The Manhattan Project to create the bomb was a science and math achievement, but also just as much an industrial manufacturing achievement, one conducted in secret. At the University of Chicago they showed the bomb could be possible, creating a chain-reacting pile of uranium. Hanford, WA was the site of the plutonium refinement plant, Oak Ridge, TN of uranium refinement, and Los Alamos, NM where the bomb was built. 75,000 people were working in and around Oak Ridge by the end of the war, over 8,000 at Los Alamos, and 45,000 at Hanford.
The project director was General Leslie Groves and in charge of building the bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Other drivers of the project were Vannevar Bush, head of the science effort, James B. Conant, president of Harvard, Enrico Fermi, a physicist who was deputy to Groves, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, and Edward Teller. Noted was how important "energy = mass X the speed of light," squared by Albert Einstein is. Graff covers Feynman highlighting the "atomic hypothesis, that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
The bomber wing was the 509th Composite Group, one, including transport supply aircraft, designed to fly a single weapon. They trained at Wendover Field at the Utah, Nevada state line. The bombs were dropped by B-29s, and airmen at first were reluctant to fly the B-29 as they were worried about its safety. To convince the men to fly the B-29, women, who weren't allowed to fly in combat, were recruited to fly it, and then when men saw this, they went ahead. After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman became President and was told about the bomb, with the full description provided by Vannevar Bush. Germany surrendered May 8, and the Trinity test of the bomb was July 16 in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert.
The first bomb was transported on the U.S.S. Indianapolis to Tinian, 40 square miles and 1,500 miles from Japan. The Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, was the plane that dropped on Hiroshima August 6, 1945, with Nagasaki three days later. The mission over Hiroshima was a textbook effort, that which dropped on Nagasaki was riddled with problems, including a switch from Kokura to Nagasaki as the target due to cloud cover and barely landing on Okinawa, the closest American base, while little fuel after dropping the bomb.
In Hiroshima, 70,000 of the city's 76,000 homes were destroyed. Casualty reports had 66,000 dying in the initial blast and another 140,000 by the end of the year, roughly half the city's residents. Japan initiated surrender negotiations the day after Nagasaki, and then surrendered August 15, 1945. As people in the days and weeks and months after would suffer from radiation poisoning, the U.S. government denied that there were any lasting effects of the atomic explosions. In early 1946, New Yorker correspondent John Hershey traveled to Hiroshima, and then the August 31, 1946 issue of the magazine devoted the entire issue, 30,000 words, to covering what happened in the city. The book closes with the Albert Einstein quote "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth... rocks."
