In August 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs: one on Hiroshima, one on Nagasaki.
So far, they’re the first and last such weapons used in war. But their legacy lingers — there are now close to 16,000 nuclear warheads deployed around the world, about 14,000 of them controlled just about equally by the United States and Russia
How did we get from the terminal act of World War II in the Pacific to today’s nuclear standoff?
University of North Dakota History Professor Albert Berger — a long-time teacher and researcher about atomic weapons — just released Life and Times of the Atomic Bomb: Nuclear Weapons and the Transformation of Warfare, a book about this compelling subject.
Berger, who’s been teaching a class on atomic weapons regularly since 1988, tells this story in 260 pages, covering, as he says, “the basics” which are chilling enough to remind us of this nuclear gorilla in the global room.
Humorous side?
In a public presentation on campus about his book the day it was released, Berger recounted several anecdotes that were unnerving reminders that even amid such potential terror, humor sometimes carries the day.
For example, physicist Richard Feynman, one of many geniuses contracted by the U.S. government to build this terrible weapon at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert, used to play the bongos at all hours of the night — in an apartment building with paper-thin walls. Feynman, ever the practical joker, broke into top-secret military safes just to leave a note attesting to his break-ins — then he’d sneak through the facility’s fences and come in through the front gate, just because.
Non-political
Berger showed the only five photo images taken in Hiroshima the day of the bombing — including images of the devastation of the city’s buildings and of survivors in shredded clothing tending to others’ injuries.
“If you were at the hypocenter of the Hiroshima bomb, you never knew what hit you,” Berger said. “You were vaporized in a thousandth of a second.”
Three days later, the U.S. loosed its second atom bomb over Nagasaki.
At noon on August 15, 1945 (Tokyo time), Japan’s emperor announced his country’s unconditional surrender.
“I tried to write a narrative text book around the courses I teach on nuclear weapons, not an encyclopedic volume full of technical and scientific detail,” Berger said. “There aren’t many such books around and some of them have political agendas, which I tried to avoid.”
For example, Berger noted, he very much wanted to get around the “we were the good guys” attitude toward nuclear weapons and the Cold War.
“I was trying to make my book accessible, for either an undergraduate audience or, better still, a general audience,” he said.
Did ending the war actually require those bombings? Berger said no, although it might have ended the war sooner and at less cost.
But he added, “This is a classic bell that cannot be unrung.”
Juan Miguel Pedraza
University & Public Affairs writer