Despite the cheerful smiles on their faces, history records that the little box killed an estimated 80,000 civilians after it was detonated on August 9, 1945 over Nagasaki.
Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki after “Little Boy” was dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing at least 65,000 people.
Agnew reportedly flew as a scientific observer in a plane that accompanied the Enola Gay on the mission to bomb Hiroshima. He filmed from the air the moment the bomb exploded over the city. The first YouTube clip above shows Agnew’s footage of the Hiroshima incident.
After the end of the Manhattan Project, Agnew — director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1970 to 1979 — kept the plutonium core photo as a souvenir, but the FBI reportedly tried to take it from him.
According to Agnew, acting on the information that he was keeping “secret photos,” FBI agents visited him in Chicago and went through his photo files but found no “secret photos.” Agnew showed them the photo in which he was carrying the plutonium core, saying, “Well, maybe this one is secret.”
The agents had no idea what the little box was. When Agnew explained to them what it was they declared it was “secret” and that they would have to take it from him. But after some wrangling they agreed Agnew could keep it if he scratched the “secret thing” out.
The plutonium core of the Fat Man bomb weighed an unimpressive 6.2 kg (14lb). But only a kilogram of that weight underwent fission reaction, and only about one gram of the whole was converted to explosive energy equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT that devastated Nagasaki.
Some have wondered how they were able to carry the plutonium core without suffering harmful radiation. It happens that plutonium can be handled without ill effects. The magnesium shielding was used specifically to keep the plutonium cores cool and protect against mechanical damage.
Others have asked what would have happened if someone had dropped the plutonium core accidentally. The answer is that nothing would have happened because the core needs to reach a critical mass before it can explode. But because the parts were kept separate in the core at sub-critical mass dropping it would not initiate a chain reaction that leads to an explosion.
The emergence of the photos showing Manhattan Project scientists posing with the magnesium box containing the plutonium core of Fat Man that later incinerated 80,000 civilians has reignited once again the debate whether the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified.
We need to take care about the arguments we invent to justify a decision to incinerate 80,000 civilians with a single bomb. What was fundamentally wrong with the decision to use the bomb on Nagasaki was the fact that the Nagasaki population was primarily civilian.
The purpose of the bombings, as stated by the Target Committee set up to select specific targets, was “obtaining the greatest psychological effects against Japan,” and “making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.”
In other words, the bombs were dropped to terrorize the Japanese populace into submission and to signal to the rest of the world that America “has arrived.”
The acts of our jihadi opponents targeted against civilians are termed “terrorism” regardless of the excuse for it. Al Qaeda and Boko Haram could compile thick volumes of legitimate grievances in the attempt to justify their acts of mass murder and we would still justifiably condemn them for targeting civilians as an act of war.
No one has invented an argument to justify the mass murder of Nagasaki civilians that Al Qaeda terrorists could not use with equal conviction from their narrow perspective to justify the September 11, 2001 murder of hundreds of innocent U.S. citizens in an act of war against the U.S. government and Pentagon.
Top military officials expressed their misgivings about the plan to drop the bombs on Japanese cities. Dwight Eisenhower reportedly said,
“I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act… so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
The smile on the faces of the U.S. scientists as they held the plutonium core reflects the capacity of the human mind, jihadi Muslim and American Christian alike, to detach from the naked reality of the impact of its actions once it has frozen focus on a goal it considers of transcending importance. Hitler also suffered the consequences of this tendency, moving whole divisions of troops on a map, protected from the physical consequences of his “great historic” actions on the lives of millions of people in the real world.
