Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s substack Between Rock and a Hard Place.
Every year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.” As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, thousands of posts, and in three books, since 1984: Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-up and my recent award-winner on the first atomic movie, The Beginning or the End. Now I’ve directed an award-winning documentary. Here’s today’s entry. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.
While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 79rd anniversary will be marked – or mourned today.
Continue reading “Trinity and the Parts Left Out of Oppenheimer“
