Free Armageddon Science by Brian Clegg Page A

compared with the aftermath of the dropping of Little Boy.
    Three days after Hiroshima, confusion raged in Japan. Some argued that, disastrous though the attack had been, it was a one-off that changed nothing. Against this backdrop, another B-29, named Bock’s Car, with Major Charles Sweeney at the controls, took off from Tinian Island to drop the world’s second plutonium bomb on the Japanese military arsenal at Kokura. Conditions were difficult. The plane came under antiaircraft fire, and visibility was poor because of palls of smoke from conventional bombing attacks. Major Sweeney diverted to the alternate target he had been given—the city of Nagasaki.
    With a yield of nearly twice that of the Little Boy, the Fat Man bomb might have been even more devastating, but the terrain around Nagasaki contained the blast to some degree, reducing the impact on the outskirts of the city—even so, another seventy thousand or more died immediately as the bomb exploded. The Japanese realized that Hiroshima had been no one-off, last-ditch attempt by their enemy. The Japanese surrender followed soon after.
    During the Second World War, the Soviet Union had begun a limited nuclear program, but the intense pressures the Soviets faced in their battles with Germany meant that limited resources could be deployed. Now, as the war came to an end, two factors contributed to the Soviet Union quickly playing catch-up. One was espionage. During the war, a number of scientists with Communist sympathies, who believed it was essential to have a nuclear balance, were passing as many details as they could of both reactors and bombs to the Soviets. The other factor was a rapid buildup of effort, making use of as many materials as could be retrieved from the German nuclear program in the eastern section of occupied Germany.
    Stalin was determined that the Soviet Union would not be held for ransom by American power, a possibility that he believed had been demonstrated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear program was officially made a state priority just eleven days after the bombing of Nagasaki. Its importance was emphasized by Stalin’s putting his feared lieutenant and secret police chief Lavrenty Beria in charge of the development.
    Stalin did not believe that the United States would use atomic weapons against the Soviet Union for anything less than a response to a direct attack—but he still felt that the USSR’s having its own nuclear weapons was essential to maintain a balance of power. By August 1949, newly built Soviet reactors had produced enough plutonium to test a bomb that had a more than accidental resemblance to the Fat Man design. At 7 a.m. on August 29, Beria and his team witnessed the first Soviet nuclear explosion in a test in the remote regions of Kazakhstan. Although the USSR would never catch up with the United States in numbers of warheads, it would not be long before both superpowers had nuclear arsenals capable of immense destruction.
    Did the bomb have to be used in Japan? It’s too late to say now, but a committee of the scientists working on nuclear weapons development, meeting in June 1945 before the Trinity test took place, believed it wasn’t necessary to use the atomic bomb in anger to have a deterrent effect. In the Franck report, named after committee chairman James Franck, the group argued against nuclear proliferation. If anything, the report suggested, stockpiling more and more nuclear weapons might be the trigger for an attack rather than a means of defense. “Just because a potential enemy will be afraid of being outnumbered and outgunned,” the report commented, “the temptation for him may be overwhelming to attempt a sudden unprovoked blow.”
    The Franck report argued that the best approach for world safety would be to demonstrate the new weapon in front of an assembled group of United Nations observers, and for the United States to express its magnanimity by saying, “Look what we could have