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The Hiroshima bomb did not make a mushroom. PT: You see all kinds of mushroom clouds, but they were made with different types of bombs. Next day, when we got figures from the scientists on what they had learned from all the things, they said, "When that bomb exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away from it." I had accelerometers installed in all airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. And the tailgunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he said that, we got this kick in the ass. The shockwave was coming up at us after we turned.
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Tom is working on his log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over the target?" And Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee says: "What lousy navigating. Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his bombardier's report and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log. We had been briefed to stay off the radios: "Don't say a damn word, what we do is we make this turn, we're going to get out of here as fast as we can." I want to get out over the sea of Japan because I know they can't find me over there. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my life. I'm in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. We get to that point where I say "one second" and by the time I'd got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. We'd been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen. I said, "OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They listened intently but I didn't see any change in their faces or anything else. He said, "Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I said, "Bob, you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. "Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded."Īfter we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, "You know what we're doing today?" They said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I said, "Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special." My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert.
What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics.
But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there." He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb.
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So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it.
PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened. ST: So Ramsey told you about the possibilities. PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe.
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ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs? All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. ST: Did Oppenheimer tell you about the destructive nature of the bomb? The whole interview is here, but these are my favorite excerpts: The late, great writer Studs Terkel interviewed the pilot of the Enola Gay (named for the pilot's mother), which dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. It's a subject fraught with emotions and politics, such that the only people really qualified to weigh in were those who were there. The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 - and, by most accounts, ended World War II - are nothing if not controversial.