Still, the Japanese government fought on. President Truman sent public messages announcing the dropping of an atomic bomb and threatened more if Japan refused to surrender. People were vaporized from the blast and their shadows imprinted on walls. With a blinding flash and rising mushroom cloud, the blast and resulting firestorm obliterated the city and destroyed 70,000 buildings. On August 6, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, dropped the uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy, which exploded with the force of 12,500 tons of TNT 1,900 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Horrified by what he saw, Oppenheimer called to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” But it was too late to turn back. Groves and Oppenheimer witnessed the atomic fireball expand into a mushroom cloud visible 60 miles away. to devastating effect, equal to the detonation of almost 20,000 tons of TNT.
The device, mounted on a metal tower, consisted of just 13.5 pounds of plutonium encased in two-and-a-half tons of explosives. The test, codenamed “Trinity,” took place on July 16, 1945, in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico, 200 miles south of Los Alamos. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves.Ītomic bombs have been used only twice in war-both times by the United States against Japan at the end of World War II, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scientists and engineers first developed nuclear weapons technology during World War II in the frame of a project, known as Manhattan Project, fully funded the US Government and directed by J. The nuclear bombs (also known as atomic bombs) are powerful weapons that use nuclear reactions as their source of explosive energy.