At 8: 16 AM on August 6, 1945 – 08:16:02 to be precise, Hiroshima time – Little Boy exploded. When President Harry Truman learned of the successful detonation of the atomic bomb and the destruction of the Japanese city, he said, "This is the greatest thing in history" (Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon and Shuster: New York, 1986, p. 734).
When future historians convene to compile an account of the 20th century – if there is enough of a future after global warming and nuclear proliferation – they may very well agree with Truman.
The effort and enterprise and science that went into the development of nuclear weapons embraced most of the greatest scientific minds of the generation, and the ability to unleash the immense forces within the basic building blocks of nature represented an astonishing culmination. If there is any single and irreplaceable watershed in the history of human intellectual accomplishment, the success of the Manhattan Project represents it.
And if there is a watershed in the history of human morality, the cataclysms caused by Little Boy over Hiroshima and, three days later, by Fat Man, the second atomic bomb used in warfare, over Nagasaki, are at the top of the heap.
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