Tag: atomic bomb

August 6th, 1945.

I grew from birth to the age of ten in the “Atomic City,” Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I even had a wooden carved bomb that read “Dan Sanders Atomic Baby.” Fighter jets and guard houses were my normal views and surroundings. My dad worked for the Manhattan Project that helped create the atomic bomb, and I know he had reservations—hell, more than reservations. I’m sure he had nightmares about how it was used. He often said the first bomb should have been dropped on Mount Fuji as a warning shot, and that killing civilians—children—was an act of revenge, not war, and I agree with him.

The death toll on August 6, 1945 — the day Hiroshima was bombed — is estimated at 70,000 to 80,000 people killed immediately. By the end of 1945, about 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima, including those who suffered a long, agonizing death from radiation poisoning, which I have seen time‑lapse video of, and it is truly horrifying.

Sometimes at night when I think about this—and it’s not always on the anniversary, for it has haunted me for as long as I’ve been alive—I picture some kids in an open field, sunny green grass, blue sky, playing soccer laughing then suddenly turned to dust.

I met a survivor of that bombing many years ago, and he talked about how his life was spared because his house was a few miles from the hypocenter, and he was hunched behind a brick wall working in his garden, talking to his wife standing on the porch. After the blast wave passed over, he looked for his wife on the porch, and all that was left was a shadow left on the wall.

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July 16th, 1945, The Big Boom and Me

On this day back in ’45 — 5:29 and 45 seconds in the damn morning — the desert out in Alamogordo lit up like somebody flipped on a second sun just to see what kind of trouble it could make. A bunch of scientists stood around in welder’s goggles, slathering on suntan lotion like they were prepping for a day at Revere Beach instead of kicking off the nuclear age.

Enrico Fermi, cool as a guy waiting for the T that’s already late, took bets on whether they’d ignite just New Mexico or the whole planet. Real casual end‑of‑the‑world office pool.

Then the thing goes off — BOOM — sky goes white, sand melts into this ghostly green radioactive glass, like the desert tried to make its own cursed souvenir.

Ken Bainbridge, Harvard physicist running the whole Manhattan Project circus, turns to Oppenheimer — the man who’d spend the rest of his life haunted by the glow — and drops the line only someone with a New England soul could deliver clean: “We are all sons of bitches now.”

Weeks later, August 6th and 9th, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled — the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. A permanent scar on humanity, no matter how you slice it.

Bainbridge spent the rest of his life trying to undo the monster he helped midwife into existence.

And about a year after all that, I boomed onto the planet myself — born into a prefab little government town called Oak Ridge, where the fences hummed, the jet fighters buzzed overhead, and every entrance had a guard who looked like he’d seen too much. I spent my first ten years around atomic plants, security checkpoints, and the strange quiet of a place built to help make the damn thing in the first place.

Thirty years later, I was getting myself arrested trying to stop nuclear proliferation — life’s funny like that, it circles back with a badge and a pair of handcuffs.

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