Mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right), 6 and 9 August 1945
6 August 2020
Seventy-five years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The number of people killed by the bomb is not known with any certainty but was probably in the range of 90,000–150,000. Three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing another 40,000–80,000. But while the actual thing was new, the term atomic bomb was not. The idea of an atomic bomb and the destruction it could cause had been around a lot longer.
As with many technological terms, the phrase atomic bomb appears in science fiction before it does in reality. The first known use of atomic bomb is in H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free, published in 1914 before the outbreak of the First World War. In the novel, Wells depicts a world war fought with atomic bombs dropped from airplanes. Wells wrote this before the process of nuclear fission and its accompanying radioactivity were fully understood, so his technical description of the weapon is scientifically implausible, but he was eerily prescient in depicting what a war fought with such weapons would be like:
Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were conbustibles [sic] whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science had burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.
Wells’s novel was widely read and the idea of an atomic bomb well known in the first half of the twentieth century, even if science was playing catch-up with science fiction. The idea was so popular, that a 1921 fashion-industry journal could cavalierly discuss how the destruction of Paris by an atom bomb would benefit American apparel makers, incidentally the first use of this clipped form that I know of:
No form of protection will prevent our dressmakers from making use of the fashion service provided by Paris. We may close our frontiers against European textiles, the samples will nevertheless reach our market and be copied. Even the highest duties have not prevented American women of fashion to buy the expensive imported gowns. So there is no use of fighting a situation which has become an institution and for which there is no remedy excepting that of blowing up Paris by an atom bomb as forecasted by H.G. Wells some years ago.
In December 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch discovered and named nuclear fission. And in August 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, recognizing the potential for the realization of an atomic bomb and the dangers should Nazi Germany acquire one, wrote their famous letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt urging the United States to not fall behind in the area of nuclear research. This was the beginning of the Manhattan Project to develop such a weapon. That project would get fully underway in 1942, after the United States had entered the Second World War.
But, prompted by Einstein and Szilard, the U.S. government had begun experimentation with uranium prior to 1942, and this was reported by newspapers in 1941, before the full security clampdown on the project had begun. The report, distributed by the United Press syndicate and based on a Swedish newspaper report, exaggerates the effects of early nuclear weapons and the state of the U.S. program at that date, but it does reflect that the government was starting to take over the program from various university labs where it had resided:
U.S. Testing “Atom Bomb”
Stockholm, Aug. 28 (U.P.).—The newspaper Tidningen today published a London report that American scientists were experimenting with a 10-pound uranium “atom bomb” capable of blasting a hole five-eighths of a mile deep and 25 miles wide, wrecking buildings over a 100-mile area.
The dispatch said the United States Government had offered to take over the laboratory for the final experiments with the bomb, which had already begun.
Given wartime secrecy, there aren’t many mentions of atomic bombs in print between 1942 and August 1945. The term re-emerges on 7 August 1945 after the bombing of Hiroshima is made public. The abbreviation A-bomb appears at this point, as does use of atom bomb and atomic bomb as verbs. From a 7 August 1945 Associated Press report:
[General Carl A.] Spaatz announced there would be a leaflet campaign to let the Japanese people know they had been atom-bombed and could expect more in the future.
Since the invention of the more devastating hydrogen bomb, powered by nuclear fusion, the terms atomic bomb and A-bomb have been generally restricted to the older, fission weapons, and today tend to be used in historical contexts.
Sources:
Alwyn-Schmidt, L.W. “Fashions, Textiles and Dyes.” Color Trade Journal, 9.1, July 1921, 2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“More Bombs of the Same Kind Ready.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8 August 1945, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. a-bomb, n., atom bomb, n. atomic bomb, n., atom bomb, v., atomic bomb, v.
“U.S. Testing ‘Atom Bomb.’” Daily News (New York). 29 August 1941, 45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Wells, H.G. The World Set Free. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1914, 114. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credits: George R. Caron, tail gunner on Enola Gay (Hiroshima) and Charles Levy, on board observing B-29 aircraft The Great Artiste (Nagasaki), August 1945, U.S. Department of Energy photos