American Realities with Bill Youngs
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      • Table of Contents
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      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
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      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
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        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume Two: 
Historical Episodes from Reconstruction to the Present, Chapter Ten


                                                              "Hiroshima" courtesy of the Wikipedia Commons

10. Total War
      The Bombing of Hiroshima

Picture

Summary

The essay describes the most deadly act of violence ever carried out by human beings. The article centers on Hiroshima as event: the Enola Gay’s flight, life in the city before the bombing, the moment of destruction,and the aftermath among the Japanese and the Americans. It suggests that the most remarkable thing about Hiroshima is not that the bombing was an extraordinary act, but that the course of total war to that point had made the use of the atomic bomb seem a logical, even an inevitable, extension of previous policies.

Author reads from the Text

When America entered World War II in 1941, President Roosevelt established a scientific advisory committee, including Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Harvard president James B. Conant, to begin considering development of an atomic bomb. This group in turn established a committee of scientists, including Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1942 the “Manhattan Project” was organized, and work began on an atomic bomb. At its peak, the project employed 125,000 workers scattered among three top-secret plants: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Most of the employees did not know what they were working on. The project’s $2 billion budget was raised secretly without congressional authorization.

On December 2, 1942, a controlled chain reaction was produced at the University of Chicago, establishing an early milestone for the project, but it was not until two and a half years later that the first atomic bomb was ready for testing. The site chosen was an airbase at Alamogordo, New Mexico, a remote place of desert and mountains 120 miles from Albuquerque. In mid-July 1945 scientists and military men from around the United States gathered at Alamogordo. Among them were James B. Conant; Gen. Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist most responsible for the bomb’s creation; and U.S. Army Air Corps Col. Paul Tibbets.


At Alamogordo they assembled at an old ranch house near a 120-foot-high steel tower at a remote corner of the base. The bomb was to be exploded atop the tower. In the early hours of July 16 they waited anxiously as torrents of rain and streaks of lightning delayed the firing. As the time for the blast drew near many lay face down with their feet toward the tower. Tibbets flew above in a B-29. No one knew what to expect.


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Chapter 9: The New Deal
Chapter 11: The Cold War