Original subtitles

These atomic blasts occurred in the final days of World War II.

The first shattered the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945.

The second devastated Nagasaki three days later.

The horror is seared into the memory of the survivors.

I saw a huge flash and immediately ran into the house.

If I hadn't, I would have been badly burned and I wouldn't

be talking to you today.

Each bomb, easily carried by aircraft, could kill more than 70,000

people in a few thousandths

of a second and condemn the unlucky survivors to the slow

agony of radiation poisoning.

In a flash, the world entered the nuclear age.

It was a horrible, horrible succession of assaults on people

and civilians' life.

The most destructive weapon man has ever developed.

The bombs marked the end of a frantic race

triggered by the Nazi threat.

For the Allies, it was seen as the only way to end the Second

World War, and it changed

the face of war and peace forever.

The objective was to realize the full potential of strategic

bombing as a weapon of terror.

The atomic bomb was clearly a turning point in the

history of humanity.

It began with history's biggest, best -kept secret, the

Manhattan Project, the mission

that gave birth to the bomb.

It was tremendous.

In dollars today, it was $30 billion spent.

It was mammoth.

The Manhattan Project, at its peak, employed about 130,000 people.

In laboratories around the United States, these men and

women worked on a classified

mission, unaware of its magnitude.

I had never heard of the atomic bomb project.

I didn't even know it existed.

He says, "We're building a bomb", and that's all I knew.

Helming the project that would change the face of the world

was General Leslie Richard

Groves, who put his trust in physicist Robert Oppenheimer.

He was confident, he said, "If one man can do it, it's me. I can do it."

80 years on, the fascination surrounding father of the

bomb, Robert Oppenheimer,

remains undimmed. In 2024, Christopher Nolan's

epic film became the most

profitable biopic in cinema history grossing 900 million dollars.

But is it accurate?

Using declassified documents we can now reveal the true story

of the creation of the A-bomb

and how the top-secret Manhattan Project produced a weapon

capable of annihilating humanity.

1939, with Hitler bent on conquest, peace in

Europe was a pipe dream.

On March 15, the German army marched on Prague.

The occupation of Czechoslovakia gave the Nazis access to

one of Europe's largest uranium mines.

In laboratories all over the world,

scientists were alarmed.

By the time that the discovery that uranium was the key to

an atomic explosion, which

was in late 1938, 1939, scientists working in physics

speculated that there would be

an atomic bomb possible.

It was an international race and it was just a matter of time.

It was a field of research in which the Germans would soon show

that they were one step ahead.

In early 1939, the results of a major discovery were published in a

renowned scientific journal,

One that was to change the course of history, nuclear fission.

When a neutron slowly collides with a uranium-235 nucleus, it splits.

This fragmentation creates two lighter nuclei, which

release more neutrons.

From one collision to the next, a series of fissions triggers a

chain reaction, thus releasing

an immense amount of energy.

This is the principle of nuclear energy.

It was a spark that triggered this race in a very, very serious way.

While initially an interesting phenomenon worthy of

study, scientists soon realized

that it could lead to violent applications.

So within a short time they were certainly aware that this

could have enormous implications.

A few months later, when Germany's first nuclear program was launched,

Hitler's enemies feared the worst.

What if the Nazis already knew how to make the bomb?

Supposing a bomb was easy to make,

it wasn't clear if you need a little uranium or a lot.

At the time, no one knew.

If Germany managed to achieve its goal,

the consequences for the whole world could prove to be devastating.

This issue began to obsess scientists who duly took action.

- People stopped publishing their research

on uranium and on fission.

They didn't want to share any of these insights

with their enemies because the war was coming.

It was quite clear.

- To preserve national security,

scientists in every country applied a system of censorship.

The culture of secrecy that began to emerge really went against the

grain for the scientists of the day.

Among the scientists to flee the Nazi regime,

one in particular did everything in his power to prevent the Third

Reich from building an atomic bomb.

Hungarian-Jewish physicist Leo Szilard, who took refuge in

England, was an expert in nuclear physics.

Faced with the imminent threat to the world,

Szilard, an inveterate pacifist,

alerted the most famous scientist of the day,

Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein.

- When he approached Albert Einstein in 1939,

he was a very receptive audience.

All refugees of Nazi Germany and Nazi countries

that had expelled their relatives and scientists and such.

And so they understood that Hitler posed an incredible

threat to the world.

On August 2, 1939, Leo Szilard wrote to the President of the

United States himself.

To ensure it would be read, it was signed by Albert Einstein.

He signed a letter to then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

to warn him the Germans had

been working, as far as they knew, on this most powerful new

atomic weapon that could

destroy a whole city at one time, and that the United States

needed to get in the game.

As Europe plunged back into war, the United States

remained resolutely neutral.

The America First isolationist policy of the '20s and '30s is

the reason why the U.S.A.

was so slow to enter the war.

But with the growing atomic threat, Roosevelt decided to set

up an advisory committee on uranium.

Danger was looming, and nuclear research needed to be speeded up.

England and the U.K., they needed to have a deterrent.

The only thing that would stop Hitler from dropping an atomic

bomb on London and then

in Washington, D.C., was that whoever gets the bomb

will win the war.

- A confidential paper triggered an acceleration

in American research.

According to calculations made by two German physicists

who had taken refuge in Birmingham,

a bomb could be detonated using only 100 grams of uranium.

This smaller than expected device

could therefore easily be dropped by plane,

but the radiation would kill thousands of people.

If you could deliver an atomic bomb in an aircraft, which

people believe Germany might

be trying to do, that made it a much greater threat.

The Nazi threat was spreading, and France had just capitulated.

While the United States still seemed detached from the war in

Europe, December 7, 1941 changed everything.

On the Pacific island of Oahu in Hawaii, the American naval

base at Pearl Harbor was torpedoed

by Japanese aircraft.

For the first time in its history, America had been

attacked on its own soil.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had no choice but to

participate full on in this conflict.

Taken completely by surprise, the American troops

suffered terrible losses.

2,400 dead, 1,178 wounded, and a devastated fleet.

A response to the attack was now crucial.

The following day, December 8th, President Roosevelt addressed the

U.S. Congress and declared war on Japan.

For the United States, building the bomb was now an absolute priority.

A top-secret military program was launched.

In January 1942, Roosevelt approved full go-ahead with what

became the Manhattan Project.

In a historical first, an unprecedented alliance was formed

between scientists, the military, and industry.

To win the war, the bomb had to be developed in record time.

Very few people knew about the Manhattan Project, so you

could count on two hands the number

of people who knew about it in Washington, D.C.

The President, Franklin Roosevelt, the Secretary of War, the

Secretary of State, very high

level leadership did know about the Manhattan Project and

what its goals were.

But below that, it was very selective.

All the more secretive in that it involved working on not

one, but two atomic bombs.

One based on Uranium-235 and another, even more powerful, on

Plutonium, a new, much more

explosive element.

The launch of the Manhattan Project on August 13, 1942 heralded

an era of nuclear secrecy.

On September 17, 1942, a military officer was put in

charge of this secret mission.

The gruff and blunt General Leslie Groves, a member of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff in Washington

and a qualified engineer, was the man chosen to push through

this operation at breakneck speed.

Groves managed to get the Manhattan Project classified as a

high priority, otherwise it

couldn't succeed.

He didn't think it was going to be very challenging.

He had been responsible for building the Pentagon, which is this

huge five-sided defense building.

And he had huge contacts in the defense industry, the

contractors who worked on military matters.

General Groves was a very strict man and absolutely adamant about

keeping things compartmentalized.

Secrecy was vital.

Anything to do with military research had to be secret.

He was confident, he said, "If one man can do it, it's me, I can do it".

Even so, he had to select a right -hand man to lead the

scientific research.

Someone who could be tasked with recruiting the brightest

minds to work on the Manhattan

Project.

Dr. Oppenheimer.

I'm Colonel Groves.

This is Lieutenant Colonel Nichols.

Have that dry cleaned.

As Nolan shows in his film, despite the clash of temperaments, the

partnership between physicist

and soldier worked well.

- Well, if that's how you treat Lieutenant Colonel,

I'd hate to see how you treat a humble physicist.

- Ah, if I ever meet one, I'll let you know.

- Ouch.

- So you had two people in charge.

The project manager, General Groves,

who was organizing things,

and the scientific manager, Oppenheimer.

- At the outset of the Manhattan Project,

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist

at Berkeley.

He was an American born in New York.

He worked mainly in theoretical physics.

He did his thesis in Germany, in Gottingen, on quantum

mechanics, before returning to

Berkeley where he set up a theoretical physics laboratory.

When General Groves made the choice, people thought he was

crazy, because Oppenheimer

had no experience in managing anything other than a

few graduate students.

But he was young and brilliant.

How could he corral this far-flung operation and pull together

the world's leading scientists,

who were, by the way, all prima donnas, and get them

to work collaboratively?

But what is surprising is it was a brilliant choice, that

Oppenheimer rose to the occasion.

He was the best manager that the National Laboratory has ever had.

On the ground, though, there was a lot of work to do.

This wasn't about improving something that already existed.

It was a design project, a huge challenge.

Installations being set up had never been made before.

A reactor is an enormous thing.

First you had to build massive facilities for producing the

fissile materials, and then

you had to build a separate lab that would house people in

secret in a confined location

to design and construct these weapons.

Then they had to find enough personnel just for

constructing these sites.

One of the leading scientists predicted that to create an

atomic weapon, you would have

to turn the entire country of the United States into one huge factory.

And they basically did that.

But how to hide industrial complexes the size of cities?

Where to find immense tracts of land that can be kept out of sight?

General Groves had several criteria.

One of them was that the place be isolated.

In just a few months, some 30 research laboratories were set up,

scattered throughout the United States.

The three main production sites were placed directly

under military control.

In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, huge factories were built to produce

Uranium-235, while at Hanford,

In Washington state, a sprawling industrial complex

would supply the plutonium.

Hidden by the New Mexico mountain range, the vast city of Los

Alamos rose from the ground.

This is where the bomb would be designed.

The sites were codenamed WXY.

Most people thought this was a crazy place to locate it.

It had very little water supply.

It was hard to get to.

It was at least an hour drive at the time on very poor roads.

But researchers had to be moved there.

In this clip from the Hollywood biopic,

Oppenheimer is considering every detail of their installation.

They'll need a school, stores, a church.

Why?

If we don't let scientists bring their families,

we'll never get the best.

You want security, build a town.

Build it fast.

Where?

Welcome to Los Alamos.

In absolute secrecy, over 125,000 people were recruited

from all over the country.

Among them were the most brilliant scientists of the day,

including Nobel Prize winners

in physics, alongside 2,500 researchers.

They had to figure out how to fashion a gadget,

as they called it,

that would detonate the

fuel and it was very complex and very complicated.

They were the brain trust.

They were the physicists, the chemists, the engineers,

the luminaries of science of the time.

Sometimes accompanied by their wives and children, these

well-established young researchers had to suddenly

leave everything behind.

Oppenheimer was trying to recruit people to leave their

university lives and big

cities to go to this outpost, a frontier outpost.

He couldn't even tell them where it was.

How did he do it?

He whispered to them that what you

do with this project

could end World War II and perhaps all other wars.

Engineers, too, like Harold Bell.

Now 102 years old, he vividly remembers the strange

recruitment process.

He said, "I have a very interesting, useful job for you, but

we only take volunteers".

So I said, "Well, tell me about it".

And he said, I can't tell you much about it.

I said, Well, where would I be?

And he said, I can't tell you.

I said, What would I be doing?

And he said, I can't tell you.

And I said, You can't tell me and you want me to volunteer?

I said, You're out of your mind.

And I walked away.

And so the next day I found that I got sent there anyhow.

When you work in the military, you go where they tell you to go.

On their arrival, nobody knew exactly what they would be working on.

They didn't know what they were working on.

That's a very important part of this.

Because people are puzzled.

How could all of those people keep a secret?

Well, they didn't know the secret.

That was how they kept it.

I had never heard of the atomic bomb project.

I didn't even know it existed.

Most of the people in Oak Ridge, for instance,

thought we were doing poison gas.

People were hired to do a very small task.

They were told at Oak Ridge,

You have to sit here at this panel,

most of them were young women,

and turn this knob and make R greater than S.

They didn't know what that meant, um, but it didn't matter;

they were good at it.

To ensure no leaks, employees were made to follow very strict rules.

You were not supposed to talk about your job, your work, to anyone.

You could gossip, you could chat, but you could not talk

about what you're doing,

either when you're on the job or afterwards to your friends or family.

There were signs all over about security, a slip of the

lip will sink a ship,

what you see here, what you hear here, what you say here, don't

do it because somebody is listening, things like that.

We had code words for just about everything.

Nothing that was critical was used by its real name.

One did not say uranium.

One did not say plutonium.

Certainly didn't say the word bomb.

Despite all the precautions, some of the staff, like Harold Bell,

harbored suspicions about what was going on.

I said, We're working on something that has to do with atomic energy,

something which has to do with ships, or trains, or electric power,

he says no, he says you're a

civilian at heart, you're not a military person, we're

building a bomb. That's how I knew.

In these secret cities, a strange daily routine became established.

On the surface, it was an ordinary life for employees, working

on weekdays before relaxing

at the weekend in a bucolic setting.

In reality, the teams were under pressure.

Faced with a Nazi threat, time was short.

But putting theory into practice was a complex process.

As portrayed in Nolan's biopic,

tensions between the scientists were many and varied.

Bob, I'm not quitting my job because plutonium is radioactive.

We just don't know what it might do to the female reproductive system.

Your reproductive system is more exposed than mine, presumably.

Can we, please? The implosion device is nowhere.

You can't rush everything, Appi, please.

Well, there's rushing and there's getting on with it, so pick one.

Wait, wait, wait. Nedimai is doing his job.

Teller's not helping. You're not helping.

I've been asking for calculations on the implosion lenses for weeks.

The British can do it. Fuchs.

Absolutely.

It's your job, Teller. - I'm engaged in the research.

On a hydrogen bomb, we're not even building!

It was thought that it would not take long to develop

the atomic weapons.

That turned out to be a lot more complicated than they thought.

The great difficulty with the bomb was first imagining it,

but above all, getting the fuel.

Managing the raw materials was a complex business.

Uranium was a nightmare.

To make it at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

they built four parallel facilities,

four production plants using completely different techniques.

The plutonium turned out to be a much trickier issue with

problems they did not originally anticipate,

so they had to develop a very different method of triggering.

The mechanics of triggering a plutonium weapon were very

different than the uranium weapon.

After three years of frantic activity, they finally had enough

plutonium and uranium to

begin manufacturing explosives at Los Alamos.

Meanwhile in Europe, the situation was changing.

The Germans were heading for defeat.

While the Nazis had failed to build an atomic weapon, the Manhattan

Project remained a priority.

On February 4th, at the Yalta Conference in Crimea, Soviet

leader Stalin met with Roosevelt

and Churchill to decide on a strategy to seal the

end of the conflict.

But there was no mention of atomic weapons.

Roosevelt, though, would never see the world they imagined.

Just a month later, a shocked American nation mourned his sudden

death on April 12th, 1945.

On the day of his funeral, Vice -President Harry Truman

took the oath of office.

Overnight, Harry Truman went from being a relatively obscure

Missouri senator to become

a true war leader.

In keeping with Roosevelt's policy, the new president decided

to continue the conflict.

To change the course of the war, he would be forced to make

the most important decision

in history.

He knew absolutely nothing

about the existence of the Manhattan Project.

At this point, in April 1945, he knew nothing about the bomb,

regarded as a superbomb.

As a matter of urgency, the new U.S. president was briefed about

the existence of the atomic bomb.

But where to use it, given that Germany was no longer a threat?

Japan was selected, to avenge the dead of Pearl Harbor.

In the utmost secrecy, committees of military and scientific

experts gathered to advise the president.

Their job was to define a number of targets.

In discussions, held on May the 10th, five cities

were deemed to meet the various criteria set out by the military.

Under the leadership of General Groves, the cities of Kyoto,

Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura

and Niigata became prime targets.

It had to be a city that had not yet been destroyed.

These were not easy to find, given

that Japan had been heavily bombed over the previous 12 months.

That's why Tokyo didn't make the list, given that 100,000 people

died there in March 1945.

Two of the cities were large enough to gauge the

effect of the bomb.

They also had to be military targets, not just civilian ones,

and by then there were

few cities with those characteristics to choose from.

But Hiroshima was one of them.

Its military base and a population of over 300,000 made it an

ideal target for the Americans

to gauge the effectiveness of their bomb.

The strategy was to use shock tactics.

They were convinced that the Japanese would never surrender,

or only at the very last moment.

So they needed to maximize the use of strategic bombing

as a weapon of terror

and bring it to its climax.

But the bomb still had to work perfectly,

as researchers at Los Alamos toiled day and night

to deliver a device as quickly as possible.

In the summer of 1945,

For the first time in history, a full -scale test was green

-lighted by Oppenheimer.

The scientists didn't know whether this gadget was going to work,

and if it did work, how big the explosion was going to be.

They really needed to test it because the fear was that if you

simply made one of these things

and dropped it over Japan, and if it didn't function correctly,

then an enemy could recover the material and know about your program.

On July 16th, 1945, at the Alamogordo Range in

the New Mexico desert,

a strange ballet of men and trucks made preparations for the

first nuclear test in history.

The codenames Trinity and Gadget were assigned to the

operation and bomb, respectively.

Under the watchful eye of Oppenheimer, taking the utmost care,

the team meticulously assembled each piece,

aware that the slightest mistake could kill thousands.

To simulate an airplane drop, the device was suspended from a

tower some 30 meters from the ground.

In his film, Christopher Nolan immortalizes the final

preparations of the researchers,

stationed 30 kilometers from the site.

Now, the glass stops the UV.

What stops the glass?

I'm heading to base camp, best of luck.

Everybody down! Do not turn around until you see light

reflected on the hills.

Then look at the explosion only through your welder's glass.

Ninety seconds to detonation.

At precisely 19 minutes and 21 seconds past five in the morning,

a huge blinding flash irradiated the surrounding mountains.

A mushroom cloud rose 12,000 meters into the air as a deafening

explosion reverberated through the valley.

The apocalyptic vision witnessed by Oppenheimer and his team was recreated

by the American director's technical crew.

This terrifying, yet fascinating detonation was recreated

exactly at the same place it happened.

The original explosion wiped out every trace of life within a

radius of one kilometer.

The first plutonium bomb in history had just been detonated.

For the scientists, it was a success.

But now they were confident that both weapon designs were

going to work in combat.

The feeling was that the psychological effect of the weapon would be

enough to put an end to all wars.

But for other researchers, like whistleblower Leo Szilard, the

world was on the brink of a precipice.

In his movie Oppenheimer,

Christopher Nolan imagines the conversation

Leo Szilard and Oppenheimer might have had.

- You're a long way from Chicago, Leo.

- If we don't act now,

they're going to use this thing against Japan.

We booked a meeting with Truman, but somebody killed it.

You're meeting the Secretary of War.

- Just because we're building it,

doesn't mean we get to decide how it's used.

- History will judge us, Robert.

In Chicago, we put together a petition.

- I'm not, I'm not getting into that.

- With this petition to the American president,

Leo Szilard tried to prevent the bomb

from being used on Japanese civilians,

and suggested an alternative approach -pressurizing America's

enemies by demonstrating the power

of the bomb only without casualties.

They delivered a petition, which was of course secret like

everything else at that point.

They sent it to the American authorities, who called in

their scientific advisors, and

concluded that a demonstration was out of the question.

The signatures of dozens of scientists working on the Manhattan

Project changed nothing.

Their attempt to prioritize deterrence failed.

They had created a monster and its control was slipping from their grasp.

As U.S. President Harry Truman crossed a devastated Berlin on his

way to the Potsdam Conference,

he knew he had a trump card in negotiating the outcome of

the war with the British and

the Soviet Union.

He alone possessed a weapon capable of killing thousands.

The sentiment at the time in 1945 was that this had been the

bloodiest conflict in human history,

and the United States was losing about 300

soldiers to the war every day.

And the European theater, the war had ended, and U.S. soldiers

were being transferred to

the Pacific for a possible invasion of the Japanese main

islands, and it was believed

that the ending of the war as quickly as possible might be the

least costly course of action

for both the United States and Japan.

As the post-war world began to take shape, there were other

reasons for wanting to use

the bomb.

The two-billion-dollar cost had to be justified.

Then there was the aspect of revenge for Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese had to pay for that stab in the back.

With the backing of the Allied powers, on July 26, 1945,

Harry Truman issued an ultimatum

he knew Japan would find unacceptable.

Once this ultimatum had been rejected on July 28th,

the Americans had no other option but to strike.

The wheels were set in motion, there was no going back.

Across the Pacific, at the Tinian military base,

the cruiser carrying the uranium bomb finally arrived.

A device, named Little Boy, was three meters long

and weighed 4,000 kilos.

Inside it, ready to explode, were 64 kilos of uranium.

On August 6, 1945, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Paul

Tibbets, the men of the 509th Composite

Group made their preparations.

Each pilot had a specific part to play to ensure the

operation's success, but the

heavy burden of responsibility for dropping the bomb would

fall upon Paul Tibbets and

the crew of the Enola Gay.

Weather conditions on August 6th were good,

so the order was given to head for Hiroshima.

The final moments before take-off were immortalized by the crew.

Smiles all round. When they returned,

the world would never be the same again.

The three bombers took off from Tinian at 2.45 a.m. for a

projected flight time of around

five and a half hours between the Mariana Islands and Japan.

For Lieutenant Tibbets, it was time to brief the crew on their

devastating assignment -the

dropping of the world's first atomic bomb.

- The weapon itself was armed on the way to Hiroshima.

- The weather is very hot in Hiroshima.

The sky is clear and it's rush hour.

- This was a Monday morning in Hiroshima.

Everybody's going to work and school.

- In the streets, children are making their way to school.

Younger children are staying home

as the heat wave is unbearable.

The bombers begin their descent towards the target.

The inhabitants of Hiroshima hear the sound of an airplane.

Six minutes before the bomb is dropped,

they see a B-29 flying overhead.

- Usually the bombing raids would have 15, 20

or more bombers come over.

But in this case, it was a single plane that came.

As a result, the public weren't overly alarmed.

The target is checked.

The Aio Bridge in the center of Hiroshima.

Two minutes before detonation,

the point of impact is clearly in sight.

At 15 minutes and 17 seconds past eight,

The bomb bay door is open, and a 4-ton black mass is dropped from

an altitude of 570 meters,

releasing 15 kilotons of TNT onto the people of Hiroshima.

Forty-three seconds later it exploded at 16 minutes

and 2 seconds past 8.

A 50 million degree blast pulverizes the city center.

This film, shot aboard one of the B -29s, is the only footage

to survive the explosion.

The images are familiar.

In just 15 thousandths of a second, the fission of a single

atom produces a mushroom-shaped

cloud of fire in the sky.

The atmospheric temperature is a million times higher than

that on the surface of the sun.

Like a bolt of lightning.

Then there's the heat ball, the shock wave,

the winds of up to 800

kilometers an hour, destroying everything in their path.

Anyone close to the point of impact is instantly atomized by the heat.

The shadows of vaporized

bodies on concrete are all that remain of their time on Earth.

This thermal shock causes fires.

So Hiroshima burned for a full 16 hours.

What we have is a firestorm phenomenon.

In other words, the temperature is so high

that oxygen becomes an oxidizer.

And as long as there is oxygen, it burns.

A shower of radioactive ash produces hell on earth, then silence.

What was happening in Hiroshima was apocalyptic.

I think the suffering must have just been beyond comprehension.

To think of something that instantly could kill 70,000 people

and leave as many injured,

it's just almost incomprehensible.

It was a horrible, horrible succession of assaults on people

and civilians' life.

Within a few kilometers from the point of impact, thousands of

charred corpses lie strewn

across the ground.

80,000 people are killed instantly, leaving 100,000 injured.

The wandering survivors of the apocalypse are all

stripped naked and haggard.

For them, the slow agony of radiation poisoning is just beginning.

The world has entered a new era, the nuclear age.

The world's media celebrates this new cutting-edge technology

that might put an end to war.

For the general public, it's their first glimpse of

history's best-kept secret.

For the hundreds of thousands of employees working on the

Manhattan Project, the revelation

comes as a shock.

I saw the headlines, Atomic Bomb, big letters, almost a

foot high, and I was shocked.

We just didn't use that word.

Here it is in the newspaper.

I didn't know that the actual bomb was used, built, fired, used,

until the newspapers had it.

And certainly I didn't tell my wife. She saw the headlines.

She said, Is that what we're doing?

In Japan and all around the world, little did anyone know that

the nightmare was far from over.

In keeping with the established plan, with no Japanese surrender

forthcoming, Truman gave the order to drop a second plutonium bomb.

This time nicknamed Fat Man.

Weighing four and a half tons, the 3.25 meter device's destructive

power was twice that of Little Boy.

Before boarding the plane, the pilots wrote a message to the

Japanese people and to the Emperor.

To Hirohito, with love and kisses.

Hiromitsu Morita, 90, is a hibakusha, a survivor of the bomb.

That day he was at home with his family in Nagasaki.

I was 10 years old.

I was in 5th grade at elementary school.

That morning it was very humid and very hot.

On August 9th, the bomber's boxcar and the great artiste took off from

Tinian for the town of Kokura.

But the fog covering the valley hampered visibility of the target.

The decision was made to continue on to Nagasaki, the number

two choice on the list.

Yes, I remember it very well.

It was only 10,000 meters above us and shining bright.

At 11.56 a.m., the pilot had his target in sight.

I still remember that B -29 shining so brightly.

Two minutes later, the bomb bay doors opened to release Fat Man.

I saw a parachute coming down.

We followed its trajectory with our eyes.

We wondered where it would come down.

and it landed in the downtown area.

At 12.02 pm, the second nuclear bomb in history

exploded in Japan's largest industrial city.

The Fat Man was dropped slightly off target.

It fell slightly in the offskirts of the city,

but it destroyed a major industrial center

that had been largely untouched during the war.

And that produced an equivalent blast to about 21,000 tons of TNT.

The flash and the blast was so unbelievable

that I immediately knew that many people were going to die.

I can still remember it.

Its power was unimaginable.

There was a park called Gosha Koen, just above my house.

We had to go through the park, but it took us a long time to cross it.

Because there were so many people there, covered in blood,

with skin hanging off them from the burns.

Telling this story, I still have tears in my eyes.

74,000 people perished instantly in the cloud of smoke, and a

further 60,000 died in excruciating

radiation sickness.

The bomb changed the face of war.

Even more horrifyingly, it now killed civilians en masse.

Purple patches appeared on my skin.

They began to swell.

Other people who had them started dying.

I receive no treatment and yet I'm still alive.

I have no idea why.

On August 15th, after a final battle with Soviet troops,

Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced

to his people that the country was surrendering.

On the other side of the Pacific, in the United States,

jubilant crowds filled the streets

to celebrate the end of the war and the bloodiest conflict in history.

The initial reaction of the American public was to be so

relieved that this horrific war

that had gone on was over at last.

The triumphant mood in America, where leaders of the Manhattan

Project celebrated a highly

successful operation, is captured in the Oppenheimer biopic.

We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest scientific

gamble in history, and we have won.

The scientists were now stars.

And this elevated the personnel of the Manhattan Project,

particularly Oppenheimer, really

into the public spotlight.

Oppenheimer was characterized as the father of the atomic bomb

and he became very highly regarded and

popular in US media at the time.

Many of the scientists involved felt a sense of pride that they

had contributed to helping

end the war, but along with that came this sense of

responsibility and guilt for having

being involved in such a thing.

Some journalists defied reporting restrictions to reveal the

unbearable truth for the first time.

On September 5, 1945, war correspondent Wilfred Burchett

published a shock article in the

Daily Express, exposing the mysterious evil that had taken hold

of the irradiated victims.

A year later, the testimonies of six Hiroshima survivors,

describing their ordeal to writer

John Hersey, appeared in The New Yorker.

And it was the first time that the American public saw it

through a human lens.

What the administration had reported initially

was all about statistics.

It wasn't about what happened to the real people, to the civilians.

The earth-shattering revelations brought humanity face to

face with a new reality.

It was Armageddon, the end of the world.

The fear was that it could be the end of mankind.

While Oppenheimer had to bear the guilt for Hiroshima and

Nagasaki for the rest of his life,

he never expressed his regrets in public.

Hiroshima was only the first demonstration of an

increasingly destructive military arsenal.

On August 29, 1949, at the height of the Cold War, deep in

Kazakhstan, the Soviets carried

out their first nuclear test.

From then on, the world would be divided in two, those with

the bomb and those without.

Replicated and developed, an unbridled nuclear

arms race was underway.

The atomic bomb was just a first step.

Next came the thermonuclear

fusion bomb, first detonated in 1952.

Its destructive power reached a peak almost nine years later during

a Soviet test in the Arctic Ocean.

The so-called Tsar Bomb was the equivalent of 2,500

Hiroshima's, which is hard to imagine.

The whole area, 50 kilometers around a target

city, would be destroyed.

Today nine powers share a nuclear arsenal of some 10,000

operational warheads.

Leading the pack are Russia, the United States, and China.

It is a perilous world we live in.

This is something that the atomic age has bequeathed to those

of us who live here now.

For the past 80 years, the Habakusha,

the survivors of the nuclear bomb,

have been trying to bequeath another legacy,

one that preserves the memory of the victims and their tragedy, so

that the whole world never forgets.

After such a massive attack, I felt compelled to promote peace.

My brother was killed, even though we were in almost the same place.

To this day, a wave of immense sadness comes over me when I

think of that time.

It's a feeling I shall never forget.

To commemorate Mr. Morita's brother and the thousands of other victims,

Every year, on the night of August 6th, at the foot of the Genbaku

Dome in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial,

thousands of lanterns are floated on the Motoyasu River

in a message of peace.

Eternal light in a world of darkness.