comes after it.
You begin to see the US and Europe and the Soviet Union
lurch towards this idea of a Cold War
that's gonna pit the two superpowers against each other.
The Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence
and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.
The United States is the only country
to have ever used an atomic weapon in warfare.
These weapons really changed the fate of the 20th century.
They changed the nature of the conflict
between the United States and the Soviet Union,
particularly once the Soviet Union had access to these weapons.
They were so big and so destructive that basically they couldn't be used.
This is one of the reasons that we think of the Cold War as a cold war.
It could not be hot.
For the Cold War to be hot between the two rival powers
would have been a suicide pact.
So instead, the Cold War was conducted through economic means.
Through psychological means.
And through proxy battlefields across the world.
To avoid situations in which US and Soviet troops
might engage each other directly in a way that might lead
to an all-out nuclear war.
The calculated pressures of aggressive communism
have forced us instead to live in a world of turmoil.
But I do have in my hand the names of 57 individuals
who are either communists,
who are certainly loyal to the Communist Party.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
I think the driving force that was in us all,
that we're aware of it, was fear.
When you can't control things, fear can ravage you.