Little Boy and Fat Man

Despite all the rhetoric, much of it contradictory on the American side, surrounding the causes and goals of the present war in Iran, it's clear that Teheran's ambitions to have their own nuclear programme has long been the critical issue that divides the combatants. The Iranians insist this programme is for pacific civilian use, the West broadly (led aggressively at the present time by Israel and the US) believes they want to make their own atomic bombs and should be stopped from doing so. Ironically, in August 1945, it was the Americans who dropped the two first and only atomic bombs (codenamed 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' respectively) ever deployed in war, incinerating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and setting in train a debate that still endures today as to whether these deadly weapons should or need to have been used at all in order to bring about Japan's surrender. There is significant consensus among historians now that the US had other options and that dropping the bombs was much more a political act than a military necessity. The popular narrative has long held that any invasion of the Japanese home islands would have entailed enormous American casualties, with figures of up to a million cited. This justification for using the bombs (reiterated by Truman in his own post-war memoirs) no longer stands up to serious scrutiny: the casualty figures, it seems, were a case of cavalier journalistic speculation at the time and bore no relation to reality (General MacArthur, slated to lead the ground forces in the planned invasion, advised Truman that they could expect losses of up to 120,000 men). Another key point is that the start date of the US invasion (Operation Olympic) was set for November 1, 1945 - almost 3 months after the A-bombs had been dropped - suggesting that other reasons lay behind the momentous decision in August. The sequence of that month's events is crucial here. Thus Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima on 6 August. Two days later, on the 8th, the Red Army (in line with a commitment to the Allies made at Yalta) invaded Manchuria, inflicting a crushing defeat on the elite Japanese army occupying it and going on to drive Tokyo's troops out of both Korea and the Sakhalin Islands. On the 9th, Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki. On the 14th August, after protracted in-fighting among Tokyo's top civilian and military factions, Emperor Hirohito finally insisted that Japan surrender - and declared this publicly in a radio broadcast the following day. So most historians now broadly agree that the Americans dropped the atomic bombs to speed up the Japanese surrender. Why? Because, if Tokyo surrendered quickly, the Soviets would have less time to grab more territory in Asia, which the US now feared would create a post-war problem to compound the growing tensions that Stalin's takeover of eastern Europe was already generating. Stalin offered to occupy Japan's northern island, but Truman made it very clear that America alone would take over Japan. On 15 August, with Tokyo's surrender, the Red Army's week-long advance abruptly halted. In short, Little Boy and Fat Man were used to convey a political and diplomatic message to the USSR - to keep out of East Asia and Japan on the one hand, to restrain any overreach in Europe on the other. You could say, then, that this was not the last military action of WW2 but rather the first salvo launched in the post-war peace that would quickly become the Cold War. It's worth noting that, cynically calculating as the American action seems in this light (after all, the two bombs caused the immediate combined deaths of at least 150,000 Japanese civilians in cities which had no particular military significance), in the event the decision was made by a very small circle of officials around Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes. Most American civilian and military leaders at the time (including Eisenhower, Marshall, Leahy and MacArthur) were against dropping the bombs, they felt they weren't necessary. Even General Curtis LeMay, whose B-29 bombers had destroyed 63 Japanese cities by August 1945 (causing 100,000 deaths in Tokyo alone), even he believed that Japan was close to surrender - another two weeks of fire-bombing would do it. When, a month earlier, Truman casually informed Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that the US had built 'a new weapon of unusual destructive force' and intended to use it on Japan if it did not surrender, Stalin's mild reaction at the time suggested he had no idea what a game-changer this weapon would be. Little did the Americans know that Soviet spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and the Russians were already embarked on their own atomic bomb programme. In fact, later the very same day (or so Marshall Zhukov's memoirs tell us) that Truman told Stalin about the new US weapon at Potsdam, Stalin telegrammed Moscow urging his atomic scientists to speed up the Soviet bomb project. Four years later, to the Americans' amazement, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its own atomic bomb. The rest, as they say, is history.

The 10-feet long Little Boy waiting to be loaded into the bomb bay of the B-29 Superfortress 'Enola Gay' on the Pacific island of Tinian. Despite its name, the weapon weighed almost 10,000 pounds: accordingly, it took two miles of runway for the bomber to get aloft and, due to the risk of setting off the bomb prematurely, it could only be armed once the plane was at its bombing altitude of 31,000 feet. Little Boy detonated at 2000 feet above the centre of Hiroshima and killed instantly some 80,000 people.

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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