Wells’ vision certainly had an impact. It inspired Alexander Korda’s film Things to Come (1936), and was manifestly prescient about the outbreak of world war, even though this happened a year earlier than Wells anticipated, in 1939.
In his prediction of the way technology could be harnessed for militaristic ends, Wells was perhaps mindful of the discoveries of the scientist Leo Szilard, whom he had met in 1929. Szilard was an émigré Hungarian physicist, who in 1933, the same year as Wells' book, conceived of the nuclear chain reaction process, which led to his patenting of the design for a nuclear reactor. Emigrating to the USA, Szilard became closely involved in the Manhattan Project, though he later expressed deep remorse that his scientific discoveries had been employed so directly to cause human death and destruction.
Monday 6th August 1945 will forever be significant, as the date that a USA B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped an atomic bomb, ‘Little Boy’, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The day had begun much like any other – a regular summer morning in a busy, bustling city, for a time Japan’s capital. A typhoon on 1 August had delayed the bombing raid, but now all was calm and peaceful. ‘The hour was early, the morning still, warm, and beautiful… Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden’, wrote Michihiko Hachiya, a resident who survived.
The B-29, nicknamed ‘Enola Gay’ by one of the pilots (after
his mother's name), took off from Tinian. The ‘Little Boy’ bomb inside
the plane looked to one of the crew members like ‘an elongated trash can with
fins’. It was a gun-type fission weapon, whereby a quantity of uranium-235 was
divided into two parts, and an explosive device fired one part into the other,
triggering the nuclear chain reaction. Such was the potential volatility of the bomb that
the explosives were only inserted into it after the plane had taken off on its fateful flight.
A timer would enable just enough time for the plane to escape the force of the
blast.
The bomb was dropped just after 8.15am and fell for 44
seconds from the B-29, exploding 500 metres above the city, at the time of 8.16am.
In an instant, the entire world had changed.
Surviving eye witnesses (from just outside of the city centre) recorded experiencing at first a blinding light, seemingly from nowhere but illuminating
everything (in Japanese, a pika). It
had a photographic effect, leaving shadows forever inscribed on surfaces, such
as the famous shadow left by the unknown person captured sitting on the granite steps of one of
Hiroshima’s banks.
Then came an intense
heat, reaching 10,000 oF at its core. All animal and insect life in
the vicinity disintegrated at a stroke: birds, insects, pets, mammals – all were
instantly cremated. Human life within the hypocentre of the explosion suffered similarly, perishing in an instant from a 370m-diameter fireball. Many beyond the immediate radius did not die but instead suffered atrocious burns. ‘In my mind’s eye, like a waking dream,
I could still see the tongues of fire at work on the bodies of men’
After the heat came the radiation, as the dust and ash swept
up in the fireball – the famous mushroom cloud – fell to ground. Eyewitnesses
recorded that the world suddenly went from blinding white light to dark grey
and brown colours. The falling debris was referred to as ‘black rain’, and
anyone caught up in it was at risk of a fatal dose of radiation. ‘There was a
fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and
vegetation were dead’ said Yoko Ota.
The effect on human life was devastating. 70,000 died as a
direct result of the bomb, and a further 70,000 would die in the weeks and
months ahead from its poisonous effects. The after-effects meant that as many
as 200,000 people in total were killed as a result of the bomb over a five-year
period.
The effect on the city itself was equally destructive. Of
Hiroshima’s 76,000 buildings, 48,000 were obliterated, and 70,000 were ruined. Traditional Japanese buildings, many of them
made from wood and paper, fell ‘as if they had been scythed’ (Robert Rhodes). The
bomb levelled the city entirely, leaving behind just a few skeletons of
buildings.
On a visit to Hiroshima earlier this year, I saw for myself
how a modern city has been rebuilt out of this apocalyptic event. But at the
heart of this city, near the hypocentre of the explosion, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Museum stands as a testament to the devastating effect of the Little Boy bomb. The
experience is gruelling. But the overriding emotion at the end of it is one of
hope and determination. The Peace flame outside the museum in the Memorial Park
burns day and night, and won’t be extinguished until the last nuclear bomb has
been decommissioned.
Also part of the Memorial Park is the ‘A-Bomb Dome’, the
former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall of 1915. This was one of
the few buildings to survive the blast, but in a ruinated state, with the green-domed
roof now a skeleton. Whereas other ruins have been supplanted by modern high-rise
developments, this one has been deliberately left to stand as a reminder of the
effects of the bomb. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Conservation work
has been carried out to ensure the building always looks as it did just after
8.16am on 6 August 1945. Only the greenness of the grass speaks to the eventual triumph of nature over human catastrophe.
Quotes are taken from Robert Rhodes, The Making of the Atom Bomb (1988).
