Narrator: August 6, 1945.
The first mission of its kind.
Morris Jeppson: The last person to have his hands on
that weapon was me.
Narrator: A devastating new weapon is unleashed on the
city of Hiroshima.
Within weeks, the US government mobilizes teams
of scientists and soldiers to assess the damage.
Directly from the pages of their report, the science
of the first atomic bomb, as told by the men who
analyzed the effects of the explosion and the survivors
who experienced them first-hand.
Takashi Tanemori: All of a sudden bang, flash in the sky.
Narrator: Now, what happened in the 24 hours
after the world's first atomic attack.
Morris Jeppson: On August 6th, 1945 I was 23 years old.
I was on board the Enola Gay B-29 flying to Japan.
Shigeko Sasamori: 1945 August 6.
I was 13 years old.
Takashi Tanemori: On August 6th, 1945, I was standing
against the window looking outside.
Koko: On August 6th, 1945, I was 8 months old baby.
And this is the dress I was wearing that day.
Narrator: A day earlier, at a military base on Tinian
Island in the pacific, the world's first combat atomic
bomb is brought out on the tarmac in preparation for
delivery.
The weapon's code name is Little Boy.
Its conception is the most covert operation ever
undertaken by the US Military.
Some say it holds the power of the sun, the stars, the
cosmos.
But for the crew, the bomb looks like something much
less cosmic.
Morris Jeppson: Little Boy was, ten feet long.
A weighing more than the biggest pick up truck you
can buy.
Narrator: Morris Jeppson, is one of twelve Enola Gay
crewmembers, whose mission is to drop Little Boy on a
yet to be identified Japanese city.
At 2:45am, almost 12 hours after loading the four and
a half ton cargo, the mission officially begins.
The Enola Gay takes off and heads west toward Japan.
Morris Jeppson: The first time I saw, Little Boy, was
when I climbed in to the bomb bay.
Narrator: Within this cylinder of armored steel
is 140 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
It's uranium is divided into a projectile and a
target.
The bomb works like a big gun, bags of gunpowder
ignite, creating the pressure to send the
projectile flying forward, smashing it into the
target.
Within seconds, critical mass creates a nuclear
chain reaction releasing a colossal amount of
destructive energy.
But because B-29s are known to crash on take off, the
gunpowder is not yet inside the bomb.
Now that they're safely off the ground Jeppson and
Captain Deke Parsons can put the explosives into
place.
It takes Parsons only 15 minutes to place the four
bags of cordite gunpowder inside the bomb's tail.
But Little Boy's detonation system is not yet fully armed.
That's Morris Jeppson's job.
These are the actual plugs he used that day to arm the
Little Boy bomb.
The weapon has three green plugs that work like a
safety lock on a gun, preventing it from
activating.
Jeppson must remove the green plugs and swap them out.
The red plugs complete the weapon's electrical
circuitry so that sparks can ignite the gunpowder.
Morris Jeppson: I had to handle, touch, lean on the
Little Boy bomb.
So the last person to have his hands on that weapon
was me.
Narrator: With the last red plug in place, the bomb is
now alive.
There are less than two hours before they reach
Japan yet no one's completely sure that Little
Boy will actually work.
Morris Jeppson: The Hiroshima bomb was an
experimental weapon and it was the first test.
Narrator: Three Japanese cities had been chosen as
potential targets for the attack.
The primary is the port city of Hiroshima located
on the delta of the Ota River.
A city of considerable military importance, it
houses a communication center and an assembly area
for troops.
But it's far from just a military target.
Eighty percent of the people here are civilians.
Since the previous March of 1945, almost every major
city in Japan has been fire-bombed yet Hiroshima
remains untouched.
Richard Richard Rhodes: The people of the city worried
about that.
Were they being chosen for something especially terrible?
Narrator: But as the Enola Gay reaches Japan,
Hiroshima's fate is still not final.
It all depends on the weather.
One of the requirements for the target is that it has
to be visible from the air.
Weather planes fly ahead to check the conditions over
the three selected cities.
As it happens it is a clear morning at Hiroshima.
The city's fate is now sealed.
Narrator: Thirteen-year-old Shigeko Sasamori can feel
the sun burning down on her on this hot, cloudless
morning.
She runs to join schoolmates in their
assignment to clear the streets for firebreaks in
case of attack.
Shigeko Sasamori: I look up the sky, I saw the
beautiful silver airplane and the white long tail and
the blue sky.
It looks beautiful.
And same time I saw something drop.
Narrator: Shigeko is less than a mile from the Enola
Gay's target, the distinctive T-shaped Aioi
Bridge.
Running across the river in the center of downtown, it
can be spotted easily at even 32,000 feet.
90 seconds before release, the Bombardier sets his
sights on the target about two miles below, and makes
careful last-minute manuevers.
Will they hit the target, and will it explode at the
pre-set altitude of 1900 feet over the city?
Morris Jeppson: There are hydraulic actuated doors,
big long doors 12, 15 feet long, they don't just
slowly open.
They fly open like that.
Narrator: Jeppson and fellow crewmembers had done
the math and expect the bomb to detonate at 42
seconds.
Morris Jeppson: At 43 seconds I was nervous.
I was monitoring the test box.
Thinking and counting in my head.
Narrator: The crew of the Enola Gay are not the only
ones counting down at 8:15 on August 6th.
Eight-year-old Takashi Tanemori, left home at 8am
to get to his school.
He's looking forward to playing with his friends.
Takashi Tanemori: I was excited this particular
morning for the hide and seek because I was chosen
as it.
So I was standing against the window looking outside.
Narrator: While Takashi counts, thousands of others
are outside, on route to work and school.
As the lone Enola Gay flies overhead there's little alarm.
It looks nothing like the bombing squadron most
people fear.
Richard Rhodes: People assumed it was a weather
plane, and instead of doing what the scientists had
assumed would happen which is they would run into bomb
shelters and be safe from the effects of the blast.
People came outdoors to look.
Takashi Tanemori: All of a sudden, bang, flash in the
sky, pure white.
I saw the bones in my fingers as though I was
looking at an x-ray.
So intense.
Narrator: This is the only footage ever taken of this
atomic explosion, scant documentation of an event
that changes the course of history.
Within moments, the mushroom cloud is 10 miles
high.
It spreads 3 miles over the city and its more than 350
thousand inhabitants.
On the day of the attack, the United States has been
in the war for 4 years and has lost over a hundred
thousand men on the pacific front alone.
Despite losing over a million men the Japanese
continue to fight fiercely.
Some fear that if the war goes on millions more will
be lost on both sides.
Richard Rhodes: We thus saw the atomic bomb as a
potential way to shock them into surrender.
Narrator: This radically new bomb reduces the
living, breathing downtown of Hiroshima to a
wasteland.
70,000 human beings are dead instantly.
Another 70,000 injured.
It's the highest death toll ever caused by a single
weapon.
Yet Japan continues to fight.
Three days later, on August 9th,
the United States drops a second
atomic bomb.
This time on the city of Nagasaki.
Another 40,000 die.
Japan formally surrenders three weeks later.
The world's bloodiest war is finally over.
Narrator: Just weeks after Japan's surrender, President
Truman orders a report on the physical and medical damage
inflicted by this new weapon.
Hundreds of scientists, engineers and military
personnel are recruited for the job.
Alongside occupation forces, special
investigative teams arrive in Hiroshima.
Working with Japanese scientists, they'll spend
10 weeks amidst the ruins gathering intelligence.
To comprehend the bomb's devastating power, the
analysts break down the three major effects of the
atomic explosion.
Upon detonation, an explosion of energy is
released into a small volume of air.
This creates a searing, white-hot fireball that
flashes hotter than the surface of the sun.
Gamma rays and neutrons from the break-up of
uranium shoot outward as deadly invisible radiation,
as the fireball stops expanding, a wall of
pressure or blast wave, races out at more than 700
miles per hour.
In their report, the scientists describe the
effects of the first stage of the explosion, a thermal
flash.
It generates temperatures of 7200 degrees Farenheit,
twice the melting point of steel.
Because there's so little film footage of the
explosion in Hiroshima, scientists look to atomic
tests, to help them measure the intensity of the heat.
Ted Postol: When the weapon detonates, an enormous
amount of energy is released in a very short
period of time, and a very large amount of the energy
is released simply in the form of light and heat.
The temperatures get extremely high.
Perhaps tens of millions of degrees.
It's as if somebody could reach down into the center
of the sun and place it in the atmosphere and let it
release its energy.
Narrator: This energy is instantly lethal when
released upon human beings.
Ted Postol: If your skin gets illuminated it will
simply be turned into carbon.
And in the case of people who were close enough to
get that much light and heat on their bodies, they
simply ceased to exist as living entities without
them probably even being aware that anything had
happened.
Narrator: It's impossible to know exactly how many
citizens are turned into simple piles of carbon
during those first few seconds.
The US Military maps the casualties.
Within a radius of eight hundred feet from ground
zero, almost no one survives.
Some, exposed directly to the rays of the fireball
seem to vanish completely.
What remains are now called atomic shadows.
These imprints of both people and objects can be
found all over Hiroshima.
Ted Postol: What happened was that the light from the
fireball shined on the ground and it caused the
concrete to actually darken.
The light from the fireball was intercepted by this
railing here, and so this bright area was not exposed
to the extreme light of the fireball.
Narrator: These Atomic shadows give scientists a
tool to analyze the location of the explosion.
Ted Postol: And this allowed people to measure
the direction and the height of burst of the
nuclear weapon because they could form a plum line and
from many different directions you can actually
get the location of the nuclear explosion.
Narrator: From their calculations, the
scientists discover the Enola Gay hit incredibly
close to the target, just 550 feet, less than two
football fields away from the t shaped bridge.
More than 50% of those killed within a half-mile
of ground zero died of severe burns.
Those who survive at that distance are barely alive.
This man is suffering from the type of burns that
plague Shigeko Sasamori.
The flash burns over two thirds of her body.
The little girl who had left the house that morning
is unrecognizable to her mother when she finds
Shigeko 5 days after the blast.
Shigeko Sasamori: She heard my voice but it didn't look
like me.
Because my face and hair was like a big black football.
All round and where is the nose where is the eyes.
Couldn't tell all black.
Man: Clothing ignited, thatched roofs of houses caught fire.
The flash heat was intense enough to cause fires
despite the distance of the fire ball from the ground..
Narrator: Anything exposed to the heat of the flash, a
child's notebook, newspapers, the traditional
paper soji screen, ignite instantly.
Temperatures higher than 3200 degrees Fahrenheit
fuse even roof tiles into unrecognizable shapes.
Richard Rhodes: This intense flash of light,
burned granite, burned steel, burned iron and glass.
Whether you lived or died depended on how far away
you were from ground zero.
It didn't matter if you were Japanese or Martian.
This was not an ideological bomb.
This was a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon of
terror.
Narrator: Less than a mile from ground zero is the
3-story school building where Takashi is playing
hide and seek.
The bomb's shockwave is about to hit.
Takeshi Tanemori: I do not know exactly how it
happened but our school building collapsed.
The blast singed the left side of face I do not know
how long under the debris.
Pitch dark.
You cannot see anything.
Even my hands from my nose I could not see.
Narrator: Takashi is not alone.
There are thousands trapped beneath the rubble that was
once downtown Hiroshima.
Narrator: The blast wave created by the Little Boy
atomic bomb flattens the city in less than 10 seconds.
Male Military Voice: Over 60,000 buildings were
destroyed or severely damaged by the atomic bomb.
This represents over 67% of the city's structures.
Narrator: A full minute after detonation the force
of the shock wave jolts the crew of the Enola Gay, 9
miles away, 29,000 feet in the air.
Morris Jeppson: There was a slapping effect on the
airplane it was the passage of a shock wave.
And ok that's expected.
And then a few seconds and another smaller slap and I
don't' think anybody on the airplane knew what that was.
Narrator: That second hit means the bomb has exploded
as planned, 1900 feet above the city.
To understand the dynamic forces of shockwaves, blast
simulations are captured with high-speed photography.
Upon explosion, a super-heated bubble of air
violently pushes outward, creating a shock wave.
Ted Postol: Now this shock wave as it expands outward
will reach the ground and reflect off the ground,
creating a combination of a reflected shock and a
primary shock and so on the ground you will do much
more damage than would otherwise be the case from
the individual shocks.
And this is why the attackers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
chose to detonate a weapon a couple thousand
feet off the ground, basically to
maximize the destruction to the target.
Narrator: If Little Boy had been dropped on the ground
the earth would have absorbed most of its
energy.
But detonation in the air forces the shock wave out
flattening just about everything in its path.
There is heavy damage for three miles in every
direction.
More than a half a century later, the once devastated
city of Hiroshima is completely rebuilt.
Few visible scars remain from the bombing.
But there is one building that stood almost directly
under the bomb's detonation and it is still here today
as a symbol of peace.
Once an exhibits building for local business and
government, everyone inside was killed instantly.
But the building still stands.
Ted Postol: The dome was built of copper and copper
melts at a low temperature, light from the fire ball
was so intense that it basically melted the copper
before the shockwave arrived.
The shock wave came down vertically blew through
this opening and just knocked each floor down as
it propagated through.
So this building is standing because of the
peculiar accident that it was almost directly under
ground zero.
Narrator: Windows and flying debris become
shrapnel as far as 12 miles away from the blast.
The damage from the explosion is well
documented after US troops arrive but on August 6th
the violence of the moment is captured only in the
survivor's memories.
Many of Hiroshima's survivors have painted
those first hours.
Years later, Takashi Tanimori also wrote about them.
Takashi Tanimori: Beneath the heap, I lay buried on
my back, unable to move.
Narrator: Trapped less than a mile from ground zero,
Takashi can no longer hear the cries of help from his
classmates.
A young soldier digs him out from beneath the rubble.
But he's not out of danger yet.
Takashi Tanemori: The soldier carrying me weaved
in and out of throngs of people who were screaming
in agony, charred, dead or just barely alive.
Creeping, stumbling, dragging their feet,
looking for any escape the blazing inferno.
Narrator: The military analysts studying the destruction
report the beginning of a rare phenomenon.
Man: In Hiroshima fires sprang up simultaneously
all over the wide flat central area of the city.
Richard Rhodes: People don't seem to understand
about this bomb that it's main effect is fire.
It's not as if a bomb started a fire in one
corner of a street and the fire slowly worked its way
up to the other corner.
Everything was lit instantaneously.
Narrator: These small flames represent the many
fires burning in Hiroshima.
Fires that were set not only by the initial flash
but also by the collapse of gas lines and broken
cooking stoves.
The fires could be seen by the Enola Gay's crew from
almost 30,000 feet above the city.
Richard Rhodes: What they saw really rather horrified
them.
Morris Jeppson: Down on the ground was a spreading mass
of flickering lights, which had to be flames of things
burning.
Richard Rhodes: There were fires everywhere.
One of the crew said, "I looked for a while and
counted for a while and then I stopped counting."
Morris Jeppson: Now the comprehension of what was going
on down there was settling on people's minds, including
mine, that there was bad destruction and loss of
life down below.
And the hope in everyone's mind was that the explosion
was of magnitude that it might affect the end the
war which it did.
Narrator: The flaming points of light below the
Enola Gay are about to turn into something much worse.
To see what happens when many small fires are set
off simultaneously, Hughes Associates, a group of fire
protection engineers, designed a simulation.
Jason Floyd: First the fire will be very small and
eventually we'll start to see an effect developed as
what happened at Hiroshima.
Think of it as rather than being cylinders to being
city blocks of burning buildings.
In the city is you have uneven terrain, you have
hills, you have buildings of different sizes so you
have uneven airflow we've set up these sheets of dry
wall with gaps in them to sort of represent this idea
of having uneven terrain which is going to introduce
a bit of a swirl into the flow feeding the fire.
Narrator: The heat of the flames sucks in air from
the ground.
This creates gale force winds of up to 50 miles per hour.
Jason Floyd: At points of time over the city you
would have had "fire whirls" these tornados of
flame which would appear and disappear as the air is
entrained into the fire and forms these vortexes, much
like a dust devil on a hot summer day.
Narrator: Whether flames from candles, canisters or
city blocks, the fires merge as the heat and winds
become more intense.
In Hiroshima the mass fire burns for 6 hours and
consumes 4 and-a half-square miles.
What remains is what survivors call a "city of death."
Shigeko Sasamori: Hiroshima city was red ocean, red
ocean fire burning whole entire city is burning.
Narrator: The rivers of Hiroshima are one of the
only safe havens for survivors seeking safety
from the heat and flames.
Despite her serious burns, young Shigeko Sasamori makes
it to a river bank, only to be surrounded by
death and suffering.
Shigeko Sasamori: I heard a baby screaming.
I still remember very clearly the mother was
bleeding all over and, and tried to nurse baby and
baby was so , when I remember that part of it I
just can't take it.
Narrator: The river is choked with floating
corpses.
Many of those still alive are barely recognizable.
Shigeko Sasamori: People themselves just horrible
looking, the hair with ashes, and kinked up, and
some were skin hanging on.
Just dead people walking, like a ghost.
Gusterson: Eye witnesses will talk about survivors
walking out with their hands in front of them,
apparently it dulled the pain of skin that was
falling off, but it also made people look like
walking ghosts.
Richard Rhodes: I remember one woman described seeing
a man walking down the road holding his eyeball in his
hand.
It's hard for us to imagine how dantesque the world was
that was created by the explosion of this beautiful
invention of physics.
Shigeko Sasamori: If there is a hell, that was a hell.
Narrator: Thousands, in desperate need of help,
have nowhere to turn and no one to treat them.
Man: Medical facilities, crowded into the heart of the
city were crippled or wiped out by the explosion.
The impact of the atomic bomb disrupted.
Narrator: The normal fabric of life in Hiroshima is shattered.
Before the attack there are more than 200 doctors in
the city, 90 percent are killed or injured that day.
Gusterson: The scale of destruction was so
enormous, it's not just the 10s of 1000s of dead and
incinerated bodies, there were hardly any hospitals
functioning, hardly any doctors functioning.
You have thousands of people dying, gravely ill
with very little infrastructure to help them.
Narrator: Of the area's 45 hospitals only 3 were usable.
But more than the city's infrastructure is wiped out.
Richard Rhodes: When you destroy a city you're
destroying an intricate web of social and personal
connections.
One of the horrors for the survivors was that their
world had been burned away.
They were left with their burns trying to decide
where the world was.
Narrator: People who had managed to survive the
attack are suddenly struck down with a mysterious
illness some called "Disease X."
Thousands of survivors report vomiting, purple
sores and hair loss in the days and weeks after the
blast.
The US Government knows it's radiation poisoning.
But they don't fully understand it.
Richard Rhodes: The only studies that had been done
prior to that time, had been done on rabbits.
There was almost no literature about whole body
exposure in human beings.
Narrator: Two years after the bomb was dropped the U.S.
government creates the Atomic Bomb Casualty
Commission, the ABCC.
Their mission is not to treat the survivors, but to
observe and study them to see what radiation exposure
would do to their health and mortality.
Koko Tanimoto Kondo was one of their subjects.
Less than a mile from ground zero, Koko was an
eight-month old baby in her mother's arms when the bomb
exploded.
Koko Tanimoto Kondo: This is area where our house was
located.
Now it's a new building It's kind of difficult to
tell but yes, this is the place.
At 8:15 I was with my mother and the house was
destroyed.
Narrator: Although Koko survived the blast and the
fire what was not known was the effect radiation would
have on her body.
In the first milliseconds of Little Boy's detonation,
electromagnetic energy, in the form of gamma rays,
neutrons and x-rays, sprays up to 2 miles in every
direction.
The waves and tiny particles, invisible and
odorless, bombard anyone exposd with cell-damaging energy.
For almost all within a half-mile, the rays are deadly.
Hugh Gusterson: Many of the survivors carry around with
them the fear that the radiation is, like, a sort
of time bomb in their bodies.
They've lived with the constant fear that they
would come down with leukemia or cancer, that
they would give birth to children with birth
defects and so on.
Narrator: Several years after her house collapsed
around her, Koko became part of the ABCC's study.
Koko Kondo: The whole world wanted to know how the
radiation affected the human body.
The best way is to check the children.
Narrator: For a decade, Koko spends one day of
every year being examined.
Thousands of survivors are still participating in what
is now one of the longest running medical studies in
the world.
The ABCC, now the Radiation Effects Research
Foundation, has collected data from over 120,000
atomic bomb survivors.
Today, with the collaboration of the
Japanese government, their information continues to
shed light on how radiation affects the human body.
Evan Douple: The reason we as mamals die
from radiation exposure is simply because cells have
DNA damage, chromosone damage and they stop dividing.
Narrator: When cells stop dividing the immune system
fails, internal organs shut down, fetuses stop developing.
The process of life ends.
But this understanding comes at a cost for
survivors like Koko.
As she hits puberty, the examinations at the ABCC
become difficult.
At 14, Koko is ushered from her private exam room to an
auditorium.
Koko Kondo: The doctor told me to go up the stage.
But the spotlight was so strong so I could not see
how many people inside, but I could hear the different
languages so I could guess this must be the doctor's
meeting.
Then doctor said, "Please take off your gown."
Puberty age.
Your body change from childhood to adult woman.
I was just so furious.
Yes August 6th, 1945 I was in Hiroshima but I didn't
started that war.
Why do I have to show almost naked body to the
people?
I couldn't tell that to my father, or my mother or my
friends, it's something deep inside for a long time.
Evan Douple: It's quite reasonable that they might
feel they were treated like guinea pigs.
But because they have been so faithful and loyal and
contributing, their legacy is that their information
is going to benefit all of mankind.
Narrator: Koko has never been able to have children,
a possible result of radiation exposure.
But her participation in the study is part of a
different sort of legacy.
The ABCC data is used to help treat others exposed
to radiation, like the victims of Chernobyl.
Koko Kondo: When I heard that, I was pleased that my
data is useful for others.
Narrator: Today scientific details about radiation
studies are freely shared internationally.
But there are other aspects of the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima that are not easy to uncover.
Secrecy has always enshrouded the world of
atomic science from the conception of the bombs
even to today.
For years, the U.S.
government confiscated and suppressed nearly all
images and first-person accounts of the bombing of
Hiroshima and its immediate aftermath.
It wasn't until 1952, seven years after the bomb fell,
that these images, the only photos taken on the day of
the bombing, were made public.
Gusterson: Military censors were aware that public
opinion back home could turn to some degree against
the bombing if they were exposed to images that are
very painful to see of what exactly the atomic bomb had
done to human bodies on a large scale.
Narrator: While the military didn't want to share details of
the aftermath with the public, they did want to
understand the power of these new weapons.
And they used film footage of later atomic tests to do it.
The footage showed not only effects of the heat ray and
shock wave on different materials and structures,
but by studying the explosion itself, analysts
could measure a weapon's distance and yield.
Many of these films were placed under lock and key
and to this day remain classified.
The military analysts, who witnessed the enormous
scale and chilling effects of atomic weapons, close
their report with a grim observation.
Man: There is no more forceful argument for
peace than the sight of the devastation of Hiroshima.
Ted Postol: These weapons, they are so indiscriminate.
They are so murderous.
You have to ultimately conclude that these are
weapons of mass genocide.
Narrator: By the mid-1950s the US military was in a
global nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and
was testing nuclear weapons up to 1000 times more
powerful than those used on Japan.
Richard Rhodes: We're balanced on a knife-edge.
And until we get rid of all the nuclear weapons in the
world and keep it that way, we're always going to be
balanced.
In fact even without nuclear weapons we're
always going to be balanced on the knife-edge because
we know how to make them.
Narrator: Today, it's difficult to see evidence
of the once-devastated Hiroshima.
The museums and monuments of Peace Park are a
reminder of what happened on August 6th, 1945.
Inside this mound are the remains of thousands bodies
not recognizable and never claimed.
But the most powerful reminders come from those
who survived the only ones who can tell us what it's
like to live through an atomic attack.
Koko: Only one bomb changed the whole thing.
We have to learn.
We cannot make the same mistake.
No.
Takashi: The greatest way to avenge your enemy is by
learning to forgive.
I hope I am able to give my children a better world
than I received, by telling the story, the lessons that
we have learned, so that's my desire.