August 6: When we handed ourselves the means of our own end
On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay released the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima, the first nuclear weapon ever used in war. Tonight's film: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).
There is a day like this when the calendar closes its hand around you. August 6 sits on two events at once, and the one that weighs most tonight is also the oldest and the heaviest.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time, the American B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay released the first atomic bomb ever used in war. Colonel Paul Tibbets had taken off from Tinian Island at 2:45 a.m. The bomb was nicknamed “Little Boy,” a uranium gun-type weapon weighing 9,700 pounds. It detonated 1,900 feet above the city center, with a yield of about 15 kilotons of TNT. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed instantly, and roughly 4.4 to 5 square miles of Hiroshima were flattened. By the end of 1945 the death toll passed 100,000. Three days later came Nagasaki. On August 15 Japan announced its surrender. This was the start of the nuclear age.
When I read these numbers I cannot help seeing the flash, that single white instant above the rooftops, a third of a mile above the ground. And I cannot help joining it to a film I watched on a tired evening years ago.
