Hiroshima: As It Happened

This episode contains descriptions of graphic violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. On the morning of August 6th, 1945, a single American bomber unleashed a weapon unlike anything the world had ever seen - Little Boy, the first atomic bomb used in war. In a blinding flash, the city of Hiroshima was levelled. In this episode, we chart that fateful day moment by moment, from the daily routines of the city's mayor and the preparations of the American air crews to the instant of unimaginable destruction. Joining us is Iain MacGregor, author of ‘The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It’. He takes us through the horror of this fateful day and the dawn of the nuclear age. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:30Dan Snow?

  It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright. Very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission. Those are the words, those are the memories of Theodore Dutch van Kerk. He was a navigator on an American B-29 bomber. It's called the Enola Gay. And in that brief passage, he is describing the last few seconds of the pre-nuclear age,

• 2:11Dan Snow?

  perched in his aircraft at 30,000 feet, looking down at the city of Hiroshima in Japan. His crew were on the brink of deploying the most powerful weapon in history. One that destroyed that city.

• 2:32Dan Snow?

  By the summer of 1945, eighty years ago, World War II in Europe had ended, but the war in the Pacific was raging on with devastating ferocity. On the Japanese mainland, the United States had unleashed months of punishing bombings of Japanese cities, particularly incendiary air raids, hoping to burn and smash the Japanese government to the point of surrender. In March 1945, for example, Tokyo was struck with a massive firebombing that may have killed as many as 100,000 people in a single night, most of whom were civilians.

• 3:14Dan Snow?

  Dozens of other cities—Nogoya, Osaka, Kobe, and more—were similarly targeted. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children were killed, and its urban infrastructure lay in ruins. Further afield, Japan's once and briefly expansive overseas empire was now a disarticulated zombie: routed in Burma, strangled in Borneo, its navy wiped out, island garrisons in the Pacific annihilated or just left to rot on the vine by the American steamroller. A suicidal stand in Okinawa cost tens of thousands of lives in a hopeless but savage battle

• 3:59Dan Snow?

  that brought the Americans step by bloody step closer to the Japanese home islands.

• 4:06Dan Snow?

  And yet, despite this, the Japanese leadership spat defiance. Despite overwhelming losses, they appeared publicly committed to continuing the war and resisting any eventual invasion of Japan itself.

• 4:21Dan Snow?

  The Allies began preparing for that invasion. They began the planning process. They called it Operation Downfall. An invasion so massive that it would dwarf D-Day. Allied estimates predicted horrific casualties. Potentially over a million Allied soldiers. And Japanese military and civilian deaths, well, a multiple of that. Another crisis for Japanese planners was Stalin's veteran, massive, battle-hardened Red Army, now massing on the borders of Japan's empire in mainland China. There was absolutely not one shred of hope for the Japanese. And the terrible thing is, in that summer of 1945, it was much, much worse than they knew. In the United States,

• 5:06Dan Snow?

  a top-secret scientific and military project had delivered the unimaginable. The Manhattan Project was initiated in 1942, building on foundations laid by the British. After fears that Nazi Germany might exploit the vast potential of atomic physics to develop a bomb unlike any other in history. The Manhattan Project brought together some of the world's leading physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and Leo Zellard, under American military oversight, personified by General Leslie Groves. It was a vast collaboration between the US, the UK, and Canada, spanning facilities in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

• 5:49Dan Snow?

  and many other places from Washington State to Alabama. After years of theoretical work and engineering breakthroughs, enormous expense, the Manhattan Project achieved its goal in July 1945. The first successful detonation of a nuclear device in the New Mexico desert. It was known as the Trinity Test. The final product of all that time, expense, and human genius was delivered to Tinian in the North Mariana Islands that summer. All the parts needed to assemble initially two bombs, nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man. They were in fact two different designs. Little Boy was a uranium-gun-type design

• 6:33Dan Snow?

  with the equivalent explosive force of 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Fat Man was the larger of the two, a plutonium-implosion-type design with an equivalent explosive force of 21,000 tonnes of TNT.

• 6:48Dan Snow?

  Bear in mind, the biggest single conventional bombs then in use had an explosive force equivalent to six tonnes of TNT. The bombs now being put together on Tinian Island had very different methods of construction. As I said, they represented enormous investment. In fact, all of the purified uranium-235 available in the world at the time went in to the construction of the Little Boy bomb. Following the Trinity Test, with the weapons now proven, military and political leaders prepared to use them in an effort to force Japan's unconditional surrender.

• 7:30Dan Snow?

  To deliver the bombs, the US had formed the 509th Composite Group, a specially trained unit equipped with modified B-29 super fortress bombers. They trained in secret for 18 months in Utah in New Mexico, and then deployed to Tinian Island, a major US airbase, the launching point for many bombing raids over Japan. In this episode of the podcast, 80 Years On, we're going to take you through step by step of what happened on August 6, 1945, the day that the Little Boy atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, changing the course of human history. We'll hear about that moment from two extraordinary perspectives, from the sky aboard the Enola Gay as it carried out its grim mission,

• 8:16Dan Snow?

  and from the city itself through the eyes of Hiroshima's mayor, Senkichi Awaiya. This is not just the story of a transformative military mission. It's a tale of human choices, of terrible loss, and what it meant to witness the birth of the nuclear age. For this, we're joined by Ian McGregor, historian and author of The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and The Fateful Decision to Use It. He's a great friend of the podcast, he's been on before. It's fantastic to have him back and talk about his new book. Before we get started, though, this is a friendly warning that this episode contains descriptions of a graphic nature. It might not be best for all listeners. Let's get into it, the step-by-step story

• 9:00Dan Snow?

  of one of the most important days of human history.

• 9:09Dan Snow?

  In early August 1945, on the Pacific island of Tinian, some 1,500 miles south of Hiroshima, the air crews of the 509th Composite Group have been waiting in tense anticipation. Rumours are swirling among the men, something big is coming. They've been flying long-range how-to training missions for months in modified silver-plated B-29 Super Fortresses, practising for a mission that they know nothing about. The island's airfield is currently the largest in the world, sending aerial armadas of bombers to strike targets across the Pacific. And to the consternation of their comrades from other conventional bombing groups who

• 9:52Dan Snow?

  risk life and limb on daily missions over Japan, the men of the 509th seem to be getting off easy. They seem to train endlessly, rather than join the other units on the hazardous round trips to and from Japan, and actually get involved in the war. Only a handful of officers know the full details of their mission. The man in charge of the 509th, Colonel Paul Tibbetts, has been careful to maintain the utmost secrecy even among the crews. Strict compartmentalisation means that few understand exactly what they're preparing to deliver. Their top-secret payload is the uranium-atomic bomb, Little Boy.

• 10:33Dan Snow?

  It has been delivered to the island in pieces, but by July 31, it has been assembled on-site by the engineers of the Manhattan Project. Ian picks up the story from here. Ian, good to see you, great to have you back on the podcast.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Thank you, Dan, thanks for your invite.

• 10:50Dan Snow?

  Right, where are we in the world? What's going on on this Pacific island?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  General Curtis LeMay, commander of 20th Bomber Command, landed on Tinian on August 3. He was carried sealed orders to Colonel Tibbetts, Special Bombing Mission Number 13. Within it, what he would discuss with the strike leader was the authorised date for the attack on Japan with no weapon. The date agreed would be August 6, and LeMay discussed with Tibbetts the targets that had been assigned by the target committee. Primary one would be Hiroshima, secondary would be Kikura, which housed a major military arsenal. And the third one would be Nagasaki, an urban area, but it did house a port and a lot of small scale, almost like a cottage industry of armaments factories.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  The order confirmed that luckily no friendly aircraft other than those listed would be within a 50 mile area of the targets from the strike during the period of the hours that they would be over the target and coming away from it. Thirty-two copies of this order were distributed to the senior commanders, Iguama, Wajima and Tinian, and Tibbetts obviously locked his copy in his office safe. And then took Lemay because he hadn't seen it to go and see a little boy, which was in the tech area, which was heavily guarded. The most important commanders on the base had been barred from entry to see this by the armed MPs. And even when Lemay was trying to get through into it, the vigilant MP demanded that he hand over his cigars and matches.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Your military men and scientists on the base, they were called the Tinian Joint Chiefs. It was a mixture of scientific, civilian and military. There were General Thomas Farrell, who was the Manhattan Project Senior Officer on the island, and General Groves's eyes and ears on the base, really. Admiral R. Purnell, representing the US Navy, Commander Frederick L. Ashworth, and then from the Manhattan Project, professors Norman F. Ramsey and Professor Robert Brode. The argument was debated about whether the device, the weapon, should be armed either on the island before takeoff or armed once they got away from the island. Captain William S. Parsons from the US Navy, he was an integral member of the scientific

• 13:02Speaker 02

  team for the Manhattan Project. He would be flying with Tibbetts in the Enola Gate and he would arm the device. He made the convincing case that to have a bomb armed before the actual takeoff risked destroying the whole of Tinian Island, should the plane, as many had done already on bombing missions, suffer a malfunction and crash. The fear of this haunted all of them. Parsons suggested, once they'd taken off, got to a relative stable altitude, he would crawl through the bomb bay early in the flight and insert the uranium plugs and the explosive charge into the bomb to fully arm it. That was agreed.

• 13:37Dan Snow?

  When do those crews, when do they learn about the nature of the bomb, the weapon that they will be flying with? Or do they ever learn about it before it actually gets dropped?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  A lot of the crew, they knew they were dropping something incredibly powerful. Tibbetts had said that, so he briefed them several times. That was the whole point of the training for the mission that they were doing. They were just dropping one bomb on a specific target from way, way up. Sometimes it was at least 30,000 feet. And that's the practice they'd been doing, that he drilled into them for months and months and months. So they knew that something big was happening. These guys are not stupid. They think, okay, this is going to be a big one, probably the biggest of my career.

• 14:17Dan Snow?

  Now, weather in the Pacific, and frankly, any ocean really, is unpredictable. It's changeable and it can be violent. On the 1st of August, an attack with Little Boy has been delayed because of a typhoon tearing its way towards Japan. For several days, Tibbetts and the mission planners wait for the weather to clear. On the morning of the 5th of August, weather reports and other intelligence comes in. The mission is finally greenlit for the next day. Tibbetts assembles the crews for a briefing.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  So that morning, Tibbetts had called the crew together to the briefing room, which was now surrounded by armed MPs as we're getting closer to the time of takeoff. This is where he announced the mission and which planes and their crews would fly it. Tibbetts had already ordered the naming of the plane. It would have the iconic name Inola Gay, after his mother. So it's not just the Inola Gay, it's a group of planes, some of which are the observational weather planes and some are backup as well. And some are the ones that are the weather planes that are going over those three targets to relay back on radio coded messages what the conditions are. And they'll direct Inola Gay to the strike. Takeoff would be scheduled for 2.45am the following morning.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  The strike crew with Tibbetts would be his co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis, the bombardier, Major Ferribey, the navigator Captain Van Kirk, both these men he'd flown with numerous times in action over European skies, radar man Lieutenant Jacob Besser, weaponier Navy Captain Parsons, assisted by another weaponier Lieutenant Maurice Jepson, the radio operator Sergeant Joseph Stillbrick, tail gunner Staff Sergeant George Karen, more of him later, radio operator Private First Class Richard Nelson, and flight engineer Technical Sergeant Wayne Dusenbury. These men's names would go into history for what they're about to do. The other planes, the great artiste would be commanded and piloted by Major Charles

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Sweeney and Lieutenant Charles Albury, who would carry the observation equipment. Another plane called the 91 but was later renamed Necessary Evil would be flown by Captain George Marquardt and was kitted out with photographic equipment and observational material to record the detonation. And then the big stink, piloted by Lieutenant Charles McKnight, you don't really hear much about this plane primarily because it was acting as standby. It would follow the planes up until Iwo Jima, which is roughly 900 kilometres off the Japanese mainland, and then it would land. It was just there playing as a standby.

• 16:47Dan Snow?

  Even at this stage with takeoff times set, crews picked and planes prepped, Tibbetts does still not reveal the exact nature of the bomb to his men. Secrecy was paramount, as was the safety of his crews. They were not only entering contested enemy airspace, but they were delivering the first nuclear payload in history. As Ian has mentioned already, B-29s were not immune to malfunction. Just a couple of days before, four B-29s loaded with ammunition and bombs had crashed on takeoff and exploded. The incident worried everyone for obvious reasons. This was an exceptionally dangerous mission. It could go wrong in 100 different ways, and Tibbetts had tried to plan for every one of them.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Tibbetts then went on to assure the crews that all precautions for their safety had been made by the US Navy. There was a thorough area stretching for hundreds of nautical miles of safety, a safety net of vessels, submarines, and they were situated at points along the route below to retrieve them if they had to ditch in the water. But also, what he decided to do was take the unit's insignia off the plane too. So the distinctive 509 arrow inside a circle was removed, and he just asked for it to be replaced with a simple, bold, black R. He just didn't want Japanese interceptors to maybe, maybe it was paranoia, he didn't want the Japanese to know this special unit was on his way. The plane was towed to loading

• 18:10Speaker 02

  bay for Little Boy to be loaded. It was anything but little. It was plum shaped, gunmetal grey, 900 pounds in weight, 12 feet long, and a diameter of 28 inches, with sharp tail fins protruding. Within that, there would be the parachute that would come out, it'd be radar active, and that would slow the descent, which would allow Tibbetts' time to get away once he dropped it. What had been scrawled on it by some of the technicians was to Emperor Hirohito from the boys of the Indianapolis, that was the warship, the USS Indianapolis, which had delivered the final parts of the bomb to Tinian for its assembly, and infamously, that would be the ship that's captured in the film Jaws, where on its return home, it

• 18:53Speaker 02

  would be torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine in shark-infested waters, and barely any of the crew escaped to life. But Tibbetts himself said in his memoirs later, as he's studying the bomb, "It was not little by any standard. It was a monster compared with any bomb that I had ever dropped in action."

• 19:09Dan Snow?

  By nightfall on the evening of the 5th, things are well underway. Little Boy has been loaded into the bomb bay of Tibbetts's super fortress and placed under tight security. Just past midnight on the 6th of August, Tinian time, the crews are making final preparations for the mission ahead. Tibbetts briefs them one final time. He gathers them at one end of the crew lounge. They will take off in the early hours of August 6th. Their target is Hiroshima, unless weather intervenes.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  The crews were brought together one final time for Tibbetts to address them. This is where they were getting serious. He stood in front of all the crews and said, "Tonight is the night we have all been waiting for. Our long months of training are to be put to the test. We will soon know if we have been successful or failed. Upon our efforts tonight, it is possible that history will be made." Everyone went silent as he's saying this. "We are going on a mission to drop a bomb different from any you have ever seen or heard about." I would imagine when he's saying this, you can hear a pin drop. He then went on to confirm the scientific nature of the mission the crews were going to go on. What resembled welder's goggles, but they were fitted with a polaroid lenses, were

• 20:21Speaker 02

  then distributed to all of them. Professor Ramsay then went and stood on the stage and reassured them that these goggles that they were looking at now, wondering what to do with, they were to prevent blindness from the bomb flash that was going to be brighter than the sun, he warned. They left, and I would imagine whispering, "Wow." I mean, the enormity of what they're about to do must have been almost suffocating. Then at midnight, they were called together again, and they all made their way to the mess hall to eat a breakfast. Eggs, sausage, rolled oats, pineapple fritters, apple butter, and plenty of coffee. While his men ate, Tibbetts quietly, without them noticing, tucked away a packet

• 21:03Speaker 02

  of cyanide pills into his breast pocket. He'd been told by the senior surgeon on the island that they weren't allowed to be taken prisoner. So if they were shot down over enemy territory, or perhaps they crash-landed just off the coast and it looked likely that the survivors were going to be picked up by Japanese fishermen or military vessels, they were to kill themselves. As they ate, as the crew was sitting around having this delicious breakfast, kind of like the Last Supper, I suppose, the three weather planes, Straight Flush, Jabbit 3, and Full House, they all took off. They were flying an hour ahead of Tibbetts' strike force to report back the weather conditions for the visual drop that he would make.

• 21:43Dan Snow?

  At 01:15 Tinian time, the crew of the Enola Gay are picked up by a truck. Tibbetts and Parsons sit in the front. They all wear pale green combat overalls and the only identification they carry are the dog tags around their necks.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Tibbetts' crew finally drove to the Enola Gay. They were surprised to be met by media teams as well as all the Tinian chiefs. They're taking photos of the crew, but it's not like there's a mass press audience there because obviously they're about to go on the mission. And then when you compare it to how it looked once they've come back from a successful mission, the world's waiting for them. Seemingly every single general in the Pacific's there wanted to shake their hand. It's very different when they take off because obviously everyone's on tenderhooks. This is the big deal. They want to make sure it works. It's a top secret mission. So yeah, you've got the photograph and you've got the photograph of Tibbetts looking out of his cockpit window as well. But everyone's on edge.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  The Enola Gay was heavily laden, not just with the bomb itself, because also they'd put gasoline stowed away in the rear of the plane to balance it out. So it was a lot heavier than they'd had before. Coming up to take off, Tibbetts, behind the controls, focused on the eight and a half thousand feet of coral runway ahead. Checked in with his crew to confirm all was ready. He announced to the radio station, "Dimples 82 to North Tinian Tower, ready for takeoff on runway able." Less than a second later came the reply, "Dimples 82, Dimples 82, cleared for takeoff." Special bombing mission 13 was now a go. Above Iwo Jima, several hundred kilometres from the Japanese mainland, the B-29s met

• 23:22Speaker 02

  each other, formed up in the V formation and flew up to the IP. At the IP, Enola Gay and the great artiste flew in towards the city of Hiroshima.

• 23:31Dan Snow?

  At 0200 Hiroshima time, on the 6th of August, the dais cast. The crews are packed into their super fortresses and are slicing through the sky towards their target. Gunners nervously swivel in their cramped turrets, scanning the skies for enemy fighters. The last thing they need is to be intercepted with their precious cargo. Pilots try to focus on the task at hand. They grip the steering columns of their planes. They monitor the various dials in front of them. Navigators are kept busy plotting courses. The weaponiers, parsons and jepson, have the important job of crawling into the Bombay to insert the charge into Little Boy. In the bellies of these hulking bombers, all of the men are afforded a moment to think

• 24:14Dan Snow?

  about the task that lies ahead. Meanwhile, in Hiroshima, another side of this story is playing out. On the ground, Mayor Senkichi Oya is at the family home, unaware that the story of his city is about to change forever.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  On the ground in Hiroshima, there's the mayor, Senkichi Oya. He'd been in charge of the city in terms of the civilian administration since the spring of 1943. So this is a man who was born in 1893. He belonged to a family that had benefited greatly by the Western expansion of industry, commerce, education since about the 1850s in Japan. So he belonged to a very prosperous middle-class family that were based just northeast of Tokyo. First generation to go to university, star student. He'd been chosen to have a job in the civil service. He worked for the Ministry of Home Affairs. And even though he started with the Ministry of Agriculture, it was plain that he was a gifted man-manager.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  And also, he was adept at reading the law. Reading the law, knowing the law, and implementing civilian law in the home islands. So from a very young age, literally within a year and a half of coming out of university, he was in the Office of Home Affairs. Age of 26, he's given his first major senior role, which is to run the police force in, of all places, Hiroshima. And that's where he would meet his wife. They would go on to have several children, two of which died from disease in the late 20s and early 19th. So by the time of the war, 1941 Pearl Harbor, he has five children between the ages of roughly around seven to 17.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  And he had had a mixed career in terms of he would go from job to job. That's what civilian administrations did. They would be in charge of various cities. But he had major roles. For instance, he was the head of police in Osaka as well in the 1930s. And the key thing, and this one thing I had to stipulate, that one of the reasons why I really respected him was, even though you've got this time of economic hardship in the 1930s, Japan's descent into militarism, authoritarianism government, he still believed in the rule of law. I can't argue the point that he was a hundred percent Democrat, but he believed in the law of the land as was practiced at the time he should implement. So he had many run-ins with senior leaders in the armed forces.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  He believed that the armed forces could just do what they wanted on the home islands, as they were doing in other places such as China, Manchuria, et cetera. And he went head to head with them, to the point which he took early retirement through illness, which must have come on from the stress of the job. So they actually brought him out of retirement in the spring of 1943 because the war's going badly. They know the Americans are getting closer to the home islands. They can probably figure out that invasion would happen eventually. The major city in the south of Japan where the attack will probably come is Hiroshima. It's a military hub. The Japanese fleet that attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941 had set sail from Hiroshima.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Most soldiers fighting in mainland China had set sail from Hiroshima. Major works there, military works, major arsenals. So it's a target. But equally, they want a gifted administrator there. So they bring him out of retirement and he's not asked, he's ordered. So he has to go down there. So he'd been there for at least 20 months by the time we're getting close to this atomic attack, where Kinian's occupied, Tivit's 509th is there training, Awaya is there. He's already brought down some of his family. His eldest children are now either mature students or working in munitions factories in around northern Tokyo. They're a little bit safer, I suppose, from the bombings that are going on in the capital.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  But he brought down two of his youngest children with his wife to say it's safe in Hiroshima. We haven't been bombed much anyway. You'll be safer here. So he brings them down ironically, tragically. So on that morning, his wife's in the kitchen, August 6th, beautiful blue sky, the weather plane that the 509th have already sent over to gauge conditions over the city to report back to Tibbetts to say this potentially could be the strike. That's exactly what they do. While they're doing that, the air raid sirens are going off, people are scurrying, but the weather plane goes. So it's not bombing anyone. So the air raid sirens go off and people are going about their day of work. So it's eight o'clock in the morning because Tibbetts hadn't arrived yet. They're just going

• 28:43Speaker 02

  about their day. They're either stopping in cafes to get some cheap tea, scouring the markets to see if they can buy any food, which is heavily rationed. In a wire's case, he's in his residence on the river, literally two, 300 metres away from what we now know today and see as the atomic dome. That's how close he was to ground zero. He's playing with his granddaughter and his youngest son. His wife is in the back of the house preparing breakfast. And that's where they are, when Tibbetts and his crew in the Enola Gay are flying over, ready to drop the bomb.

• 29:15Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History at There's More Coming Up.

• 29:23Dan Snow?

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• 30:05Dan Snow?

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• 32:07Dan Snow?

  Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History Hit.

• 32:46Dan Snow?

  At the same time, in the skies above, the Enola Gay is preparing for its final run. Jepson had removed little boys' safety devices and inserted the arming devices. At 0630 Hiroshima time, Tibbetts had announced to the crew, "We are carrying the world's first atomic bomb." At 0805, the navigator Dutch van Kerkhove calls out, "Ten minutes to the IP." The Enola Gay is flying at over 30,000 feet when the city of Hiroshima comes into view for the first time. The seven channels of the Ota River are full and motionless, reflecting the morning sun. On the ground, students are making their way to the munitions factory, while groups of schoolchildren are already hard at work demolishing buildings

• 33:31Dan Snow?

  to clear fire breaks in case of air raids. They were soon to learn of the object futility of their efforts.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Ten miles out from the target, at 30,000 feet, bombardier Major Therby was in the nose of the Enola Gay. Their approaching speed was roughly 330 miles per hour. The autopilot, as they practiced, was engaged as the northern gun site took control and was guiding the plane towards the T-shaped target that had been agreed they practiced on, called the IO Bridge. As soon as Ferribi announced he could clearly see it, Tibbits took his hands off the controls, giving Ferribi command of the plane. Radio silence was a signal to the accompanying B29s that the Inolagais bomb doors were now open, and a little boy had been dispatched. The bomb hurtled towards Earth, heading for the IO bridge.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Five miles down, as had been designed, the bomb's fin radar system activated the detonator. Parachute had already opened, slowing the bomb down, which was allowing Tibbits the time to really do almost like a handbrake turn, going left, and get back away from the bomb as quickly as possible, the explosion, I should say. At 8:15, some 43 seconds after it had dropped from the Inolagais bomb bay, the weapon exploded at 1,890 feet above the ground. Tibbits and his crew were by then approximately six miles away, having turned away as instructed by Oppenheimer. Ferribi's aim, however, had been off, missing the bridge by roughly 800 feet. The atomic bomb detonated instead above the Shima Surgical Hospital.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  It didn't matter for the men, women and children of Hiroshima within the blast radius, but the effect, obviously, was going to be the same.

• 35:12Dan Snow?

  Witnesses remember the blinding flash that seared across the sky. Almost immediately came the deafening roar, trailed by an overwhelming blast wave that shattered windows, flattens walls and hurls people and debris through the air. In less than a second, the fireball swells nearly 900 feet across, radiating heat upwards of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, that's nearly 4,000 degrees centigrade. The inferno vaporizes wooden buildings and instantly turns many victims to ash with temperatures that fuse steel and concrete. Detonating at that altitude, the blast tears through two-thirds of Hiroshima's structures,

• 35:54Dan Snow?

  igniting fires that merge rapidly into a massive firestorm, engulfing entire neighborhoods and layering the skies in thick black smoke. Survivors emerging from collapsed buildings describe the surreal aftermath: a dusty, grey darkness cloaking ruins.

• 36:13Dan Snow?

  Soon the skies unleash black rain, a toxic downpour of ash, soot, and radioactive fallout that tar's streets sears the skin and will bring suffering long after the fires die down. On the ground, one survivor later recounted, everywhere there was dust. It made a greyish darkness over everything. It was a really terrible scene. It was just like something out of hell.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Eight out of 10 people within a half mile radius of the bomb blast instantly killed, evaporated, gone. Birds in the sky, evaporated, gone. Anything living within that half mile radius is pretty much gone. Housing completely flattened. You've got to remember, traditional Japanese housing was made of wood and paper, hadn't changed for centuries. There are various modern buildings that are made of reinforced concrete. So as we know, what's called the now famous atomic dome, that's shattered, but it's still kind of in one piece. There's very few modern buildings in that centre of the city that are still standing. Roughly between 66,000 and 75,000 people died within a matter of seconds.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  And that's a city of over 300,000.

• 37:29Dan Snow?

  A third of a second after detonation, the blast wave is moving at two miles per second, that's over 7,000 miles per hour. At its maximum size, about a second after detonation, the fireball is, what, approximately 100 feet in diameter?

• 37:47Speaker 02

  At least, yeah, and all consuming. And miraculously, a few people witnessed it and survived. But it's biblical, it's the only way to describe it. It's literally incinerates the city. Incinerates is the right word, there's nothing left. It's just gone. And people that would go and research this afterwards, once they've listened to this podcast, you go and look at the pictures, all that's left is the imprint of where the roads crisscross. There is nothing left.

• 38:18Dan Snow?

  The temperature was something like 7,000 degrees.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Several thousand degrees.

• 38:22Dan Snow?

  Several thousand degrees Fahrenheit at this point at the hypercentre, just beneath the blast. I mean, stone, stone melts at that temperature.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Stone melts, roof tiles melt, disintegrates. If you go to the Hiroshima Memorial Museum, they've got some very emotive but amazing artefacts that are now stored there that you can see, as in, you know, semi-melted roof tiles, people that have literally just been disintegrated, all that's left is a shadow of where they were sitting or standing on a doorstep. And it happens in a click of a finger. It's just, the power is incredible.

• 38:59Dan Snow?

  So, yes, you get these shadows. There's a shadow of a young woman on the bank of the river. There's a shadow of a man pulling a cart across the street. So that the only remnants of these people is the shadow that they cast at the nanosecond of their death.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yep. And for the survivors, then it becomes a case of what were you wearing when you were exposed to the bomb blast and the gamma radiation? So, again, people that I interviewed, some of them would later, they had cancer, developed cancer, radiation poisoning, but they survived. But some of them were lucky, they were just wearing long-sleeved clothes, full trousers, long-sleeved shirts and dresses or smocks. And that's what saved them. Whereas others were in short sleeves or skirts and died of their wounds, died of the burns that they would receive that would develop from the radiation poisoning and the bomb blast. For those that have been to Hiroshima, it's a beautiful city, the setting's amazing.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  It's surrounded almost in a kind of horseshoe shape by mountains, at least three, four, five thousand foot high. They did rebound the bomb blast that swept across the city, which caused even more destruction. It's something like 4.7 square miles of the city would be destroyed, that's 69% of housing and everything else, utilities. But on top of that, the mushroom cloud is raging above them, a boiling kettle of dark purple, yellow, white clouds that's rising forty, fifty thousand feet into the air. That's what shocked and surprised and awed the crew of the Inoue Gay and the other two B29s following them. They just couldn't get over just the size of this thing. Shrouds

• 40:41Speaker 02

  the city and it's scooping up all the debris and dust and everything else and human body parts, I would imagine, from the city and then raining down on them. That's famously where you get the black rain, the radioactive rain that would then shower the city immediately afterwards, which caused even more devastation. A mini tsunami is happening because of the force of the shock wave, which then engulfs the lower end of the city by the port. People are trying to escape that and they're trying to escape the flames. It's kind of a mirror of what happened in Tokyo a few months before in March. To get away from the heat, you obviously look for water. You jump in the rivers. The rivers are just as hot as anything you're stepping on outside. You're boiling to death, basically. And there were hundreds,

• 41:23Speaker 02

  if not thousands, of bodies floating in the rivers that separated the city to days on end until recovery teams could fish them out and burn them.

• 41:31Dan Snow?

  As Hiroshima is still experiencing this catastrophe, we get the first Japanese official reaction.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  The first report out of it, that Hiroshima had been destroyed, was actually sent by a 14-year-old communications officer, Yoshioka. She was one of thousands of students that had joined early the military that were working almost like a militia administration force and worked in the headquarters of major army groups across Japan, really. So she's working in the one that's in Hiroshima. And so she was part of this and she worked in the communication division. She was monitoring air defenses, enemy radio traffic and such. And what saved her life is she's sitting in a concrete bunker. So the initial explosion, the little boy rocked the bunker and despite the protection

• 42:19Speaker 02

  in the office, she was knocked off her feet as most of the people in the office were. And for a moment she lost consciousness, but she was alive. And when she recovered after a few seconds, she calls frantically Fukuyama Headquarters on a special hotline that was still intact. And obviously, they're not believing her. She's telling them that the city, the whole city, has been hit in one fell swoop. A surprise attack almost, because obviously it's just one bomber coming out of nowhere. So at first, the officer at Fukuyama didn't believe her. He tells her, you need to go up out of the bunker, onto the ground and see what's going on, see for yourself and then come and ring me back. She does this. She witnessed a, I suppose, dystopian nightmare.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  The fireballs there off in the distance. The mushroom cloud is literally towering above her, higher than Everest, boiling and mad hot. The air must have been suffocating. But creatively, she comes across a survivor, an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army, badly burnt, half his clothes missing. And he says what she's kind of thinking and what she's wanting to say up the chain of command. We've been hit by some new weapon. It came out of nowhere. It's destroyed the city. She scrambles back downstairs, gets back on the line to Fukuyama. And that's what she says. Hiroshima's been attacked by a new type of bomb. The city is in a state of near total destruction. And it was.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  The core of the city's municipal government office had been destroyed and had 90% of the buildings within the city centre a mile radius. Of the thousand employees fit for work that day, who normally worked for mayor or wire, after the dropping of the bomb, just 80 reported be duty the next day. The rest of them were either dead or die. The few civilian servants alive were able to walk into the inferno, I suppose, and try and deal as best they could with trying to get emergency medical treatment. For the tens of thousands of people that were still alive, that had managed to survive, obviously 80 odd thousand had literally just disappeared, had been evaporated.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  So throughout the next 48 hours, huge columns of survivors now, and those badly injured, are making their slow procession out of the city to what they think is the safety of the mountains. Cities emergency medical services been decimated, fourteen of the sixteen major hospitals in and around Hiroshima were destroyed. Of medical personnel, two hundred and seventy of two hundred and ninety-eight hospital doctors were dead, along with one thousand six hundred and fifty-four of a total of one thousand seven hundred and eighty registered nurses. I mean, that's the city's medical blanket just disappeared. The central telephone exchange was in ruins and all its employees dead. The tram car system was no longer tenable as the tracks running through the centre of town melted and disappeared.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Street cars that had been caught in the blast were just charred husks. And again, some of your listeners, if they go online, they can see those photographs. And the main train station was a wreck. And Hiroshima harbour, you would hope you'd try and get supplies in that way, that was a wreck too, that was destroyed. To tackle the thousands of fires now out of control in around the city, only sixteen firefighting equipment pieces of the hundreds that had been available seconds before were now destroyed. It was reminiscent of the catastrophic fire raids on Tokyo because most firemen had been killed in the blast. And the military complex based within Hiroshima Castle had literally disappeared, it'd been destroyed. Several thousand people had died and ironically, there'd been two dozen American POWs that had been gardening in front of the castle.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Again, they died instantly. Their shadows were burnt into the ground when they stood. So the estimated three hundred and twenty thousand human beings present within city boundaries that morning, approximately eighty thousand were dead, which would rise to well over a hundred thousand within a couple of weeks.

• 46:10Dan Snow?

  Mayor Awaya, his son Shinobu, and his granddaughter Ayako are in the dining room of their house as the Inola Gay passes above them. His wife, Sachiyo, has walked across the courtyard of their home to fetch some fresh fruit. They're practically at ground zero when the bomb explodes. Ian explains what happened to them.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  So as the Inola Gay is approaching Hiroshima towards eight fifteen, Mayor Awaya, he did in the dining room of his house, preparing for breakfast with his youngest son Shinobu and his granddaughter Ayako. She'd come across from where her parents were in Osaka because that had been heavily bombed over the last few weeks by the B-29s. So her parents, his daughter, had said, can she come and stay with you for a while? Because Hiroshima is obviously untouched at the moment, so that's why she was there. Awire's wife had walked across the courtyard to the rear of the residence to retrieve some fruit from the store next to the shrine they played at daily. So his residence is right on the river. It was a beautiful, must have been a beautiful place to live.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Very quiet, surrounded by trees and bushes. I suppose it's the kind of place a very senior official would have if they're running a city. And then as Awire's having breakfast and he's, I suppose he's urging his son and his granddaughter to eat their food. That's when the blinding flash of light fills a room and the fireball strikes the city. And his residence is less than half a mile from Ground Zero. So it was swept away in this cauldron of heat, dust and explosion. Crucially, his wife survives miraculously because she was at the back of the residence. And a lot of the research and interviews I've done with survivors, they do talk about they themselves either survived because they were at the back of the building, which took

• 47:58Speaker 02

  the brunt of the explosion at the front, or one of their relatives was there and they miraculously survived. And that's how Mrs. Awire survived. She was in the kitchen. In practice, it collapsed on her, but it created a slight air pocket cushion. So it didn't completely collapse and crush her. But she had severe injuries. And the next few days for her would be clearly a nightmare. She managed to stagger out. She would eventually be rescued by fire teams that got into the city. But eventually she would pass away a few weeks later from radiation poisoning. This is Dan Snow's History here. More after this.

• 48:40Speaker 01

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• 49:23Speaker 01

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• 49:29Speaker 03

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• 50:07Dan Snow?

  Back in the skies, the wall of this massive shockwave reaches the Enola Gay. It's her engines strained to carry her as far away as possible. The plane is buffeted, and the crew immediately enter survival mode.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  By the time the shockwaves hit the plane, they were roughly around about 18 and a half kilometers away. And they assumed they're being hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire. It's that strong. It really shakes the plane mercilessly. And it's only the tailgunners telling them, no, no, we're not being hit by anything. It's a blast wave, and I can see the next one coming in a minute. Hold yourselves.

• 50:41Dan Snow?

  So he could see Bob Carron in the tailgun. He could see these blast waves approaching.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, these concentric circles just emanating from the mushroom cloud.

• 50:49Dan Snow?

  Did the crew experience, apart from the physical shock, could they sense somehow, in any other way, the explosive yield that they'd just delivered?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  I would say yes, judging by the interviews that I researched in American Archives, quite a few of them have done memoirs as well. They've all experienced bomber crews. They know the power of the ordnance that they've been dropping over the last few years, especially in Europe. To see that kind of explosion must have been an incredible sight for them. I suppose for Tibbetts, he's banking the plane around. He's not literally just taking off, and Bob Carron in the tail is getting the only look at what they've done to the city. They're departing to the southwest, and so he can see out of the cockpit the atomic cloud that's rising. And I'll just quote this from him, from his memoir.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  The giant purple mushroom which Karen had described had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, three miles above our own altitude and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive. It was a frightening sight and even though we were several miles away by now, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us. If Dante had been with us in the plane, he himself would have been terrified.

• 52:03Dan Snow?

  Even looking back on the fiery inferno in their wake, none of the crew of the Inola Gay are aware at this point of the scale of the damage the bomb has inflicted. But from the size and appearance of the mushroom clouds soaring through the atmosphere behind them, they know for certain that they have ushered in a new epoch in history. Its mission a success, Inola Gay sets a course to return to Tinian.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  So, a 258 Inola Gay returns to Tinian. Their mission had covered 2,960 miles, taken 12 hours and 13 minutes and used approximately 6,000 gallons of fuel. Tibbetts always said it was the easiest mission he ever flew. They clearly weren't interrupted by any enemy activity towards and over the target and on the way back it was the same. It was literally cruise control. But this time an even bigger crowd awaited them than they'd seen the night before when they were sent off. 200 officers and men crowded onto the apron where the Inola Gay would park and several thousand more of the airbase crew, MPs, supply units etc were lining the tarmac, waving at them, greeting at them as they landed. And as soon as Tibbetts

• 53:13Speaker 02

  managed to park the Inola Gay and the crew disembarked onto the tarmac, General Carl Spatz, who was the head of the air force, quickly marched up to shake his hand for the cameras, clearly it's a big PR opportunity, and he pinned a distinguished service cross on his chest and then the media take over and start interviewing the crew.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  So, as this is going on, right on the other side of the world, at 11:45 AM, crossing the Atlantic in the USS Augusta, President Truman's sitting down for breakfast in the aft mess hall of the ship with his Secretary of State James Byrne, his Chief of Staff Admiral William Lay, and the ship's Captain James K. Foskett. Gentlemen are sitting down to have breakfast. It was now 16 hours since Fariby had released little boy over Hiroshima, and this is when the news arrives from General Groves. "Hiroshima bombed visually with only one tenth cover. There was no fighter opposition of black." Parsons, Captain Parsons, reports 15 minutes after drop as follows: "Results clear-cut and successful in all respects.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Visible effects greater than in any other test. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery." You can imagine Truman's reaction. He launched himself from his seat, startling everyone, because you've got to remember, it's not just the senior men and politicians sitting around him. The ship's crew are having their breakfast. They know the President's sitting there. I would imagine it's quite hushed and quiet and they're just getting on with things. Maybe there's a slight hubbub, but the President of the United States is jumping out of his seat like it's his Christmas. He did startle everyone close to him and pumped the young messenger's hand that had given him the cable from General Groves. And he shouted to the ship's Captain Foskett, "Captain, this is the greatest thing in history." So while the buzz among the ship's crew has drowned out any private conversation, another

• 55:03Speaker 02

  cable arrives, and this time it's from Henry Stimson. It says, "To the President, from the Secretary of War. Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 5th, at 7:15 PM, Washington time. First reports indicate complete success, which was even more conspicuous than the earlier test." So now he's got everything confirmed. So Groves has confirmed the military aspect, and Stimson's given the official political green light from Washington DC. So he's clutching both of these communiques in his hands. Quite biblical, I would imagine, this visualization. And he exultantly turns to Secretary of State Burns and shouted over this, you know, the increased noise in the canteen from the other crew, "It's time for us to get on home." That's when he thinks the politician in him, he wants to address the crew, the crowd.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  So he turns to the men now looking at him, and he picks up his fork and strikes it against the glass so they can hear it like a wedding, so he can get silence all round. And he tells the excited room of men, I suppose he reads the cables out, he reads both cables out to them. And then the room explodes in cheering and clapping, which then spreads through the ship in the next few minutes. And I would imagine, argue that that was a very pleasant voyage home.

• 56:13Dan Snow?

  Little Boy was not the only atomic bomb dropped in August 1945. The Hiroshima bombing failed to elicit an immediate Japanese surrender. And so, three days later, on the 9th of August, a plutonium-based bomb codenamed Fat Man was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Although estimates vary, we think up to 40,000 people were killed in the initial Hiroshima detonation. By the beginning of 1946, some 30,000 more people were dead. And overall, we think some 100,000 deaths were directly attributable to the bombing of Nagasaki.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Whereas the first mission, to deliver Little Boy over Hiroshima, went like clockwork, and everyone involved said the same thing. And as I said already, Tibbetts said it was the easiest mission he flew. The second mission to deliver the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, delivered by the B-29 called Boxcar, same setup, with the planes going ahead and then the communications and observation planes behind. It was a bit of a mess, truth be told, in terms of the first target, which was Kikura, they couldn't get to, they couldn't do, they were missing the rendezvous points as a unit together. They then were told, we can't do this one, we need to go further on, and Nagasaki is now the target. They managed to deliver the

• 57:29Speaker 02

  bomb, but the conditions over the target were nothing like it had been over Hiroshima. It was difficult to observe where ground zero was going to be to deliver the bomb. They managed to deliver it by the skin of their teeth with just enough fuel to get home. At one point, they thought they may have to land, emergency landing in Okinawa, which was part of the plan anyway. But they did manage to get home. But it was fraught with difficulty, with anxiety, and there was a lot of name-calling and a blame game afterwards.

• 58:01Dan Snow?

  Ian, as someone who's been immersed in this material now for years, how have you come away thinking about this new chapter in our story as a species? The importance of it, the necessary, the cruelty, the... What are you thinking now about those atomic strikes?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  I sympathise, empathise, I should say, with Truman. He would give the order in terms of he wants to finish the war. Ultimately, as a politician, he's looking to... This will save lives, and it did. It ended the war quickly. The fighting finished in the Pacific. The daily casualty rates he's looking at for his own troops as well as civilian deaths. And the incredible losses in China that was going to stop. So I can see that pragmatically, he's thinking that's the situation. But if you, as I've done with my research, you're charting the progress of the war in the Pacific. It's as vicious compared to the Eastern Front, which we all look at as a really racially driven, vicious war, no weapon off the table. I would argue the Pacific War was just like that.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely. There is no weapon off the table. If you're prepared to incinerate a whole country with napalm over six, seven months of operations, why would you not then think the logical next choice is to use something like an atomic bomb? You look at the Great Tokyo Raid, which has been covered to a degree by some excellent historians. That killed well over 100,000 people in a night with napalm. And I would say that's a far harder way to die than if you're right under an atomic bomb and you die in the bomb blast. You're dead instantly. Whereas, as I've done with the research and interviewing people with the Tokyo firing, the deaths there were appalling and it went on for hours. It must have been absolutely terrifying.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  From a moralistic point of view, I admire Tibbetts in terms of his message discipline. You've got to remember this guy, once he finished the war, how many interviews must have he gone through, hundreds upon hundreds of interviews in the press, on TV, on radio, that he was asked to justify, is it morally correct to drop an atomic bomb? And he says, and it's on, if you go on to the Atomic Heritage Foundation website, and front and centre is his quote, and the more often I read it, I should say, I thought, actually, he's got a point. He said, "There is no morality in warfare, there just isn't. And if you think that, you're a fool. What is the difference between dropping a conventional bomb, using napalm, using a flamethrower, poison gas, than dropping an atomic bomb?

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, they're killing people." But he said, "That's what I did, and I just, there is no morality, there is no moral argument in what I did." We are fortunate, we're looking at it from 80 years down the track. And we've lived with the atomic bomb, you and I, all our lives, we're children of the Cold War. So we know the horrors. Back then, he would not have known the horror, because someone like John Hershey hadn't gone yet to interview the survivors. The hydrogen bomb hadn't been developed, which is a genocidal bomb. That finishes off humanity, just doesn't finish off a city. They hadn't gone there yet for someone like Tibbetts. So that's why I think someone in his position, he would think it completely normal to do this kind of bombing mission. It would have been nothing strange for him to drop something like this.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  So you've got to judge him at that point in time to say, this is what he was thinking, this is what he'd experienced. You can't judge him on anything else.

• 1:01:25Dan Snow?

  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the end point of a story that began with our first hominid ancestor picking up a rock or a stick to strike their enemy. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the lethality of our weapons has increased until one man was able to release a single weapon that could destroy a city. What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was unlike anything the world has ever seen. In just a few seconds, these cities were leveled. Tens of thousands of lives were lost in an instant. In the weeks and months that followed, countless more suffered the slow, agonizing effects

• 1:02:07Dan Snow?

  of radiation, injury, and trauma, not to mention alienation from their fellow citizens. According to the crew, the mission of the Inola Gay was carried out with an unwavering belief that the bomb would help to end the war. And they did help to end that war. Just nine days after the Hiroshima bombing, Japan surrendered. World War II was over. For some, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a necessary evil, a horrifying but decisive act that saved millions of lives by avoiding a bloody land invasion. For others, they remain one of history’s darkest chapters, a massive use of force against

• 1:02:48Dan Snow?

  the civilian population, one that unleashed a new era of warfare that humanity has struggled to reckon with ever since. Earlier, I said that the bombings were an end of the story of human weapon development. But of course, they weren’t. In the decades that followed, bombs were developed that dwarfed even those devices. Later generations of nuclear weapons have given individuals the power to effectively destroy human civilization on our planet. As these bombs have strengthened and multiplied, so too have the questions about their use. Was it justified in 1945? Could there have been another way? Was it a genuine attempt to get Japan to surrender, or a signal to the Soviet Union?

• 1:03:33Dan Snow?

  And, really, most haunting, perhaps most importantly of all, could it happen again? Today, Hiroshima stands as a city of peace and remembrance, a symbol of resilience, a dark reminder of what nuclear weapons are capable of, and a desperate warning to all future generations.

• 1:03:59Dan Snow?

  Well, a huge thank you to Ian McGregor for guiding us through this. His book is The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and the Fateful Decision to Use It. It really is a masterful account of the development of the bomb and the experiences of four particular men at the heart of the story. I thoroughly recommend it. If you've enjoyed this episode of the podcast, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. They really do help us. And if there's any topics you'd like to hear more about, please send me an email at ds.h at historyhit.com. Thanks so much for listening.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

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  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 1:06:19Dan Snow?

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