Trickery is the way of war - thus has it always been. But the nuclear trick is the biggest, boldest and baddest-ass scam in all of mankind's ancient and eternal quest for power and profit through mass slaughter. DEATH OBJECT takes you behind the curtain and reveals the empty sound stage. The science, the history, the misery, the mystery - the full hoax is covered.

The DOD and the security agencies all have amply-paid COINTELPRO media staff devoted to jackbooting publications that get the masses a little too 'interested" for their own good. They'll be on here trashing and thrashing this book within an inch of its life. Don't fall for that. You may have to duck, but you don't have to let them cover you with manure. DEATH OBJECT packs more evidential meat into a couple hundred tightly reasoned pages than any existing nuclear hoax website, conspiracy forum, blog series or YouTube video. Every element of the atomic bomb scam, the founding myth of the technological age, is tied to every other, coalescing into an unanswerable exposé.

• Chapter 1: Fire Last Time
• Chapter 2: Fire This Time
• Chapter 3: Born Secret
• Enemy At the Gates
• Geek-Out
• Chapter 4: The Nuclear Secret That Dare Not Speak Its Name
• Burn the Sky!
• Virtual Manhattan Project
• Checkmate
• The Secret
• Chapter 5: Money Shot: TRINITY
• Something Like an Actor
• Unit Testing?
• Jumbo
• 100-Ton Test
• I Am Become Death
• Trinitite
• Chapter 6: Fool Me Twice: Japan 1945
• Hiroshima
• Trickery is the Way of War
• Nagasaki
• Downfall
• Chapter 7: The Mike of the Beast
• H-Bomb
• Lookout Mountain Studios
• Something Fishy: Bikini
• Photo and Film Checklist
• Chapter 8: Conspiracy!
• Chapter 9: Fire No Time: Falsification
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Other Supporting Articles
• Michael Palmer, MD
• Miles Mathis
• Russ Winter

Akio Nakatani is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His research interests include Stochastic Systems, Parameter Estimation, Stochastic Optimization, Monte Carlo Methods and Simulation, Neural Networks, Statistical Pattern Recognition, Statistical Image Analysis, Nonparametric Bayes and Bayesian Hierarchical Models, Time Series, Graphical Models, Nonparametric Bayes and Bayesian Hierarchical Models.

Death Object: Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax

Akio Nakatani

Copyright © 2017 Akio Nakatani

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Print ISBN 978-1-5455-1683-6

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
– John von Neumann

The ultimate mystery about nukes is why, after all these years, from 1946 on, nobody has ever nuked anybody in anger (if you’re reading this by the glow of a green glass parking lot, you may be forgiven a sardonic chuckle). Maybe the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction really is restraining the bloodlust. But the MAD doctrine only applies to nations. National leaders obviously care nothing for the lives in their charge, but they are attached to their palaces and limos. The politicians’ uncertainty as to whether those perks could be up and running quickly enough after a nuke exchange is enough to restrain them – for now. But that doesn’t apply to terrorists who are happy to die for The Cause. So then the question arises of why no terrorist bad guys have yet nuked anything. The usual answer boils down to lack of these components:

• Materials
• Knowledge
• Infrastructure

It’s assumed that those resources are a ‘bridge too far’ for a terrorist organization. The usual show-stopper statement to avoid the whole topic is: “You’d need another Manhattan Project.” I could go deeply into all the contradictions and absurdities that abound on this subject. But in this section, I want to discuss whether the FEAR hypothesis is valid.

Given all the restrictions on publicizing the science and design factors that enable explosive fission, it seems we’ve struck out on the ‘replication’ requirement that underlies real science. It appears that all anybody can do it accept spoon-feeding of filmed results and expert testimony. But appearances deceive. There is a way that the validity of explosive fission could be verified. The method outlined in this book is only a thought experiment. It involves no acquisition or use of fissionable materials whatsoever. It is proffered strictly in the service of the search for truth.

It must however be said that, sadly, there is no barrier preventing a small group of bad guys, not to mention a nation or sophisticated criminal organization from doing in reality what is outlined here as mere virtuality. And the horrible beauty of the scheme is that, by the precedent of the Manhattan Project, the development procedure sketched here is guaranteed to work.

Is there only enough fissionable material for a single bomb? No problem. By following the procedure here, bad guys could develop a nuclear weapon that works perfectly on first firing – without testing. No classified information would need to be accessed. It is thus the fabled ‘unclassified bomb’. All that’s needed is one bomb’s worth of fissionable material. I’ll cover the materials issue elsewhere. Now, let’s talk about the knowledge problem and the design challenge for building a 21st century unclassified bomb. If the FEAR hypothesis is correct, this procedure cannot fail to produce a working weapon.

Consider the original Manhattan Project. Forget about the materials problem for a moment (General Groves is on it). The Los Alamos scientists began with a theory and a goal, nothing more. The theory told them that explosive fission should be possible. As far as post-1945 conventional scientific thought is concerned, this theory is true. It was fully validated at Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

So how did they get from their true theory to their realized goal? In terms of anything remotely recognizable today as serious simulation they had only Stone Age tools. They relied on pure brains and instinct, just a wing and prayer. They were like the pinball wizard in the rock opera Tommy, who though deaf, dumb and blind “plays by sense of smell”. Because their theory was true, they were able to develop two different weapon designs and implementations, both of which worked perfectly on the very first full test/use (Trinity and Hiroshima). In achieving this, they did all the heavy lifting for all time. The task of today’s unclassified bomb builder is infinitely simpler and easier than what the Manhattan Project faced in the day. The two challenges should not even be compared.

The Virtual Manhattan Project is built around two essential elements, neither of which was available to the original guys.

1. A reverse-engineered component model.
2. Simulation technology.

With those, it is now possible for, on the one hand, any regular Joe to recruit some friends and build a basement nuke, or on the other hand (more to this book’s purpose) to either verify or debunk the FEAR hypothesis.

In technology one sometimes hears about ‘reverse engineering’.

Reverse engineering, also called back engineering, is the process of extracting knowledge or design information from anything man-made and re-producing it or re-producing anything based on the extracted information.
– (Wikipedia)

An engineer begins with a fully functional example of a working artifact (anything from an electric toothbrush to a software application) and then figures out what makes it tick by inference based on (i) its performance and/or (ii) disassembly for direct inspection.

An analyst has reverse-engineered the first atomic bombs. John Coster-Mullen’s book ‘Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man’ is a nearly complete design manual for understanding and replicating the simplest original nukes. The book explains every design element and how they all hang together, based on exhaustive review of original documentation and interviews with surviving principals, including scientists, engineers, and military deployment personnel – virtually anyone who had some hand in working on or with the bombs.

C-M’s work has been praised to the skies by heavyweight atomic authorities, including former heads of the USA nuclear weapons laboratories, as the only accurate design analysis of the early nukes. Some have even gone so far as to suggest he’s in violation of national secrecy laws. But everything in the book was derived from unclassified public reference materials harvested by C-M’s laser eyes (poring over hundreds of piecemeal physical prototypes and museum pieces) and his razor logic (applied to establishing connections, catching contradictions and filling in gaps). C-M is clearly the greatest ‘reverse engineer’ of all time. ‘Atom Bombs’ is the how-to manual for the ‘unclassified bomb’ that Los Alamos weapons designer Ted Taylor obsessed about in ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ (John McPhee).

So then why, apart from the few insider grumbles mentioned above (which Coster-Mullen proudly reproduces in the front matter of his book as testimony to authenticity) hasn’t there been more outcry? Why hasn’t Coster-Mullen been spirited away by Men In Black, the book scrubbed from Amazon, and all copies flushed down the Orwellian memory hole? Well, for one thing the USA is still a free country, sort of. After all, the book does not reproduce classified documents or include any illegal information found only in such sources.

But the most important reason for the official tolerance extended to this book is the bogus refrain we’ve heard along: You’d (still) need another Manhattan Project. But if the FAIL hypothesis is true – if explosive fission is for real – then that response is a tragic misreading of the situation.

Once possessed of C-M’s manual, why (under conventional thinking) might you still need another Manhattan Project to produce your unclassified bomb? One thing is the usual sidetrack about fissionable materials. That’s not my main focus in this section, but suffice it to say again: read ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’. This decades-old book will bleach your hair as you learn how easily bad guys of that time could have possessed themselves of all manner of nasty stuff, including U235 and plutonium, in various forms. Whatever tightening of security and accounting protocols was imposed after the book’s appearance has probably been more than out-run and end-run by the huge accumulation of such materials in the ensuing decades – especially outside the USA.

For now, let’s put the materials thing aside and concentrate on the weapon’s design and function. Decades before C-M’s detailed design manual was available, Los Alamos weapons designer Ted Taylor had this to say about the ‘unclassified nuke’. It’s what I’m talking about here, a proof-of-concept device:

Ted Taylor would like to see Los Alamos or Livermore build and detonate a crude, coarse, unclassified nuclear bomb – unclassified in that nothing done in the bomb’s fabrication would draw on knowledge that is secret. … Taylor’s instructions to Los Alamos would be “Lay off any sophistication altogether. Try to see how sloppy you can get. Then set the thing off underground. Measure the yield. Put a stop to speculation about this subject.”
– (‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ John McPhee)

As far as anybody knows, this has never been done. The formulaic response from sophisticated readers to the Taylor challenge above has always been, again: You’d need your own Manhattan Project. In addition to the C-M manual, there are plentiful public materials to be found in odd places such as the former Encyclopedia Americana, including things like:

…factors of density that could be reached in metallic fissile material with certain levels of implosive force
– (‘The Curve of Binding Energy’ John McPhee)

Put it all together and you have the blueprint of a bomb. I am most emphatically not suggesting any non-scientist, people working with a nefarious purpose, should pursue this. Why would you want to hurt anybody? Be a lover, not a fighter. No, the purpose of this excursion is to consider whether there’s any way to verify the truth or falsity of the FAIL hypothesis short of physically blowing something up. A thought experiment, if you will.

It turns out there is. And due to the Manhattan Project’s (supposed) existence proof, it’s now way easier than anything that team faced in the 1940s. All you need is a MacBook. Maybe a MacBook Pro.

Given all the existing materials, the C-M manual and all the rest that’s out there, it would be straightforward to construct a functional software simulation of a nuclear weapon. Before anybody freaks out and starts sputtering about super computers and irreducible complexity and so on, listen calmly to exactly what I’m laying down here.

A simulation is built from these points of information:

1. Components, with their a priori characteristic and specification
2. Spatial arrangement of the components
3. Process model of temporal operation
4. Control parameters for the components, their interactions, and their environment
5. A set of workable values for each control parameter

What in the above list is missing or secret at this point? The C-M manual totally covers 1 and 2 and most of 3, certainly for the Little Boy uranium ‘gun’ type of bomb. The combination of the C-M manual with the essential theory of explosive fission (basic level - only what the Manhattan scientists began with) specifies the required parameter types. A starting list of parameter types for core nuke processes would include environmental, characteristic and control factors like these usual suspects (mixing bomb types just to give the idea):

• Type, amount, quality, density, geometry etc. of the fissile mass, including figures for likelihood of fission, neutron capture, average neutrons released per fission, etc.
• Specifications for initiator (neutron source) if any
• Specifications for neutron reflector if any
• Speed and required force of critical assembly mechanism

… and many more. In a practical simulation there might be hundreds of components and processes, each with dozens of parameters and a vast interaction space. All these would be embedded under a physics model, specifying all real-world stuff that might affect the reactions, such as gravity, temperature, magnetic or electric fields, moisture – anything that affects or constrains the intended process. That support piece would be like the high-end ‘physics model’ used in sophisticated video games. Embedded within the bomb model would be the critical assembly simulator. (I’m not talking about a graphical simulator here. The graphics of this simulation don’t matter. We’re building a ‘good enough’ proof-of-concept where all the numbers play well together; reflect the perfectly smooth match between theory and practice demonstrated by the Manhattan Project; and add up to BOOM.)

This isn’t eye candy – pretty colors on the screen where you could set any values you want for atom count, neutron count, implosion depth etc. Those are toys. What I’m talking about here is expressing the theoretic elements of explosive fission thoroughly and accurately enough in our parameters such that the model’s process when ‘run’ yields the same explosive numbers that would be reflected in a perfect instrument capture of an actual event such as Trinity. To do that you can’t just provide some inputs and not worry about the real world accuracy of the outputs, nor can you set desired outputs and blithely assume the real world feasibility of the generating process and initial conditions. Both ends must match up, just as they did in the Trinity test (I’m talking about the abstract quality of consistent and realistic modeling, not about matching the observed values of any one particular test. Any simulation based on input of good theory, expressed in realistic parameter settings, that yields output of the observed values of a real world explosive detonation would qualify as a good simulation.)

That’d be a real hairball of a simulation for sure. That’s why the contemporary designers of actual nuclear weapons are so into massive supercomputers. Consider this news story from a few years back:

LIVERMORE, CALIF. — A group of nuclear weapons designers and scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted a what-if experiment several years ago, deploying supercomputers to simulate what happens to a nuclear weapon from the moment it leaves storage to the point when it hits a target.

They methodically worked down a checklist of all the possible conditions that could affect the B-83 strategic nuclear bomb, the most powerful and one of the most modern weapons in the U.S. arsenal, officials said. The scientists and designers examined how temperature, altitude, vibration and other factors would affect the bomb in what is called the stockpile-to-target sequence.

Such checks typically have been carried out by taking bombs and warheads apart; scrutinizing them using chemistry, physics, mathematics, materials science and other disciplines; and examining data from earlier nuclear explosive tests. This time, however, the scientists and designers relied entirely on supercomputer modeling, running huge amounts of code.

Then came a surprise. The computer simulations showed that at a certain point from stockpile to target, the weapon would “fail catastrophically,” according to Bruce T. Goodwin, principal associate director at Livermore for weapons programs. Such a failure would mean that the weapon would not produce the explosive yield expected by the military — either none at all, or something quite different than required to properly hit the target.
– (The Washington Post Nov. 1, 2011)

The above report indicates that simulations of complex atomic processes are both feasible and can be functionally reflective of real world outcomes. But the above simulation required some heavy computational lifting, with lots more capacity lined up on the runway for the near future:

Next May or June, Livermore plans to put into operation an IBM supercomputer, Sequoia, capable of 20 petaflops. A petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. The machine, on 96 refrigerator-size racks, will contain 1.6 million processing cores and will be 10 times faster than what is now the fastest computer in the world. By comparison, all the computing power at Livermore today is about 2.5 petaflops.
– (Post article)

With these kinds of sophistication and power requirements, how can I assert that a simulation performed with lesser hardware and software capability is even remotely feasible? Consider the situation that has obtained from the time of Trinity until just recently:

In recent years, physicists at Livermore surmounted one of the oldest and most difficult challenges they faced. In many nuclear weapons explosive tests, measurements suggested that the detonating bombs appeared to violate a law of physics, “conservation of energy,” which states that in a closed system, the total amount of energy remains constant, and thus energy cannot be either created or destroyed. For decades, the nuclear weaponeers puzzled over why the test results appeared to break from this principle. Then, the “energy balance” problem, as it was known, was solved by a Livermore physicist, Omar Hurricane, who won the 2009 E.O. Lawrence Award from the Department of Energy for his work, which remains classified.
– (Post article)

Say what?? You have got to be effing kidding me. You mean those early nuclear geniuses, the baddest-ass scientists ever, who got the bomb blowing up first time out, homerun on their first at-bat, with essentially zero system testing, didn’t understand why it worked? They were flying blind? That’s what the above statement appears to suggest, at least for the early hydrogen bombs. A Soviet physicist recalls what he heard about this early uncertainty:

At a conference at Los Alamos in April 1946, where Teller presented the results of his calculations of Classical Super, Bethe made a remark, that the amount of inverse Compton scattering of γ’s (not accounted for by Teller), will result in negative energy balance and that the hydrogen bomb of this type will not explode. In our calculations after hard work we came to the same conclusion – the energy balance was negative.
– (Boris Ioffe, Moscow Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics)

Well, that’s ok. We can take a tolerant view. After all, did the Wright Brothers totally understand all of aviation science when they got their gadget off the ground? It’s possible they never even heard of the Bernoulli effect (which may not even be the true/full explanation for aviation ‘lift’ anyway). And Darwin didn’t know about DNA (though he never tried to clone sheep either). Regardless, we have to admire the original atomic gangsters even more – truly they were real-life embodiments of the blind pinball wizard, with crazy flipper fingers and such a supple wrist.

At least the Wright Brothers were able to do wind test and other engineering integration testing, step by step. But even powered flight is way simpler than building an atomic bomb that works first time out. You have to admire the Manhattan Project’s achievement:

• Wrong, confused, or poorly understood theory
• Dozen or hundreds of control and sequencing parameters estimated ‘manually’
• No integration testing prior to first major demonstration

At this point we could drag out the tired cliché about ‘the probability that a tornado ripping through a junkyard will spontaneously assemble a 747’. But you won’t catch me saying that. Because you don’t need monster arrays of 20 petaflop machines to do the parameter setting for your working bomb.

All you need is:

1. primitive-but-workable Manhattan Project level of theory
2. some public domain data tables
3. C-M’s model of components, layout and process
4. a decent laptop computer
5. Matlab and/or Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud and/or any other standard machine learning tools suite

With the above in hand, you can reverse-engineer the one remaining necessary item – the final classified ‘secret sauce’ of the Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki bombs – the parameter settings. I’m using the term ‘parameter setting’ in a broad sense for anything variable in the device such as amount and quality of core materials, dimensions of everything, timing, and all else that needs to be numerically specified or controlled.

This is where those who are complacent about books like C-M’s manual and McPhee’s work on Ted Taylor are sadly fooling themselves when they say: “You’d need another Manhattan Project.” One Manhattan Project was enough, and, partly as a result of its ‘success’, the unclassified bomb designer now has access to all the stuff above. So I can assert the following:

1. There exists an unclassified device model M, characterized by parameter set P, which, when engaged according to parameter value set V, is a functional representation of a working atomic bomb.
2. If a device were built and deployed in accordance with M = P(V) it would explode with the yield of Fat Man or Little Boy (depending which was chosen as the basis for M).

Now you say: gotcha! Because it’s well enough to claim that, while the Manhattan Project’s theory was wrong or seriously incomplete, it is a sufficient basis for a working bomb. And it’s all very well to say that an accurate device model and set of timing and control parameters is openly available. But what about the parameter settings? There’s your showstopper! You’d need petaflops of computing power to resolve those.

No, you wouldn’t. Consider how the Manhattan Project worked.

[One process] of great interest to Los Alamos was the progress of free neutrons hurtling through a nuclear weapon as it began to explode. As Stanislaw Ulam … would subsequently note, “Most of the physics at Los Alamos could be reduced to the study of assemblies of particles inter-acting with each other, hitting each other, scattering, sometimes giving rise to new particles.” Given the speed, direction, and position of a neutron and some physical constants, physicists could fairly easily compute the probability that it would, during the next tiny fraction of a second, crash into the nucleus of an unstable atom with sufficient force to break it up and release more neutrons in a process known as fission. One could also estimate the likelihood that neutrons would fly out of the weapon entirely, change direction after a collision, or get stuck. But even in the very short time span of a nuclear explosion, these simple actions could be combined in an almost infinite number of sequences, defying even the brilliant physicists and mathematicians gathered at Los Alamos to simplify the proliferating chains of probabilities sufficiently to reach a traditional analytical solution.

The arrival of electronic computers offered an alternative: simulate the progress over time of a series of virtual neutrons representing members of the population released by the bomb’s neutron initiator when a conventional explosive compressed its core to form a critical mass and trigger its detonation. Following these neutrons through thousands of random events would settle the question statistically, yielding a set of neutron histories that closely approximated the actual distribution implied by the parameters chosen. If the number of fissions increased over time, then a self-sustaining chain reaction was underway. The chain reaction would end after an instant as the core blew itself to pieces, so the rapid proliferation of free neutrons, measured by a parameter the weapon designers called “alpha,” was crucial to the bomb’s effectiveness in converting enriched uranium into destructive power.

All those ‘Deleted’ arrows represent numerical parameters, the supposedly ‘secret’ sauce that separates the sheep of a general layout from the goat of a working device. Given the configuration shown, and a physics model, the parameters can be restored by high-speed simulation. Virtually infinite combinations can be tested and verified in milliseconds.

The weapon used on Hiroshima is estimated to have fissioned only about 1 percent of its 141 pounds of highly enriched uranium, leaving bomb designers with a great deal of scope for refinement. Using [probabilistic simulations], the explosive yield of various hypothetical weapon designs could be estimated without using up America’s precious stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. This was, in essence, an experimental method within a simulated and much simplified reality.
– (‘Nuclear Monte Carlo Simulations 1947-1948’ Thomas Haigh)

Thus it’s clear that fully functional parameter values can be derived even in the absence of accurate theory and based on incomplete experimental results, just by a powerful sampling and automated simulation. But note the date on that description: 1947 – 1948. Right after the war, Los Alamos began to work with serious digital computers, which, though pitifully slow and buggy, were more like today’s architectures than the analog calculators and IBM punch card machines used in the initial (wartime) phase.

In the wartime phase, the calculating machinery was truly Stone Age, yet the scientists arrived at good-enough (BOOM!) workable parameter values, which were subsequently locked up as highest state secrets. But with the materials outlined above, and with the incomparably superior parameter estimation and statistical modeling systems available to anybody today practically for free, that secret sauce of ‘known-to- BOOM’ parameter settings could be easily recovered and replicated. For our purposes, that would validate the explosive fission FEAR hypothesis. Unfortunately, this process would also serve up to any villain or scumbag who comes along a guaranteed-to-BOOM recipe for a working gadget. I’ll have more to say on probabilistic simulation methods later in this chapter.

Everything in a 2 mile radius of the explosion’s epicenter was vaporized.
– (‘The Manhattan Project: The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ Al Cimino)

Sci-fi nuclear carbonization of people? Or merely conventional carbonization? You be the judge.

There you have it. ‘Everything’ was ‘vaporized’. Including the people. But wait:

The [nuclear] scientist later became annoyed with me when I showed him a paper in which I had written that many people in Hiroshima were “vaporized” by the bomb. He pointed out that the correct term was “carbonized”. “That’s the problem with nonscientists: you are so sloppy with detail,” he added.
– (‘People of the Bomb’ Hugh Gusterson)

Hmm… another multi-cultural moment. But I’m inclined to be more forgiving about that kind of sloppiness. Sometimes it’s hard to know, in Marvin Gaye’s immortal words, what’s going on. Even when bodies aren’t vaporized, merely carbonized, can we really be certain it was an effect of The Bomb? What would you say about the bodies in this photograph? Atomic carbonization? Or conventional napalm cooking?

But before we get to the really horrifying stuff, let’s back up to the boring question of testing once again, this time for a different device than the Trinity Gadget. If the Trinity test is the most impressive chunk of ‘extraordinary evidence’ for the (putative) existence of explosive fission chain reactions, the Little Boy uranium bomb ‘gun’ design lies (I use the term advisedly) at the other end of the scale. It is the most baffling and almost ridiculous ‘just-so story’ of the entire miserable nuclear saga.

Let’s start with the bomb itself. Remember that the Trinity test’s Gadget was the more complex plutonium implosion design. Little Boy was the much simpler uranium ‘gun’ design, as described in the previous chapter. What was the test track record of this ‘Acme Atomic Bombs’ device before combat use?

Although all of its components had been tested in target and drop tests, no full test of a gun-type nuclear weapon occurred before Hiroshima. There were several reasons for not testing a Little Boy type of device. Primarily, there was insufficient uranium-235. Additionally, the weapon design was simple enough that it was only deemed necessary to do laboratory tests with the gun-type assembly. Unlike the implosion design, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the gun-type design was considered almost certain to work. Thirty-two drop tests were conducted at Wendover, and only once did the bomb fail to fire. One last-minute modification was made, to allow the powder bags of propellant that fired the gun to be loaded in the bomb bay.
– (Wikipedia)

Note that the ‘drop tests’ referred to there were of dummies, not nuclear devices of course.

In August 1944 Groves reported to the Top Policy Group that the scientists at Los Alamos were sufficiently confident of the uranium gun working that they advised it could be used in combat without a prior test.
– (‘Brotherhood of the Bomb’ Gregg Herken)

Little Boy was the first atomic weapon ever deployed in a battlespace. It wasn’t just a matter of ramming some metal down a tube with a high explosive blast. It was to be the first explosive nuclear chain-reaction ever occurring in a deployed weapon, a phenomenon that, up to the moment that Little Boy shipped, was a purely theoretical idea. Note when Little Boy’s parts shipped out:

The target and bomb pre-assemblies (partly assembled bombs without the fissile components) left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, California, on 16 July aboard the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis.
– (Wikipedia)

This means that before Trinity, before there had ever been a fission explosion on planet Earth, Little Boy had begun its combat deployment. (The naughty bits followed a few days later on separate transport.) That’s how confident the Project’s tech team and brass were about a weapon that not only had never been used, and never been integration tested, but that was based on a theory that had never been tested either.

Here’s one of the big reasons for the no-test thing, as cited in the Wikipedia entry: Primarily, there was insufficient uranium-235. ‘Primarily’. Is it true?

By November 1944, all nine Alpha racetracks [uranium enrichment facilities] were running at full capacity – daily feeding more than 100 grams of U235 into two Beta tracks. Weekly shipments of enriched uranium to Los Alamos had begun. Just before Thanksgiving, Lawrence telephoned Groves from Oak Ridge to exult that “things are really booming down here.” The production of U235 in November equaled all previous months combined. In December came another new record: nearly 200 grams of uranium, 80-percent pure U235, were left in the receivers after a single day’s run. All nine Alpha tracks and three Beta tracks were in continuous operation for the first time.
– (‘Brotherhood of the Bomb’ Gregg Herken)

Furthermore, if uranium supply was the only limitation on an otherwise proven, guaranteed, war-ending, world-beating weapon system, then research and production effort should have doubled or tripled on that, to the exclusion of any other activity. It was wartime.

But I shouldn’t Monday-morning quarterback these guys too hard. After all, they were right – it worked straight from the box, as we’ll see in the attack story further below. But let’s think about the implications of this for a minute. First of all, we have to admire and applaud the Manhattan Project bomb designers. Not for making a fancy new-fangled sci-fi weapon, but for exactly the opposite achievement. They created something that fits a weapons guy’s far more significant design goals: robust, reliable, unbreakable, practically field-strippable, and so on. That, not sophistication and complexity, is what makes a classic weapon design for the ages. The Little Boy device ranks right up with, indeed can only be compared to, the greatest weapons design triumph of the 20th century, (maybe even the GOAT – Greatest Of All Time) – the Kalashnikov rifle:

The AK-47, or AK as it is officially known (also known as the Kalashnikov) is a selective-fire (semi-automatic and automatic), gas-operated 7.62×39 mm assault rifle, developed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov. Even after almost seven decades, the model and its variants remain the most popular and widely used assault rifles in the world because of their substantial reliability under harsh conditions, low production costs compared to contemporary Western weapons, availability in virtually every geographic region and ease of use. The AK-47 has been manufactured in many countries and has seen service with armed forces as well as irregular forces worldwide, and was the basis for developing many other types of individual and crew-served firearms. Of the estimated 500 million firearms worldwide, approximately 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s.
– (Wikipedia)

Now that is a weapons design for the ages. And if we believe the official story, the Little Boy was in this same elite realm of weapons that are preternaturally “reliable, cheap, and easy to use”. Just think: Little Boy, with no integration testing, relying on physics that had never been demonstrated, was shipped halfway around the world with god knows what kind of manhandling along the way, in wartime, bounced all over in its delivery vehicle, and functioned under unpredictable and variable parameters of temperature, moisture, altitude, vibration, etc. – functioned perfectly to spec.

To get a sense of the kind of thing that could have happened, consider the assembly of the Trinity Gadget (which was prepped under comparatively ‘ideal’ conditions).

Inserting the plug courted disaster, team member Boyce McDaniel remembers: “It was through [an opening] that the cylindrical plug containing the plutonium and initiator was to be inserted… In order to maximize the density of the uranium in the total assembly, the clearance between the plug and the spherical shell had been reduced to a few thousandths of an inch. Great care had been exercised to make sure… that mating pieces had been shipped to [Trinity]. Imagine our consternation when, as we started to assemble the plug in the hole, deep down in the center of the high explosive shell, it would not enter! Dismayed, we halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces, and stopped to think about it. Could we have made a mistake…?”

Bacher saw the cause and calmed them: the plug had warmed and expanded in the hot ranch house but the tamper, set deep within the insulation of its shell of high explosives, was still cool from Los Alamos. The men left the two pieces of heavy metal in contact and took a break. When they checked the assembly again the temperatures had equalized. The plug slid smoothly into place.
– (‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ Richard Rhodes)

This kind of thing could easily have fouled up Little Boy somewhere along the line. The ‘gun’ design called for a cylindrical ring projectile to be fired onto a central spike of U235 metal. The sudden assembly was supposed to yield a critical mass that could be instantaneously triggered by a small neutron source. It was ballistically precise female-to-male instantaneous ‘seating’ or atomic sex if you will. These components had been jostled, bumped and man-handled thousands of miles over land, sea and air, and were now finally to be delivered all together from 30,000 feet altitude down to the detonation level around 2,000 feet. The temperature effects alone boggle the mind. Heat, cold, re-heating, re-freezing – all kinds of things could have thrown these precise alignments out of whack at any point.

Suppose a commander, in the middle of a war, had a guaranteed supply of AK47 rifles – a battle rifle of incomparable ease and speed of deployment, as well as absolute reliability and versatility in the mud, crud, dirt and blood. Suppose this commander, about to take the field, knew all about the AK’s superior economics of manufacture, training, and maintenance; and knew its brain-dead simple training, transport, field-stripping, cleaning and assembly. But then, a scientist came along and said:

Wait – I have the M16, a completely different, incompatible design that is vastly more finicky and troublesome. This is a new weapon with complex and unproven ballistics, it’s much harder to disassemble and clean, far more likely to jam, and it uses a totally different ammo than what you’ve already begun to plan for. It might not work, as it needs an unspecified period of further development and invention. It can’t just be banged out on a backyard ironworks, you need precise high-tech machine tools to manufacture it. How many shall I sign you up for?

What honest commander would turn his back on the AK, destroy all plans, and never look at it again? It smells more like concealing the evidence on a strictly Kabuki shell of an atomic ‘weapon’. Basically it was abandoned after Hiroshima.

After the war ended, it was not expected that the inefficient Little Boy design would ever again be required, and many plans and diagrams were destroyed.
– (Wikipedia)

Excuse me? This thing that cost umpteen billions in today’s money, that functioned perfectly under combat conditions without integration testing, the very model of AK-style weapons design philosophy – and they destroyed plans and diagrams? They dumped it? No, wait. The “inefficient Little Boy” design, or that design family, was in fact manufactured for deployment, and the same basic type was (supposedly) fired off exactly 3 more times:

1. A test firing of the W9 11-inch nuclear artillery shell in test shot Upshot-Knothole Grable on May 25, 1953
2. The W33 was an American nuclear artillery shell, fired from an eight-inch (203 mm) M110 howitzer and M115 howitzer. A total of 2,000 W33 projectiles were produced, the first of which was manufactured in 1957. The W33 remained in service until 1992.The W33 is the third known model of gun-type fission weapons to have been detonated as a test. The W33 was tested twice, first in Operation Plumbbob Laplace, on September 8, 1957 (yield of 1 kt), and the TX-33Y2 in Operation Nougat Aardvark on May 12, 1962, with a yield of 40 kilotons.

– (Wikipedia)

So despite the fact that the tech specs and diagrams were destroyed, it was reinvented from scratch, was manufactured, and “remained in service” until 1992. This again shows how simple and perfect a design it was, that it was cobbled together again after being decommissioned and having its tech specs destroyed. The whole story of the ‘gun’ design bombs reminds me of Wile E. Coyote setting up for a shot at Roadrunner.

I’m sure there were good secret reasons for all these illogical actions and conflicting claims. So let’s confine ourselves to the deeper question: was there no integration testing… because they were so sure it would work? Or because they’d become so sure it wouldn’t work that they’d made other plans for staging a fake Japan atomic operation, and could relax about Little Boy’s performance (assuming there even was any sincere attempt at a functional Little Boy in the first place)? There are two situations where no test is run: when you know it works, and when you know it doesn’t.

A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Although the word has been used to describe certain large fires, the phenomenon’s determining characteristic is a fire with its own storm-force winds from every point of the compass. The Black Saturday bushfires and the Great Peshtigo Fire are examples of forest fires with some portion of combustion due to a firestorm. Firestorms can also occur in cities, usually as a deliberate effect of targeted explosives such as occurred as a result of the aerial firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
– (Wikipedia)

The Hiroshima firestorm probably caused more damage than the blast itself. The general effect of a firestorm (for example, in Dresden) has been explained as follows:

Consider the use of precision saturation (incendiary) bombing in Dresden. At 10:09 AM, the first bombs were dropped unleashing a massive firestorm. Gigantic masses of air were then sucked in by the expanding inferno creating something similar to a tornado. People caught in this wind were mercilessly tossed into the flame, while those seeking protection underground suffocated as the fire gasped for more oxygen. The least fortunate were those who died from a blast of white heat which has temperatures so high it literally melts human skin.
– (Eric Roberts)

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who was present in Dresden at the time, commented:

You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Another analyst comments:

How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? U.S. bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from blast; they completely ignored damage from atomic firestorms. Recently a small group of researchers has shown that for modern nuclear weapons the destructiveness and lethality of nuclear mass fire often – and predictably – greatly exceeds that of nuclear blast.
– (‘Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation’ Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

They ask a good question. Why minimize nuclear-ignited firestorms? The problem is that firestorms can arise from causes other than nuclear, and have effects that are all too similar to supposed nuclear outcomes. It seems the brass at the time were anxious that nobody start to line up and too closely compare the ‘atomic’ outcomes against those of conventional firebombing raids.

Beginning with an incendiary raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945 which Japanese records showed killed 83,793 and burned out 267,000 buildings (25% of Tokyo’s buildings), sixty-four Japanese cities were destroyed by non-nuclear air raids. The detailed and objective analysis of these incendiary air raids was classified “Restricted” in April 1947 by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in its unpublished limited distribution typeset and printed report Number 90, Effects of Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan; Part 3 (pages 65-118) documents the effects of the 9 March 1945 Tokyo incendiary raid, with photos on pages 104-109 very similar to the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (combustible light frame buildings burned out with their steel distorted by the fires, and piles of charred bodies in streets). By omitting to publish this, an objective comparison of nuclear with conventional attacks was prevented.
– (‘The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan’ – U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report)

In fact, the damage patterns of the supposed atomic attacks were nearly identical to previously observed firestorm effects.

Although fashionable books on Hiroshima tend to print pictures of the “blasted” twisted metal beams of the Odamasa Store (former Taiyo Theatre), USSBS building 52 at 2,800 feet from ground zero, page 322 explains it is an effect of fire: “Severe distortion caused by burning of combustible construction and contents.” Furthermore, similar twisting of metal frames in wooden buildings occurred in the Tokyo incendiary attack, but those photos remained Restricted. It is not a special “nuclear” effect, nor are the burned bodies in the streets of Tokyo photographed after the main non-nuclear attack, despite all the polemic and inaccurate claims attacking civil defense.
– (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)

Damaged trees at Nagasaki 2,700 feet southwest of ground zero.

Anyway let’s get back to nature for a moment, let’s talk trees.

The picture at right is described as follows by conventional histories:

Fat Man snapped trees at Nagasaki; the less powerful Hiroshima bomb only knocked them down.
– (‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ Richard Rhodes)

There are spindly looking tree remnants to the right side of that Nagasaki picture which appear not only unsnapped, but still upright. What, other than a massive atomic blast of 20 kilotons (Fat Man), could have ‘snapped’ (or maybe we should say ‘splintered’) those trees? A firestorm, that’s what.

Exploding trees occur when stresses in a tree trunk increase leading to an explosion. Exploding trees occur during forest fires and are a risk to smokejumpers. In Australia, the native eucalyptus trees are known to explode during bush fires due to the high flammability of vaporized eucalyptus oil produced by the tree naturally.
– (Wikipedia)

Ordinary forest fire 1910 Big Blowup Aftermath of an ordinary forest fire showing a jumbled mix of upright, splintered, snapped, and toppled trees. Jumbled aftermath of the 1910 Big Blowup forest fire in Idaho.

---------------------------- Hiroshima near ground zero: a lot of vertical stuff…

The Nagasaki trees photo looks a lot like the usual jumbled mix of upright, damaged, toppled, and snapped wood that you see in the aftermath of any major forest fire.

That does not completely rule out a nuclear blast. After all, by conventional hypothesis, nuclear detonations themselves actually produce firestorms at some point (presumably even when not helped along by residential cooking and kitchen fires, as well as electrical shorts). But it shows that nuclear explosion need not be fixed on as the only possible cause of that kind of damage. With those photos as reference, let’s look at blown-up Hiroshima.

Below right we see, close to ground zero, a bunch of utility poles in the foreground and tree remnants in the background. Not much of this skinny stuff has been ‘knocked down’. Would 5 more kilotons have done the job? Maybe not, because you sometimes hear that vertical standing objects, when perfectly located ‘just so’ with respect to the blast, have remarkable superpowers:

Because the shock-front came down from almost directly overhead, telephone poles and trees… were able to resist and were largely bypassed by the forces of compression. Trees and poles and up-thrusting steel beams behaved much like the noses and fins of rocket bombs cutting through supersonic air.
– (‘The Last Train from Hiroshima’ Charles Pellegrino)

It’s amazing that so many scrawny, bent and twisted natural objects, located all over the blast area, as well as many dozens of utility poles, could all have been situated in the mathematically perfect angular centering with reference to the bottom of the blast front, such that this theoretically well-motivated ‘vertical resistance’ effect applied so extensively. But anything is possible. Maybe the exact zone pictured above matched perfectly with the overhead shock-front. Thus, maybe it’s better not to consider trees and poles standing ‘too close’ to air zero, as it seems that may be the safest place for them. The problem is that as we move away from ground zero, we still find lots of standing trees and other vertical objects:

Hiroshima damage Upright trees Hiroshima damage. Plenty bad fire damage, yet upright trees are numerous along the left side of the central road.

---------------------------- Diagram of Little Boy 15-kiloton air blast contours overlaid on (modern) Hiroshima. The inner circle is the 20 psi contour; the outer circle is the 5 psi contour. (see Bibliography for source attribution of the map and the overlay)

Again we see the familiar mixture of upright, leaning, and toppled trees and poles.

So it seems that uprights are protected by the contradictory conditions of (i) being directly under ‘air zero’ and also, paradoxically, by being (ii) farther away – yet in zones from which most buildings were supposedly blasted down. But there must have been some kind of blast – if a real nuke was dropped. Let’s tighten the bolts on the blast thing. At the ‘air zero’ detonation altitude of 600 meters, there would be an inner blast contour of 20 psi, and an outer contour of 5 psi effects. These are shown as concentric circles on the Hiroshima effects map.

Here are descriptions of blast effects within the contours (note that Little Boy detonated at 600 meters, almost the theoretical ideal for maximal destruction).

Air blast radius (20 psi): 340 m (0.36 km²)
At 20 psi overpressure, heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished; fatalities approach 100%.

Air blast radius (5 psi): 1.67 km (8.78 km²)
At 5 psi overpressure, most residential buildings collapse, injuries are universal, fatalities are widespread.

20 psi has a maximum wind speed of about 502 mph and 5 psi has a maximum wind speed of about 163 mph. The Hiroshima damage photos in this section are all from either the inner (20 psi) contour or at least the outer (5 psi) contour. It isn’t necessarily true that psi decreases linearly and smoothly from the 20 psi center zone out to the 5 psi edge. But there must have been a pretty wide belt of, say, 10 psi, with wind speeds of up to 294 mph. On the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale:

A category 5 hurricane is the highest level of ‘Major’, defined as 157 mph or higher wind speeds: catastrophic damage will occur: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed.
– (www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutsshws.php)

So keep in mind, as you read on, that even the outer edge of the 5 psi contour should have experienced buffeting at, or exceeding, the highest level of hurricane force.

Alexander P. de Seversky (June 7, 1894 – August 24, 1974) was a Russian-American aviation pioneer, inventor, and influential advocate of strategic air power. He made an inspection tour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after the war’s end. His observations and conclusions are particularly valuable as he had extensive personal experience in bombing and aerial warfare, as well as a deep conceptual and theoretical understanding of explosives and blast effects. His trip report was published in a 1946 magazine article, which was reprised at greater depth as a chapter in his 1950 book ‘Air Power: Key to Survival’.

The American public thoroughly approved the bomb’s use.

Seversky is sometimes charged with bias. It’s sometimes said that he misleadingly minimized atomic weapons’ horrifying power, the better to either forestall or assuage American public guilt over dropping the bomb on prostrate Japan. That’s a ridiculous charge because in 1946 there was precious little guilt to worry about. The public overwhelmingly approved the bomb’s use.

Nor was there much fear to calm. The USA was the sole possessor of nuclear weapons. It’s more likely that Seversky’s observations were exactly what they come across as – the candidly stated assessment of a rational, sober and highly knowledgeable military man (who believed implicitly in the existence of the atom bomb, and who merely disputed some of the hype about its effects). This report did little to endear him to an American political regime eager to instill fear in new post-war adversaries.

After visiting the major areas of the Pacific, I arrived in Japan. I began the study to which I had been assigned by making an aerial tour of the islands of Honshu and Kyushu, which encompass the main portion of industrial Japan. I flew over Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Akashi, and dozens of other towns and cities which had been subject to intensive air attack. Some of these towns are so close together that they seem almost continuous industrial sites.

All of these areas of annihilation presented approximately the same visual pattern. The smaller towns were totally burned out. Seen from above the prevailing color was pinkish – the effect produced by the piles of ashes and rubble mixed with rusted metal. Similar pinkish carpets were spread out in the larger cities, except that among them stood large and small modern concrete buildings and factory structure, unscathed bridges, and other objects that had withstood the impact. Many of the buildings, of course, were gutted by fire, but this was not apparent from the air.

I was keyed up for my first view of an atom-bombed city, prepared for the radically new sights suggested by the exciting descriptions I had read and heard. But to my utter astonishment, Hiroshima from the air looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities I had observed!

There was a familiar pink blot, about two miles in diameter. It was dotted with charred trees and telephone poles. Only one of the city’s twenty bridges was down. Hiroshima’s clusters of modern buildings in the downtown section stood upright. It was obvious that the blast could not have been so powerful as we had been led to believe. It was extensive blast rather than intensive. I had heard of buildings instantly consumed by unprecedented heat. Yet here I saw the buildings structurally intact, and what is more, topped by undamaged flag poles, lightning rods, painted railings, air raid precaution signs and other comparatively fragile objects.

At the T-bridge, the aiming point for the atomic bomb, I looked for the “bald spot” where everything presumably had been vaporized in the twinkling of an eye. It wasn’t there or anywhere else. I could find no traces of unusual phenomena. What I did see was in substance a replica of Yokohama or Osaka, or the Tokyo suburbs – the familiar residue of an area of wood and brick houses razed by uncontrollable fire. Everywhere I saw the trunks of charred and leafless trees, burned and unburned chunks of wood. The fire had been intense enough to bend and twist steel girders and to melt glass until it ran like lava – just as in other Japanese cities.

The concrete buildings nearest to the center of explosion, some only a few blocks from the heart of the atom blast, showed no structural damage. Even cornices, canopies and delicate exterior decorations were intact. Window glass was shattered, of course, but single-panel frames held firm; only window frames of two or more panels were bent and buckled. The blast impact therefore could not have been unusual.
– (Reader’s Digest 1946 Alexander P. de Seversky)

There is no mention of any kind of blast crater under ‘air zero’. It may be that the detonation altitude was too great for that (1,900 feet). It also may be that in a built-up enemy city even a shallow crater is difficult to fudge, fake, or dig on short notice. Anywhere within either blast ring, you’d expect trees – if nothing else – to be pretty much wiped clean off the earth, vaporized, flung around like toothpicks in a hurricane, except possibly where shielded by concrete buildings.

Quite a number of plants not only remained upright, but actually survived in the most intense areas, to bloom again the following year.

A-bombed trees are trees that survived the atomic bombing of 6 August 1945. Some 170 trees, in 55 locations within the roughly 2km radius of the hypocenter, are officially registered by Hiroshima Municipality as A-bombed trees. Lovingly cared for over the years by authorities, botanists, various citizens’ groups and individuals, they are identified by a name plate and the unique reference: hibakujumoku (survivor tree). These survivors of nuclear tragedy carry a significant message – not just for those living in or visiting Hiroshima, but for all of humanity.
– (United Nations Institute for Training and Research)

Maybe this book embodies the plants’ ‘significant message’.

If the Trinity test is the most intellectually demanding event confronting the nuclear skeptic, then dealing with the accounts of people on the ground who actually suffered and died in these events (whatever caused them) is the greatest emotional challenge.

I don’t have space to go deeply into the body count game. There are a variety of estimates of how many dead, wounded, sickened, and a lot of quibbling about what killed who when. Estimates can differ by many tens of thousands depending on your starting assumptions and methodology. Not to mention that everybody brings some kind of minimization or maximization bias to the table. Suffice it to say it’s all plenty damn horrible no matter how you slice it. And it’s all plenty damn horrible no matter how it was done – by science or fire, by land, sea or air. War is hell – nobody is disputing that.

But I have to keep tracking my technical subject – the FAIL hypothesis. So I won’t be talking much about, say, the real population figures for Hiroshima in early August 1945 (pre-attack). Some accounts say the starting population was greatly exaggerated and that because of evacuations and lack of shipping activity in the port, the city had largely emptied out. At the very least, initial population estimates should take into account that after years of urban air attacks, most cities had been partially evacuated.

Overall, 8.5 million Japanese civilians were displaced as a result of the American raids, including 120,000 of Hiroshima’s population of 365,000 who evacuated the city before the atomic bomb attack on it in August 1945.
– (Wikipedia)

That estimate cuts against the grain of the usual fable about pre-attack Hiroshima as some kind of idyllic island of peace in the sea of flames that otherwise engulfed Japanese cities at the time. It’s sometimes said that the residents of Hiroshima lived almost as normal nearly to the end, with only a weird feeling of invulnerability due to having been ‘spared’ up to that point. But accounts in some Japanese sources tell of a largely emptied city, with work details pulling down houses for firebreaks (‘Clearance Project’) and other somewhat spiritless civil defense activities predominating. Whatever the case, I can’t get into all that.

There are some very impressive collections of heartbreaking survivor testimonies, beginning with the 1959 book ‘Children of the A-Bomb’ (English language edition) by Dr. Arata Osada. This book contains over sixty terrible first-person narratives from children on the ground. Most of them date from 1951. So presumably there were obstacles delaying Dr. Osada’s publication. The soul-searing accounts of loss, desolation, and destruction wouldn’t paint the American occupiers in the kindliest light. Many of these have a close variation of the following line in the first paragraph:

Just as we saw a bright flash there was a loud bang and I almost fainted.
– (Sanae Kanoh, 5th grade girl)

These lines fit the profile as given by standard histories. Some of them have some interesting twists though:

I often heard the words, ‘Air raids’ and ‘The war’ and I remember them clearly. ‘Today evacuation, tomorrow evacuation.’ And then every day we wandered around places we had never seen before searching for a safe place to live. Those who didn’t have any acquaintances in the country finally returned to the city. We were living in Hakushima. … Mother and my three older sisters and I seated day after day at digging a shelter to which we would entrust the lives of the five of us. In July the air raids became more frequent and by the middle of the month they came as though by schedule. At half-past eight in the evening the air raids began, accompanied by the rasping sound from the radio. Each one with his particular belongings in hand jumped down into the shelter… Every time, praying in our hearts that we would all continue to be safe, we would wait for the dawn. When morning comes and the all-clear sounds, we all crowd out of the shelter.
– (Masataka Asaeda, 9th grade boy)

This is bad enough, but it does not seem entirely compatible with the usual ‘reserved city’ narrative. Maybe this boy’s account wasn’t edited quite heavily enough leaving it out of alignment with the book’s overall orientation.

The Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law defines hibakusha as people who fall into one or more of the following categories: within a few kilometers of the hypocenters of the bombs; within 2 km of the hypocenters within two weeks of the bombings; exposed to radiation from fallout; or not yet born but carried by pregnant women in any of these categories. The Japanese government has recognized about 650,000 people as hibakusha. As of March 31, 2016, 174,080 are still alive, mostly in Japan. The government of Japan recognizes about 1% of these as having illnesses caused by radiation.
– (Wikipedia)

Many of the book’s children fall under the second provision of the hibakusha specification: ‘within 2 km of the hypocenters within two weeks of the bombings’. That’s because many of the respondents were not in the city at the time of the attack, as they had been evacuated. But most of them had homes and relatives in the city. Beyond this pioneering book, decades later there is now a web-based archive of over 3,000 very similar accounts by hibakusha (被爆者 atomic bomb victims).

What can be concluded? In a way, it’s simple: either (i) nukes work as advertised and Little Boy wiped out Hiroshima in an instant, or (ii) the attack was a nuclear psy-op painted over the canvas of a real incendiary and high explosive attack. One or the other is the truth. If the former, it is interesting that after the first paragraph of these reports, the bulk of the material is always perfectly compatible with the horrors of WWII incendiary and high explosive air raids, as experienced all over Europe and Japan up to that time.

On 13 February 1945, Victor Gregg was a 25-year-old British rifleman being held by the Germans in the beautiful city of Dresden. At about 10.30 pm, the air-raid sirens started wailing, and because this happened every night no notice was taken. But after a short period of silence, a wave of pathfinders started to drop target flares. We saw them … filling the sky with blinding light, dripping burning phosphorus on to the streets and houses. The flares were still falling when the initial stream flew over, dropping thousands of incendiaries along with the first bombs … and the sky changed from a bright white to a dull red … about four incendiaries burst through our glass roof … shredding the luckless men beneath. The phosphorus clung to the bodies of the injured, turning them into human torches … and their screaming was added to the other cries. …

Suddenly, a “blockbuster” dropped outside our building, blowing in the whole wall. (These thin-walled, massive missiles could demolish whole blocks with one explosion, hence the name.) I was thrown nearly 50ft and covered in brickwork and rubble … the smoke and fumes from the building’s burning shell were now being swept away by a gradually rising wind. … Wherever I turned, I was confronted with flames, smoke and dust – and all the time blocks of debris falling from the sky. … Survivors were clawing their way through mounds of rubble that an hour before had been their homes. We stumbled along the remains of a wide avenue, flanked by fires and mountains of red-hot wreckage. (I was saved by my wooden soles, which were so thick that I could walk over the glowing cinders.) … The new bombs were so big that you could see them in the sky. Even the incendiaries were different – not metre-long sticks, but four-ton objects that exploded on the ground, incinerating anything within a radius of 200ft – and raining down with these came more blockbusters, 10-tonners this time.

Everything was in flames, even the roads, which were burning rivers of bubbling and hissing tar. Huge fragments of material flew through the air, sucked into the vortex. We could see people being torn from whatever they were hanging on to and drawn into the ever-deepening red glow less than 200 yards away. A small group tried to reach us by crossing what had once been a road, only to get themselves stuck in a bubbling mass of molten tar. One by one, they sank to the ground through sheer exhaustion and then died in a pyre of smoke and flame. People of all shapes, sizes and ages were slowly sucked into the vortex, then suddenly whisked into the pillars of smoke and fire, their hair and clothing alight … above the wind’s howl and the inferno’s roar came the interminable, agonised screams of the victims being roasted alive. … It was a sea of flame rising into a sky of smoke. … When the raid ended, we continued with the cellars, prising them open. … Inside, we found the victims’ bodies, usually shrivelled to half their normal size or worse. (Children under the age of three or four had simply melted.)

Some of the corpses were so brittle that they crumbled into clouds of ash and dried flesh. We set off to a small square, where what had been grass was now a bed of ash 4in thick, and the first three shelters we uncovered were empty. Trudging through streets where sheets of flame were still shooting up 100ft, we came to the door of a communal shelter, which took all afternoon to prise open … a terrible smell hit us – and slowly the horror inside became visible. There were no real, complete bodies, only bones and scorched articles of clothing matted together on the floor and stuck together by a sort of jelly. There was no flesh visible, just a glutinous mass of solidified fat and bones, inches thick, on the floor.
– (‘Dresden, a Survivor’s Story’ Victor Gregg)

That kind of thing is pretty much what you read in ‘Children of the A-Bomb’, following the initial ‘standardized’ paragraph of each report.

If, on the other hand, the FAIL hypothesis is true, then the first paragraph of each account in ‘Children of the A-Bomb’ has been consciously or unconsciously edited to bring it into line with atomic gospel. After the Occupation ended, there may have been less pressure to keep the USA military looking good, and more emphasis on building an international image for Japan of striving for peace and human harmony etc. The unique suffering described in the ‘A-Bomb’ book – whatever caused it – certainly worked towards that end, because most of the reports conclude with a somewhat formulaic plea for peace and renunciation of weapons and war forever. Make it so!

One of the most interesting stories of adult survival is the saga of Kenji Hirata, who by ill or good luck lived to tell about both the atomic attacks of August, 1945. After losing his wife in the Hiroshima bombing, he caught a train over to Nagasaki and managed to live through the second bombing there. Hirata’s amazing experience is illuminating because it plumbs the depths and tests the boundaries of virtually every dimension of this historically complex event – time, space, physics, logistics, and raw human emotion.

Hirata’s story has been movingly rendered by author Charles Pellegrino in his book ‘The Last Train from Hiroshima’. In a nutshell, Hirata was working in the Hiroshima area that morning at a plant four kilometers distant from ground zero. He survived the blast, though it was a very close call. However, Setsuko, his new bride, was unfortunately at their home downtown, almost directly beneath ‘air zero’ – the detonation point. She was vaporized and their house was destroyed. After somewhat recovering himself that morning, Hirata bravely ventured into the firestorm, heading to his house to find his wife. When he arrived at the site, no trace of her could be found. A few neighbors who had survived by lucky accidents of positioning explained what had happened there, so close to ground zero. Realizing that the situation was hopeless, Hirata resolved to gather a few fragments of material representing his wife’s remains and to return with them to the couple’s original hometown – Nagasaki. He took a train from Hiroshima and arrived in Nagasaki in time to experience and survive the second bombing. He later remarried and lived quietly for many years, avoiding publicity and keeping his almost unique experience untold until Pellegrino brought it to the world in the last years of Hirata’s life.

It began for Hirata that morning at his workplace:

Kenshi had been working as an accountant at the Mitsubishi Weapons Plant, slightly more than four kilometers [2.5 miles] away. A young woman nearby had crept to a window and peeked outside. Whatever she saw in the direction of the city, Kenshi would never know. She stood up, uttered something guttural and incomprehensible, and then the blast wave – lagging far behind the bomb’s light waves – caught up with her. By the time the windowpanes traveled a half-meter, they had separated completely from their protective cross-hatched net of air-raid tape, emerging as thousands of tiny shards. Like the individual pellets of a shotgun blast, each shard had been accelerated to more than half the speed of sound. The girl at the window took at least a quarter-kilogram of glass in her face and her chest before the wind jetted her toward the far wall. Kenshi did not see where she eventually landed. Simultaneous with the window blast, the very floor of the building had come off its foundation and bucked him more than a half-meter into the air.
– (‘Surviving the Last Train From Hiroshima: The Poignant Case of a Double Hibakusha’ Charles Pellegrino)

The exact location of the Mitsubishi plant relative to Hiroshima city topography isn’t given, but note the extreme power of these terrifying effects at four kilometers distance: “blast wave”, “windowpanes traveled a half meter”, “shotgun blast”, “half the speed of sound”, “wind jetted her toward the far wall”, “floor [came] off its foundation”, “bucked him more than a half-meter into the air”. It was an almost unsurvivable impact. The speed of sound is 767 mph. Half that is 383 mph. 10 psi impact is equivalent to 294 mph winds. The blast here was hitting with well over 10 psi pressures, nearly twice the threshold of a Category 5 hurricane, which begins at 157 mph. Fortunately Hirata came through it all right, having ducked down behind cover at the last moment.

2.3 miles (3.7 kilometers) from hypocenter
Isao Kita.
Age at impact: 33 years old

KITA: Well, at that time, I happened to be receiving the transmission over the wireless. I was in the receiving room and I was facing northward. I noticed the flashing light. It was not really a big flash. But still it drew my attention. In a few seconds, the heat wave arrived. After I noticed the flash, white clouds spread over the blue sky. It was amazing. It was as if blue morning-glories had suddenly bloomed up in the sky. It was funny, I thought. Then came the heat wave. It was very very hot. Even though there was a window glass in front of me, I felt really hot. It was as if I was looking directly into a kitchen oven. I couldn’t bear the heat for a long time. Then I heard the cracking sound. I don’t know what made that sound, but probably it came from the air which suddenly expanded in the room.

By that time, I realized that the bomb had been dropped. As I had been instructed, I pushed aside the chair and lay with my face on the floor. Also as I had been instructed during the frequent emergency exercises, I covered my eyes and ears with hands like this. And I started to count. You may feel that I was rather heartless just to start counting. But for us, who observed the weather, it is a duty to record the process of time, of various phenomena. So I started counting with the light flash. When I counted to 5 seconds, I heard the groaning sound. At the same time, the window glass was blown off and the building shook from the bomb blast. So the blast reached that place about 5 seconds after the explosion.
– (Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK)

Kita’s testimony above is one of the most interesting. It almost seems he had prior knowledge of a single super bomb and its features. The ‘count’ that he talks about would not be especially relevant in the case of anything Japan had experienced up to that point. Furthermore, he says “as I had been instructed… I lay with my face on the floor. … I covered my eyes and ears with my hands”. The actions taken by Kita are very much like the instructions to the Trinity witnesses. I have never read that kind of account of a Japanese wartime emergency drill. Normally they were concerned first and foremost with evacuation:

“During World War II, we [ran and] hid in air raid shelters wearing masks when we heard the sirens,” said Reinosuke Ishigaki, an 89-year old resident.
– (CNN March 19, 2017)

2.54 miles (4.1 kilometers) from hypocenter
Hiroshi Sawachika.
Age at impact: 28 years old

SAWACHIKA: I was in my office. I had just entered the room and said “Good morning.” to colleagues and I was about to approach my desk when outside it suddenly turned bright red. I felt very hot on my cheeks. Being the chief of the room, I shouted to the young men and women in the room that they should evacuate. As soon as I cried, I felt weightless as if I were an astronaut. I was then unconscious for 20 or 30 seconds. When I came to, I realized that everybody including myself was lying at one side of the room. Nobody was standing. The desks and chairs had also blown off to one side. At the windows, there was no window glass and the window frames had been blown out as well.
– (Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK)

Koi Station is 2.29 kilometers from hypocenter.

Now let’s pick up the trail with Hirata again. Two days after the atomic attack on Hiroshima, he took a train departing from Koi Station heading for Nagasaki. Koi Station is located 2.29 kilometers from the Hiroshima hypocenter – much closer than Hirata’s workplace to ground zero, about half the distance.

We can’t expect blast effects to be strictly linear with distance, and particularly not in a heterogeneous urban landscape. But, while blast effects could vary widely depending on a building’s exact orientation, construction, and intervening structures, still we do find an extreme contrast between the supposed effects on Hirata’s workplace compared to the situation at Koi Station – half the distance from the hypocenter:

During the war, today’s Nishihiroshima Station, run by the Japan Railway Company, was called Koi Station, and Hiroden Nishihiroshima Station, run by the Hiroshima Electric Railway, was called Nishihiroshima Station or Koi. Both stations were about 2.4 km from the hypocenter. According to the Record of the Hiroshima A-bomb Disaster, Koi Station, part of the National Railway back then, was largely destroyed in the A-bomb blast. The 20 or 30 staff members of the station crept out from the wreckage to the train tracks. Because of the black rain that fell in the aftermath, damage from fire was minimal. As the bomb was dropped after both the inbound and outbound trains had left the station before 8 a.m., there were few passengers in the station at the time. The Sanyo Line was restored by the National Railway on August 8. A streetcar line, the Miyajima Line operated by the Hiroshima Electric Railway, was unable to continue service between Nishihiroshima and Kusatsu Station on August 6, but the streetcar continued running between Kusatsu and Miyajima. The next day, streetcars began running end to end on the Miyajima Line, carrying many survivors. Another streetcar line in the city center, between Koi and Nishitenma (present-day Tenmacho) resumed operations on August 9.
– (Chugoku News Service)

Koi station A-bomb damage. Trestle bridge and tracks apparently unscathed, and reported to be fit for use 48 hours post-blast.

Some station staff may possibly have been killed, but there is no mention of fatalities. Given that “20 or 30” personnel are mentioned as surviving, we can assume staff casualties were not significant. That conclusion is supported by the rapidity with which inter-city service on the Sanyo line was restored. Trains were apparently running in and out by the next day but one. That conclusion in turn is supported by the photographic evidence, showing little apparent damage to the complex trestle and track structure. This is an amazing outcome, given what happened at twice the distance from ground zero, as we’ve seen in the testimonials.

By contrast with the Hiroshima case, after the 1995 Kobe earthquake (magnitude 6.9) the New York Times reported: Railroad officials estimate it will take at least three months to repair tracks and bridges.

An earthquake of Richter scale 6.0 releases energy of ~15 kilotons – which is the approximate yield of the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (~16 kt).
– (Wikipedia: ‘TNT equivalent for seismic energy yield’)

It’s true that earthquakes of 6.9 magnitude are much worse than 6.0 magnitude quakes. And presumably they’re much worse than “16 kt” atom bombs (which are intentionally designed, deployed, and deliberately targeted by enemies to destroy things… hmm). And an earthquake affects a wider area. So let’s cut that 90-day (minimum) repair estimate massively – by a factor of 10. Nine days is still significantly longer than two days, and would have blocked Hirata’s train to Nagasaki. Furthermore, the epicenter of the Kobe quake was on the northern end of Awaji Island – 20 kilometers away from the city proper. The Kobe tracks were made with far sturdier and more sophisticated construction techniques and much greater repair resources were available for the job, by comparison with wartime ‘just nuked’ Hiroshima.

PSI values with expected effects.

Anyway, the testimonies of Hirata, Sawachika, and Kita do seem fully consistent among themselves. They all give clear evidence for effects (damage and casualties) within the 5 psi blast contour. Actually, more like effects within the 10 psi contour. But when you put those testimonies up against actual and hypothetical blast contour maps, things get weird.

In order to get 5 psi effects at the distances indicated in the set of personal testimonies above, you would need a bomb of about 100 kilotons – more than six times the conventionally reported Little Boy yield of 15 kilotons. Actually, I’m being generous, because the height of detonation in the nuke map 100 kiloton blast overlay at Hiroshima ground zero is set to maximize the range of 5 psi effect, not the actual reported height. Furthermore, in the map shown, even the 5 psi contour extends significantly less than 4 kilometers. These generous concessions are sufficient to more than cover any worries that the damage in the testimonies was possibly characteristic of “only” 4 or 3 psi. To push the 5 psi ring out to the location of the most distant testimony would take an absurdly large yield.

For 5 psi effects at ranges greater than 3 km from Hiroshima ground zero, you need a bomb with 100-kiloton yield – 6 times Little Boy’s reported power. See Bibliography for attribution of map and overlay effect.

If there really were all these 5 psi effects that far out, at 4 kilometers or more (thus indicating a 100 kiloton yield), then what about Koi Station? Recall its location – about 2 kilometers from the hypocenter. Under this new estimate of yield, supported by the testimonies, Koi Station would have been subjected to 10 psi (or greater) effects. Yet the staff survived, the tracks were ok, and service was quickly restored.

We have a choice here. We can:

1. accept the testimonies of the moment of blast, but
2. discount any report of taking trains from Koi within two days, and also
3. massively upgrade the estimate of Little Boy’s power.

Or, we can:

1. accept the train service story, and
2. retain the Little Boy yield estimate of 15 kilotons – but then
3. discount the survivor testimonies above (and a number of other similar accounts).

But the whole package together isn’t self-consistent, and whichever option we go with, we will be required to discount at least a portion of Hirata’s testimony. I am not, by the way, impugning Pellegrino’s integrity here. He’s a respected scientist and successful author with impressive Hollywood connections. Even the most scrupulous analyst can be taken in by unreliable testimony from an apparently credible witness. That could happen to any of us.

Further confirmation of these estimates of blast strength comes from official USA archives:

Between zero point and the main building of the novitiate of Jesuits four miles away, was a hill which served to lessen the intensity of the blast. Yet despite this protection, all the windows were shattered and part of the wall blown in. The chapel, which is the left wing of the building, is built of timber with plaster walls. The glass in the foyer windows was shattered and the roof was blown loose by the force of the explosion occurring four miles away.
– (‘The Atom Strikes’ 1945)

Here, at four miles distance, we see blast effects of at least 1.5 psi, possibly greater (note the intervening hill). Those effects at that distance require the 100-kiloton bomb, just as with the other testimonies.

Professor Richard Muller (U.C. Berkeley) has stated that: “The death from radiation and radioactivity in Hiroshima was really quite small. Mostly it was the blast.” This seems to be borne out by interview statements from Brigadier General Crawford F. Sams (chief of Public Health and Welfare Section of the General Headquarters, Supreme Allied Powers from October 2, 1945 until June, 1951.) Sams was not a nuclear weapons skeptic. He did assume and believe that an atomic weapon was detonated over Hiroshima. All the more reason to take his assessment of the actual situation regarding radiation sickness deaths seriously. It’s interesting to sense the tension that apparently existed at the time between those who wanted to play up atomic horrors (either as a deterrent to war or as macho posturing) and those who wanted to play them down (to appear humanitarian).

Nothing could be established in Japan by any agency from the United States without our permission. The Manhattan Project was very interested in assessing the damage done by the atomic bomb, and so other agencies were. The Public Health Service sent over a mission, the Navy sent over people. I had a dozen different groups of medical people in, wanting to know about the effects of the atomic bomb, which was under my control. I had taken the first group down on the second of September, no, it was about the third,– into Hiroshima. I sent down six plane loads and went down to introduce some of our medical people. When I was first in Hiroshima and landed this group, I got on the radio and some professor from Columbia was saying that “anybody who got into Hiroshima in the next fifty years would die of radiation.” We’d get this nonsense all the time.

I set up, out there then, a Joint Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. The American thing was authorized and financed from the United States – the Atomic Energy Commission – but we got the Ministry of Health and Welfare to set up a commission there and so it was jointly staffed with the Japanese. We set up a long-term project on the effects of this radiation.

I mentioned deterrents against war. There was a letter brought over, in which the President was looking for a new deterrent against a future war, because air power had failed. You know, “If you have another war, air power will destroy civilization,” and it failed because it hadn’t even brought Germany to its knees. A strategic bomb survey over there showed that military production had increased actually during our bombings. So the object of Letter of Instruction, was “You will play up the devastating effect of the atomic bomb.” I was the one who set the deadline. Anybody who had been in Hiroshima and died within six months, whether they got run over by a bicycle or whatnot, would be credited to the atomic bomb. Most of the casualties occurred from thermal readings.

The atomic bomb went off and that city had about 250 thousand people in it. In other words, you had a high density population exposed. When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation. Then, what happened is like an earthquake. The blast knocked down houses, hibachis had turned over and started fires. When you have an earthquake or an atomic bomb, you start fires and then people are trapped in the buildings. And again, by endless interviews, “Where were you?” “Where was your great uncle?” “Where was grandma when this occurred?” We built up the evidence to show on a cookie-cutter basis that it took about thirty-six hours for about two-thirds of that town to burn.

You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent. They’re talking about after that, “One bomb and away goes Chicago,” you know? All you’ve got to do is look in Life magazine and whatnot back in ’45, ’46, and so on. What I’m trying to do is to show how it’s like “End the war with one B-17.” Well, you have to keep your feet on the ground. As near as we could figure then, about twenty-one thousand people died in thirty-six hours as a result of being trapped and burned and so on. It’s like those who died in the ’23 earthquake [and subsequent] fire. Then, as I say, I set the six months’ deadline for anybody who had been there, even though they went away and so on, to put a deadline on deaths from delayed radiation effects.

One of us got a priest there to say he guessed 100 thousand people died when the bomb went off. Well, you see, it didn’t. There never was 100 thousand people [who] died. When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing! And [they were] comparing it – saying it was the greatest killer in comparing it to the number of deaths in Tokyo, which had been literally destroyed by high explosives. Actually, the atomic bomb was a damn poor killer in comparison to the exposed population.

I used to tell them back in the general staff and including the chief of staff, “If you can deter a war, for God’s sake, let’s do it and blow up the effects all you want. But don’t believe your own propaganda if you are applying it to your military planning.” Actually, the atomic bomb was a poor killer.

Anywhere you care to look, in the library or on the web, you’ll find plentiful renditions of the Enola Gay’s mission, timeline and details of the attack. I’m not going to rehash all the military procedure stuff. I’m not even going to quibble about little things, such as the post-mission buildup of bombardier Thomas W. Ferebee’s supposedly preternatural skill in dropping Little Boy close to the aiming point, by pulling a switch or cord or something at just the perfect moment to earn his place in history.

In fact, after a B-29’s bombardier locked onto a visually determined target at the start of a bombing run, and then making a few adjustments to insure the heading stayed straight in the face of crosswinds and other interference, the bombsight mechanism took over the plane prior to the drop. By means of the auto-pilot, the bombsight enforced its precision adjustments to the heading as needed, then automatically released the bomb at the right moment (in reality often wildly off). There was no special button or cord that needed a heroic or genius little tug at the Moment of Truth. That’s all myth making. But I’m not going to get into that kind of mission trivia. I’m more interested in what supposedly happened next.

Immediately following the bomb’s release, Tibbets executed his signature and much-practiced sharp diving turn away from the detonation point. Here’s an account of the immediate post-detonation situation on the Enola Gay:

Though already eleven and a half miles away, the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast. At first, Tibbets thought he was taking flak. After a second shock wave (reflected from the ground) hit the plane, the crew looked back at Hiroshima. “The city was hidden by that awful cloud… boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall,” Tibbets recalled.
– (www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-worldwar/5891)

Now consider some timing details of the shock wave and the mushroom cloud formation and rise. Here’s the timing on the shocks:

Martin Harwit’s 1996 book, ‘An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of “Enola Gay,” says, “The shock wave arrived another 45 seconds later [after the detonation],” This was the direct shock wave; a few seconds later a second, ground reflected shock also hit the Enola Gay.)
– (‘Chases and Escapes: The Mathematics of Pursuit and Evasion’ Paul J. Nahin)

For brevity, I’m going to leave aside detailed interrogation about the occurrence of these shocks. The Enola Gay dove only about 2,000 feet in the escape turn, putting it at no lower than 28,000 feet, probably higher.

At 17 seconds past 9:15 am at 30,000 feet, Col. Tibbetts dropped the bomb while Chuck Sweeney in Great Artiste dropped his instrument packages. Tibbetts immediately put Enola Gay into a hard 60 degree bank to the right, and Sweeney made the same turn to the left. When they straightened out to level flight they had lost 1,700 feet of elevation.
– (user.xmission.com/~tmathews/b29/155degree/155degreemath.html)

At that altitude, by that time, there should have been no separate shock of ‘ground reflection’ because the Mach Effect (merger) would have already occurred.

When an [air burst] occurs it sends out a shock wave like an expanding soap bubble. If the explosion occurs above the ground the bubble expands and when it reaches the ground it is reflected – i.e. the shock front bounces off the ground to form a second shock wave travelling behind the first. This second shock wave travels faster than the first, or direct, shock wave since it is travelling through air already moving at high speed due to the passage of the direct wave. The reflected shock wave tends to overtake the direct shock wave and when it does they combine to form a single reinforced wave. This is called the Mach Effect, and produces a skirt around the base of the shock wave bubble where the two shock waves have combined. This skirt sweeps outward as an expanding circle along the ground with an amplified effect compared to the single shock wave produced by a ground burst.
– (‘Nuclear Weapons Frequently Asked Questions’ Carey Sublette)

But let’s not get sidetracked by small anomalies. Eyes on the prize! Let’s just carry on with the mission.

Enola Gay circled Hiroshima a total of three times, beginning at 29,200 feet and climbing towards 60,000 feet, before heading for home. It was 368 miles from Hiroshima before [tailgunner] Bob Caron reported that the mushroom cloud was no longer visible.
– (Atomic Heritage Foundation)

Let’s flashback to that ‘circling’ interval. Tibbets called for verbal descriptions from the crewmembers, beginning with the tail gunner.

Tibbets addressed the crew. “Okay. That was the reflected shock wave, bounced back from the ground. There won’t be any more. It wasn’t flak. Stay calm. Now, let’s get these recordings going. Beser, you set?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“I want you to go around to each of the crew and record their impressions. Keep it short, and keep it clean. Bob, start talking.”

“Gee, Colonel. It’s just spectacular.”

“Just describe what you can see. Imagine you’re doing a radio broadcast.”

With the Enola Gay beginning to orbit at 29,200 feet, eleven miles from Hiroshima, the tail gunner produced a vivid eyewitness account.

“A column of smoke rising fast. It has a fiery red core. A bubbling mass, purple-gray in color, with that red core. It’s all turbulent. Fires are springing up everywhere, like flames shooting out of a huge bed of coals. I am starting to count the fires. One, two, three, four, five, six … fourteen, fifteen … it’s impossible. There are too many to count. Here it comes, the mushroom shape that Captain Parsons spoke about. … It’s like a mass of bubbling molasses. The mushroom is spreading out. It’s maybe a mile or two wide and half a mile high. It’s nearly level with us and climbing. It’s very black, but there is a purplish tint to the cloud. The base of the mushroom looks like a heavy undercast that is shot through with flames. The city must be below that. The flames and smoke are billowing out, whirling out into the foothills. All I can see now of the city is the main dock and what looks like an airfield.”
– (‘The Bomb: A Life’ Gerard DeGroot)

Caron’s description has a number of interesting features:

• Pre-scripting: ‘the mushroom shape that Captain Parson spoke about’
• Height: ‘nearly level with us’ at ‘half a mile high’
• Color: ‘purple-gray’, ‘red core’, ‘molasses’, ‘very black’, ‘heavy undercast’
• Visibility: ‘the main dock’

Let’s consider these one at a time. First, the reference to a ‘mushroom shape’. This was a pre-insertion by Parsons at the mission pre-briefing.

“No one,” Parsons continued, “knows exactly what will happen when the bomb is dropped from the air. That has never been done before.” He drew the shape of a mushroom on the blackboard and said: “We do expect a cloud this shape to rise at least 30,000 feet and maybe 60,000 feet, preceded by a flash of light much brighter than the sun’s.”
– (‘Inferno: The Fall of Japan 1945’ Ronald Henkoff)

You have to wonder whether that image would have emerged spontaneously at this moment to a truly naïve observer with no background in atomic weaponry. It sounds like pre-seeding based on the earliest bomb fiction. Those who’ve read detailed accounts of the Enola Gay mission will easily recognize the many parallels in this 1914 science fiction:

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action.

Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the man’s mind was a blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed nothing but a profound gloom. … The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was approached… So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any soaring sentinel. Their machine was painted a pale gray, that lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved. … Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side. ‘Round,’ he whispered inaudibly. … The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped. … When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water.
– (‘The World Set Free’ H. G. Wells 1914)

But I digress. Most importantly, consider the height estimate of the developing cloud. Here we find something extremely odd. By hypothesis and every account, at this stage the Enola Gay was circling at minimum 29,000 feet. The cloud is said to be ‘level with us’. Yet at the same time, the cloud is estimated to be ‘half a mile high’ (2,640 feet). All sources seem to agree that these mushroom clouds rise up very quickly. ‘The Effects of Nuclear Weapons’, a federal guide, informs us that nuclear mushroom clouds typically reach their maximum heights in about 10 minutes. Based on estimates from other sources, the Little Boy cloud would have risen to over 60,000 feet in about that time.

So there is the Enola Gay, post-detonation, post-shock wave (#1), post-shock wave (#2), safely circling and climbing. Then, there was the time taken for reassurance from Captain Tibbets and for his instructions, and now the tail gunner is talking. We’ve seen that the shock waves could not have finished much earlier than one minute, and we should allow at least another couple minutes for the other activities listed above.

Let’s make a conservative simplifying assumption that the hypothetical mushroom cloud has at that point had three minutes and twenty seconds to develop. We can’t assume strict linearity for the cloud’s rise over time, but at least, if it’s non-linear, the early phase is the more likely to be hyperlinear. So let’s be conservative again and call those first three minutes at least linear, in the absence of any better information. So that’s one third of our ten minutes, to get one third of our 60,000-foot final height, thus the cloud was at 20,000 feet. How is that ‘level with us’ at 29,000 feet? Most crucially, how is that, at the same time, ‘half a mile high’? Somebody screwed up the scripting there.

White (putative) mushroom cloud of Hiroshima

As for color, the cloud is described in no uncertain terms as basically dark. Remember that the description we’re concerned with here realistically could not have been earlier than after three full minutes of development. Here is a photo said to be of the Little Boy mushroom cloud. How dark is that?

It’s interesting that Caron mentions the dock area’s visibility, because there’s a final fatal gotcha on this Enola Gay urban legend. On that morning, by chance an unauthorized B-29 had somehow missed the word banning all non-mission flights to or near Hiroshima that morning. This was a reconnaissance plane whose crew included photographer John McGlohon. According to newspaper accounts, it has now been verified that “the photos [McGlohon] took minutes after the explosion were the only ones made looking straight down on Hiroshima as the mushroom cloud was enveloping it.”

McGlohon’s plane, piloted by Jack Economos, left in the early hours of Aug. 6 for a long flying day, to photograph potential targets near Hiroshima, Kure and farther north. As they neared Hiroshima around 8:15 a.m., a gunner reported over the intercom seeing a B-29 flying in the opposite direction as if headed for an emergency landing at Iwo Jima. Often, McGlohon says, when bombers had engine trouble, they would abort their missions, drop their bomb loads and try to reach a friendly landing site. Within seconds, McGlohon said, “There was a brilliant flash below our plane. The light was as if someone had fired a big flashbulb directly in your eyes.” “We assumed the bomber had salvoed his bomb load and managed to get a good hit on an ammunition dump or an oil tank, so the day wouldn’t be a total loss,” McGlohon said. He turned on his cameras to shoot the damage and the cloud that was rising from below so that later, “The crew could get credit for the good job they had done.”
– (www.mcclatchydc.com)

There’s a big tortuous saga of how his film later got mixed up and lost or suppressed for decades, and how his account of being on the scene was doubted and denied but eventually verified. For our purposes, what matters is the photo he supposedly shot from directly above the city.

This is said to be the only known photo looking straight down on Hiroshima immediately after the atomic bomb was dropped.

This photo was shot after McGlohon’s plane had flown toward and over the city, passing the Enola Gay on its way out. McGlohon wanted to take some photos as soon as he realized something was blowing up under their plane. Here’s an account of his plane’s timing and location:

At the moment the bomb exploded, McGlohon and his crew were approaching Hiroshima at about 27,000 feet and flying at least 275 mph. They would have passed over the city before the mushroom cloud had time to reach their altitude.
– (‘Scars of War’ Marilyn Swinson)

If McGlohon was able to be directly over Hiroshima after the detonation yet before the mushroom cloud had developed sufficiently to alarm or block him (or even be noticed by him as such), his plane would have been destroyed by the shock wave(s). Recall from the prior discussion that the mushroom cloud boiled up to 20,000 feet within one minute of detonation. Remember that Enola Gay felt two big shocks, described by Tibbets: “We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion, but the whole plane cracked and crinkled from the blast.” That was at 45 seconds after detonation, as we’ve seen. Now consider McGlohon’s plane: it is described as being ‘directly above’ a mushroom cloud that had to have been already 20,000 feet high or more, as we’ve already seen.

But since McGlohon certainly wasn’t directly on top of the Enola Gay when the bomb was dropped, it had to be that his plane flew straight into a hugely rising, roiling mushroom cloud, of at least 20,000 feet height, without noticing anything special, and focusing only on the ‘good job’ somebody had done far below, hitting ‘an ammo dump or an oil tank’.

Since McGlohon’s plane was neither swatted from the sky by the shock waves (if he was above the drop point between detonation and mushroom cloud rising) and given that he doesn’t seem to have flown straight into or around an amazing 20,000+ foot mushroom cloud, clearly his straight-down overhead photo is not of the mushroom cloud – at any stage. Nor could it have been the mature Hiroshima firestorm, which just after the strike had barely begun to develop.

It’s obvious that here we have an overhead photo of a firestorm in Hiroshima, without any nuke shock waves or mushroom cloud involved. How do you get a firestorm without a nuclear explosion? You do it with a garden-variety incendiaries-plus-high-explosives saturation raid. McGlohon’s picture, which he seems to have shot in good faith, shows Hiroshima in the early (or early-to-mid) phase of an ‘ordinary’ firestorm caused by a normal-for-the-times firebombing. The kind of raid the 20th Air Group performed, with factory-like precision and saturation coverage, all throughout 1945. Notice how the smoke contour ends just before the water line. There’s no reason for a nuclear cloud to respect the water line (do keep in mind that this was supposedly shot well before any nuclear-triggered firestorm could have kicked in).

Kobe bombing Tarumiza bombing Incendiary bombing of Kobe in-progress. Tarumiza firebombing and start of smoke cover.

But, wind factors apart, firestorms from incendiary bombing do respect the water line, at least for a while. Compare this photo of a slightly earlier stage of a standard fire-bombing. What we see at right is a similar white incendiary smoke cover beginning to fill the space up to the water line and docks.

The reason for the McGlohon’s unauthorized presence in the area is explained as follows:

Before the bombing, an order was issued to the 20th Air Force barring its planes from flying within 50 miles of Hiroshima the morning of August 6. McGlohon’s unit was not on the distribution list [for this order].
– (‘Scars of War’ Marilyn Swinson)

It’s natural to suppose that an order to keep extraneous units out was motivated by concerns about interference with the singular atomic mission, for the safety of uninvolved planes, and for general high-security. But it may be that the order was not intended to keep the skies safe, it was to keep the real operation secret. They needed a decent-size formation to do the fire-bombing. It’s more likely the order was to keep the skies clear of anybody without a need to know.

If there had been a full sequence of professionally executed surveillance photos from Necessary Evil, the mission’s photography plane, none of this sleuthing would be necessary. Everything would be cleared up instantly. But no complete, clear, time-stamped and geo-located output from Necessary Evil’s assigned mission seems to be available.

For on-site ground-level documentation, we have the small photo archive created by Matsushige Yoshito (松重 美人) on the day.

On August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige was 32 years old, living at home in Midori-cho, Hiroshima. His home was 1.7 miles away from ground zero, just outside of the 1.5 mile radius of the total destruction created by atomic blast effects. Miraculously, Matsushige was not seriously injured by the explosion. With one camera and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures, he tried to photograph the immediate aftereffects of the bombing of Hiroshima.
– (Atomic Heritage Foundation)

He described his actions that day as follows:

I had finished breakfast and was getting ready to go to the newspaper when it happened. There was a flash from the indoor wires as if lightening had struck. I didn’t hear any sound, how shall I say, the world around me turned bright white. And I was momentarily blinded as if a magnesium light had lit up in front of my eyes. Immediately after that, the blast came. I was bare from the waist up, and the blast was so intense, it felt like hundreds of needles were stabling me all at once. The blast grew large holes in the walls of the first and second floor. I could barely see the room because of all the dirt. I pulled my camera and the clothes issued by the military headquarters out from under the mound of the debris, and I got dressed. I thought I would go to either the newspaper or to the headquarters. That was about 40 minutes after the blast.
– (Matsushige Yoshito)

From this account, given the ambiguity in his statement that he’d go to “either the newspaper or to the headquarters”, it seems most probable that he was saying he set out from his house at 40 minutes after the blast, rather than that he arrived at either of those destinations at 40 minutes after the blast. In fact, it’s not clear from the rest of his account that he ever arrived at either location on that day, which further reinforces the departure time interpretation that I’m adopting.

Clearly he was not in a position to photograph the immediate blast. He took five famous street-level photos. They are close up or mid-distance shots of survivors, rescuers and damage. His camera was a Kodak Retina, a popular small walk-about camera of the 1930s, not equipped with telephoto lens or zoom capability. (It appears that the Kilfitt 3682 mm/2.8 Zoomar introduced in 1959 was the first varifocal lens in regular production for still 35mm photography.) I mention Matsushige Yoshito because he is often wrongly credited with a shot more relevant to my analysis.

The early Hiroshima mushroom cloud? Often mis-attributed to Matsushige Yoshito.

This photograph, purporting to show the early Little Boy mushroom cloud, should be credited to a different photographer with the same surname: Matsushige Tatuso (松重三男). It is correctly attributed in the 2-panel version reproduced here. All that seems to be known about him is the following:

Mitsuo Matsushige was at home in Furuichi-cho, in the outskirts of Hiroshima, when the atomic bomb exploded. When he saw the flash, he dashed outside and witnessed the orange fireball rise rapidly in the sky leaving a trail. Three days later, he went to his workplace in Fukuro-machi, 500 meters from the hypocenter, and found the entire area a burnt plain.

The two-panel illustration shows a single photograph. On the left side, the contrast and sharpness are retained from the original negative. On the right side, the contrast and sharpness have been muted in order to eliminate the flames, sparks, and embers rising from below. On Japanese websites, the two versions are sometimes contrasted as evidence of censorship of aspects of the event. As for timing, this is variously said to be “immediately following” or “2 minutes after” the detonation.

Incendiary raid smoke billows at Yokohama.

For our purposes, we only need to note the attributed distance of 7 kilometers (4.3 miles). You needn’t be a whacko conspiracy theorist to find something odd about this picture as described, if it’s meant to show the mushroom cloud formation. This photographer was able to rush outside, with his camera, and capture a very close-up shot, without a zoom lens, of a fireball rising 4 miles away, with the fire having apparently already reached his own neighborhood. If this is the start of the mushroom cloud, the top is way low. Even at 2 minutes post-detonation, by our previous analysis, the top should have been much higher. If the shot was taken at that early time, from as close as it appears (no zoom lens), then the blast (not just ground flames) should have affected the cameraman and surroundings. In short, this photographer was not 4 miles from the billow he’s photographing, and if all these things (camera position, house, mushroom billow) are as close together as they appear, everything should have been blown to spit.

It likely that this is actually a photo of a close incendiary strike, a ground level view of something like one of the incendiary hits on Yokohama.

Tokyo Cologne Hiroshima Tokyo. Typical firestorm damage, extensive burnout of light and wooden construction, retention of stronger or concrete structures, no central ‘bald spot’. Note also the many intact bridges – similar to Hiroshima, where only one of the city’s 20 bridges was disabled or destroyed (apparently collapsed by mobs fleeing fires). Cologne, Germany showing ‘bald’ at center of normal fire and blast damage. Overall extent of destruction approximately equal to the map in upper left. Aerial photo [top right] has ‘Mulheim’ hand-labeled with arrow on outer ring, and ‘Cologne’ written left-center. Top panel is April, bottom panel is mid-August.

Apart from any other nitpicking and anomaly chasing, the key deal breaker for the orthodox story of atomic Hiroshima is the fact that there was no ‘bald spot’. The damage was uniform to the perimeters, exactly as in a typical firebombing raid.

What do I mean by a bald spot? When massive firepower is centered on a main central area, I want to see a serious, concentric glass parking lot (in case of nuke, glowing green). I want to see a focus area melted to sludge and slag at ground zero (immediately below air zero).

Some interesting ‘before and after’ aerial collage photos of Hiroshima were made in mid-1945.

There are problems all over this contrastive display. The basic function of the assembly is to draw your eyes to the center whited-out area and hit you in the gut with this kind of vibe: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and Weep!” Total vaporization, devastation, glass parking lot.

But these pictures could easily be flipped and make the same point. By fiddling with the lighting, contrast, shadows, and focus knobs in Photoshop, I could interchange these photos with the same impact. You also have to wonder why are these photos assembled by strips? Though there is cloud cover in Japan, the POV is not that high off the ground. The US was bombing all cities at will. General Cutis LeMay, who ran the whole show, later said about Japan: “throughout the war, not one of our attacks was ever turned back by enemy action.” That is what’s called ‘air superiority’. You wouldn’t think it so difficult to get a single bird’s eye view.

But using assembled strips makes it easier to play with the exposures to get the impact you want in different local zones. A few things were overlooked however. The basic theme here is: ‘white = bad’ i.e. anywhere that’s whited out is supposed to punch our ‘glass parking lot’ emotional buttons. Examine then the lower left quadrant of the two pictures. That’s the dock and wharves area of the port. In that zone, the after picture looks more devastated than the before shot (using the white-out criteria that we’re intended to apply to the hypocenter near the top-center area). All good you say? But wait: neither the blast nor the fire ever reached nearly that far.

Blast and fire extent map.

Conversely, look at the lower right quadrant. Here, if the degree of white-out is our criteria, we have the opposite problem: in that area, the before picture is more ‘devastated’ than the after. It’s obvious that the entire display is a carelessly tricked up piece of ‘drive-by evidence’, created by fiddling with strip exposures, without much attention to logic or the fire/blast map.

Hiroshima was indeed wiped out. No argument there. Both pictures show extensive destruction (and clearance) all over the area. It makes sense given the plentitude of military targets. If the whiteout in parts of both photos means anything all, it may just indicate a more advanced stage of deliberate clearance of blacker, older charred rubble – which takes time. In any case, the second was taken at a later date, but they’ve been synchronized in tandem; both of them tweaked and tuned to the storyline. Back in 1945, it probably took a full-day darkroom shift to trick this out, while with current digital tools it would take about 20 minutes.

Now we need to back up and look at what probably really happened. To do that, we need to first consider the whole target selection thing. It’s well known that certain areas were off limits to everybody. Both LeMay’s firebombing raids and the upcoming possible nuclear attacks were prohibited for Kyoto and the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. There’s a whole huge history on the Kyoto thing and Secretary of War Stimson’s top-down imposition of hands-off that ancient cultural city. I’m not going to go over all that. I’ll just accept for purposes of this discussion that Kyoto was sidelined from the start. Likewise, there were strategic and political issues in deciding whether to target the Imperial Palace that I won’t get into.

By early-to-mid 1945, what did that leave? In the documentary movie The Fog of War, a list of 67 Japanese cities that were, on average, 50% destroyed (usually a lot more) is scrolled out, with the percentage destruction figure for each. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were excluded from that list (in the documentary’s otherwise unrelated storyline), obviously understood as special cases. Those two were especially useful cases – but not perhaps in the way usually thought.

Up to late spring of 1945, the United States strategic bombing and carrier forces had already engaged in continuous attacks of relentless ferocity against the 67 cities – many of which were of far lesser size and military significance than Hiroshima. Here is the attitude of the field commanders up to the end of Spring 1945 and probably much later:

[The] Joint Staff [reported] in April 1945 that our course should be:

Apply full and unremitting pressure against Japan by strategic bombing and carrier raids in order to reduce war-making capability and to demoralize the country in preparation for invasion
– (‘Now It Can be Told’ Leslie Groves)

No mention whatsoever of an amazing new super weapon. The field commanders had no real awareness of the progress of the atomic bomb project, no conception of its potential strategic utility and no plan for its incorporation in real war fighting. They focused entirely on their vision of “no stone left atop another”. Given that by April 1945, they had bombed out over 60% of numerous relatively minor strategic sites (the 67 mentioned above), is it likely that Hiroshima had truly been left pristine? It comes down to a question of military value: did Hiroshima have any?

Hiroshima [was] a major port of embarkation for the Japanese Army and a convoy assembly point for their Navy. The city, in which the local Army headquarters, with some twenty-five thousand troops, was situated, was mainly concentrated on four islands. The railway yards, Army storage depots and port of embarkation lay along the eastern side of the city. A number of heavy industrial facilities were adjacent to the main metropolitan area.
– (Leslie Groves)

Hmm. Keep in mind that up to early summer of 1945, there was no atomic target list of ‘reserved cities’. That happened later, after secret committees had been formed in Washington D.C. and wide-ranging discussions had been held:

At about this time, the Spring of 1945, another job was dropped into our laps at the [Manhattan Engineering District]. The first inkling I had of this added responsibility came in the course of a conversation with General Marshall. We had been discussing the progress of the work, and, having mentioned our anticipated readiness date, I suggested that the time was fast approaching when we should begin to make plans for the bombing operation itself, even though we still had no assurance that the bomb would be effective. I asked him to designate some officer in the Operations Planning Division (OPD) of the General Staff with whom I could liaison with whom I could get in touch so that planning could be started. After a moment’s hesitation, General Marshall replied: “I don’t like to bring too many people into this matter. Is there any reason why you can’t take this over and do it yourself?” My “No, sir, I will” concluded the conversation, which constituted the only directive that I ever received or needed.
– (Leslie Groves)

Before Groves could create the target list (and thus, the reserved or protected list), he had to consider many factors:

I had set as the governing factor that the targets chosen should be places the bombing of which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war. Beyond that, they should be military in nature, consisting either of important headquarters or troop concentrations, or centers of production of military equipment and supplies. To accurately assess the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.
– (Leslie Groves)

Here is our first mention of the ‘undamaged’ criterion. Again, we see emphasis on the strategic/military value of Hiroshima – obvious to General Groves even at his remove of thousands of miles from the battlespace. The ‘reserved’ list was the output of a committee that Groves then set up:

The next step was to set up a special committee to recommend specific targets. This group met for the first time on May 2 in Washington.

At its third meeting, the Target Committee was informed that General Arnold and I had concluded that control over the use of the weapon should reside, for the present, in Washington. This announcement was necessary because some of the Air Force people on the committee had displayed a total lack of comprehension of what was involved. The operation would not be formally considered and acted upon by either the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Combined Chiefs. One of the reasons for this was the need to maintain complete security. Equally important though, was Admiral Leahy’s disbelief in the weapon and its hoped-for effectiveness; this would have made action by the Joint Chiefs quite difficult. When our target cities were first selected, an order was sent to the Army Air Force in Guam not to bomb them without special authority from the War Department.
– (Leslie Groves)

So now finally, no earlier than May 1945, we get the first order to the field concerning what was to be ‘reserved’ and ‘protected’. It’s most likely that Hiroshima (and Nagasaki as we’ll see) was not chosen as an A-bomb because it was ‘un-damaged’ – rather, it was chosen because it was ‘pre-damaged – in just the right way to serve as the movie set for an atomic attack of the type that had been advertised to the brass as the Manhattan Project payday.

Reconnaissance revealed to the Committee that Hiroshima had been pre-pounded in such a way that the destruction could, with perhaps a pre-dawn finalizing raid and some dog-and-pony psyop work, be represented as a city that had gone from fully populated, undamaged normal functioning to a total moonscape in less than 60 seconds. It was apparently the best choice among the 67 pre-damaged alternatives they must have considered. After the war, the records would have been scrubbed to make it appear that Hiroshima had, by some kind of telepathic precognition, been mysteriously spared or ‘pre-reserved’ – throughout half of 1943, all of 1944, and half of 1945 – by the otherwise incessantly bloodthirsty and hyper-active United States strategic bombing command.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s stick with the standard story. Let’s assume that for some unfathomable reason, the Hiroshima core city area had not, as of August 5th, been raided and burned out. Let’s take Hiroshima as the one remaining unblemished plum, or at least as a pre-damaged target that still required some finishing touches and some final tenderizing. It’s well established that on the night prior to the Enola Gay mission, a big operation went out:

To divert attention, a major effort by the 20th AF was conducted on the night of 5/6 August 1945 by 602 B-29’s striking a variety of targets including the urban areas of: Saga, Maebaski, Nishinomiya, Imabari, the oil refinery at Ube and various mining targets. The biggest effort by 250 planes was against Nishinomiya, a town close to the Inland Sea and about 140 miles east of Hiroshima. This effort was in lieu of the initial request by the Corps of Engineers to Gen. LeMay for 1000 B-29’s to accompany the atomic bomb to the Empire.
– (‘No Strategic Targets Left’ F. J. Bradley)

Got that? They had the capability of sending 1000 B-29’s out to accompany the ‘special mission’ – but supposedly they did not. A few targets are listed above, but the word ‘including’ indicates that list is not exhaustive. Contemporary news stories in US newspapers confirmed that there was a “580-plane attack in the pre-dawn of Aug. 6 with 3,840 tons of bombs on four cities and a coal liquefaction plant.” Some of these target cities are very close to Hiroshima.

During the night of August 5–6, Japanese early warning radar detected the approach of numerous American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. Radar detected 65 bombers headed for Saga, 102 bound for Maebashi, 261 en route to Nishinomiya, 111 headed for Ube and 66 bound for Imabari.
– (Wikipedia)

Most of those target cities had already been bombed to useless, scantily populated junkyards months prior. The drive-by rationale is usually offered (as in the account above) that the August raids were just a ‘diversionary’ tactic. And yet, by this time the USA had absolute air superiority over Japan and could operate from the air with impunity. So I can’t help wondering – diverting whose attention from what, exactly?

Hiroshima area targets such as Imbari (right end of distance line) and Kure (middle of distance line) separated by short air-mile flights.

From the above account, we know that Imabari was supposedly targeted that night. It’s possible that Kure, a major (already destroyed) naval base near Hiroshima, may have been specified as another so-called ‘diversionary’ target. In general the Hiroshima neighborhood was a target-rich area, as long as you didn’t question why the rubble was being bounced and re-bounced. The relevant distances are shown in the map.

There are only a few dozen air miles between Imabari and Hiroshima, with Kure along the way. As for the actual condition of Imabari at that time, dig if you will the picture:

“When I was looking at the train timetable, I found that no trains stopped at Imabari station … I wondered why the third largest city in the province had no train service. It sounded ridiculous. … The other guy said, “Wow! No Imabari Station. But … all the trains pass by Imabari Station.” A third guy stepped up … “It’s not strange at all. There’s no stop because there’s no Imabari City anymore. It got burned up last April in the air raid … No buildings, no houses, no people … The whole city burned up and the people ran away …” A fellow soldier explained to Manabe. “The air raids came on the 26th of April and the 8th of May. Imabari was burned up. My father was in business there. We had a wholesale draper business. All gone. All burned up.”
– (‘Inferno: the Firebombing of Japan’ Edwin Hoyt)

So, to summarize the Hiroshima operation, here’s what likely went down.

It appears that anywhere from 250 to 1000 B-29’s (exact count uncertain, depending on how much of a touch-up and light-show was needed) hit Hiroshima-area targets, including the city itself, on the night and early morning of August 5 and 6. Those attacks were the usual mix of incendiary and high explosives, blasting stuff to ruins and triggering the firestorm. Standard procedure. Probably Hiroshima proper, central districts, was hit last, to coincide closely with that morning’s arrival of the Enola Gay. I am assuming the Enola Gay probably did really put in an appearance over the city, for the sake of the flight logs, posterity, history, or Hollywood. They probably released some kind of ‘pumpkin’ device (practice atomic bomb shell) that was rigged for a big flash and dispersal of radiation (thus becoming the second dirty bomb in history, after the Trinity 100-Ton test).

My estimate of the number of planes required, a few hundred at most, is based both on the recorded number of active flights in the time window (as we’ve seen) and also on the Survey’s estimate of what would have been needed. Note however, that a lot of the damage was probably inflicted over the preceding several months.

On the basis of the known destructiveness of various bombs computed from the war in Europe and the Pacific and from tests, the Survey has estimated the striking force that would have been necessary to achieve the same destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To cause physical damage equivalent to that caused by the atomic bombs, approximately 1,300 tons of bombs (one-fourth high explosives and three-fourth incendiary) would have been required at Nagasaki – in the target area. To place that many bombs in the target area, assuming daylight attacks under essentially the same conditions of weather and enemy opposition that prevailed when the atomic bombs were dropped, it is estimated that 1,600 tons of bombs would have had to be dropped at Hiroshima and 900 tons at Nagasaki. To these bomb loads would have to be added a number of tons of antipersonnel fragmentation bombs to inflict comparable casualties. These would add about 500 tons at Hiroshima and 300 tons at Nagasaki. The total bomb loads would thus be 2,100 tons at Hiroshima (400 HE, 1,200 IB) and 1,200 tons (675 HE, 225 IB) at Nagasaki. With each plane carrying 10 tons, the attacking force required would have been 210 B-29s at Hiroshima and 120 B-29s at Nagasaki.
– (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)

In the context of 1945 Japan strategic operations, the resource requirement for these operations is absolutely trivial. After the war, Curtis LeMay said that in the new era of the A-bomb: “one airplane does the work of hundreds”. But as with any mathematical equation, it can also be reversed as needed for special operations: “Hundreds do the work of one.”

Ground witnesses often mentioned the pika-don (ピカドン) effect. This means basically ‘flash-bang’. In the chaos and madness of an incendiary raid, which includes high explosives, flashes and bangs are certainly expected. As for the single pika (flash) it’s possible (though not really essential) that Enola Gay or another plane deployed a photoflash bomb.

A photoflash bomb, or flash bomb, is explosive ordnance dropped by aircraft, usually military surveillance aircraft, designed to detonate above ground to create an extremely bright flash of light. These bombs, which are capable of producing light at an intensity of up to hundreds of millions of candlepower, assist surveillance aircraft in taking nighttime aerial photos without the need to fly low to the ground which would make it vulnerable to possible enemy detection.
– (Wikipedia)

Even if these were detonated at daybreak (rather than the intended night usage) anybody looking directly at the flash would feel it, just as you’d feel it if a flash camera went off in your face. It need not have been ‘bright as a thousand suns’ to be noticeable. One thing you sometimes hear as one of the abstractly cited effects of a nuclear bomb’s flash is genuine permanent blindness. There don’t seem to be very many (or any) verified cases of that, but the M46 photoflash bomb was definitely no fun to look at:

The resulting flash of light lasted for about ⅕ th of a second and had a peak intensity of approximately 500,000,000 candlepower.
– (www.harringtonmuseum.org.uk/m46-photoflash-bomb/)

To those on the wrong end of the gun, ‘dirty bomb’ radioactive materials dispersal is not the same thing as direct exposure to atomic radiation effects. By my FAIL hypothesis, there shouldn’t have been any so-called ‘prompt’ radiation effects from the Little Boy attack. There should be only dirty bomb types of contamination (and not a whole lot of that). Therefore, the acute radiation sickness reports must have been either misunderstood burn effects, or plain over-reporting, exaggeration and fakery. It’s possible the dispersed radioactive material from Enola Gay did have an effect on some people’s health, but that was not likely to have been as intense or immediate as later reported. Dirty bombs just aren’t that dangerous, it’s more of a psy-op concept.

Even if a real ‘Little Boy’ had detonated, even if everything had been strictly-to-spec by the conventional book, we should remember that the blast height and other aspects of the plan were, according to Leslie Groves, designed to minimize radiation effects. Even the humid air of the Japanese summer would have militated against the extreme radiation effects that were later reported. So at a minimum there must have been exaggeration of at least that aspect of the bomb effects. Please don’t think I’m callous about any of this. My breezy tone just soothes the horror of having to write about such things at all. If even one person was hurt in any of this, whether s/he was carbonized, vaporized, barbecued or liquefied, that’s one too many.

Moving on from the relatively straight-forward case of Hiroshima, and turning to Nagasaki, again there’s the ‘nuclear target list’ thing. This was the short list of good nuclear attack targets that was circulating among committees and principals of the war command and the Manhattan Project.

It should be remembered that in our selection of target, the 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities, and that they do not propose to save some important primary target for us if it interferes with the operation of the war from their point of view. Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell our of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft manufacturing and assembly, engine plants and in general paralyze the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force is systemically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on another:

Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yawata, & Nagasaki.
– (Notes on Initial Meeting of Target Committee, May 1945)

Again, we see Nagasaki, but not Hiroshima, among the cities explicitly listed as undergoing massive destruction. That fits with the revised story of the Hiroshima ‘special mission’ given above.

Although only eight cities are given as examples of ‘not leaving one stone lying on another’, we know from the citation of 67 destroyed cities that in fact there was a lot more destruction going on at the time. So if we leave aside Kyoto and the Imperial Palace for the reasons mentioned earlier, the key elements remaining by summer of 1945 boiled down pretty much to the following choices that were to be “reserved” for the ‘special missions’ (atomic attacks) – Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata.

Furthermore it confirms that Nagasaki was never on any nuclear ‘reserved’ list (hands off, 20th Air Force!) until days before the attack, if then. This is well-documented.

On July 24th, I send a memorandum to General Marshall at Potsdam to obtain his final approval of our plan of operation. Attached to it [was] … a one-page draft of a necessary action by the Joint Chiefs releasing the previously reserved targets (all but Nagasaki, which had never been reserved) to the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, for attack only by the 509th Group, 20th Air Force.
– (Leslie Groves ‘Now it Can Be Told’)

Nagasaki is a long, thin city strung through a valley leading down from the north to a southern port area that gives into the sea. The southernmost part of the city is a historical and cultural hotspot. During the war, the more northerly part of the city, in and around the Urakami Valley, was the site of important arms plants and facilities. Consider this account of the result of the ‘nuclear’ attack on that area:

The Fat Man weapon, containing a core of about 6.4 kg (14 lb) of plutonium, was dropped over the city’s industrial valley at 32.77372°N 129.86325°E. It exploded 47 seconds later at 1,650 ± 33 ft (503 ± 10 m), above a tennis court halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Nagasaki Arsenal in the north. The radius of total destruction was about 1 mi (1.6 km), followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to 2 mi (3.2 km) south of the bomb. About 58% of the Mitsubishi Arms Plant was damaged, and about 78% of the Mitsubishi Steel Works. The Mitsubishi Electric Works suffered only 10% structural damage as it was on the border of the main destruction zone. The Nagasaki Arsenal was destroyed in the blast.
– (Wikipedia)

In other words, the part of Nagasaki supposedly hit by the bomb was a sweet and juicy military target. Yet by all accounts, it was only the purest accident of a lucky cloud break that pushed the Nagasaki atomic attack to target this plum, after diversion from Kokura due to visibility issues. Followed by diversion yet again of the drop point within Nagasaki, modified away from the (supposedly) pre-assigned aiming point which was more southerly, closer to the port area.

Remember Pearl Harbor

Let’s think about how likely it was that this area would have been spared from the bombing campaign that had been raging for at least the prior year. Was this prime military zone really left untouched? Consider that for the previous 12 months or more, USA marines, sailors and airmen had been dying by the thousands, up against Japanese arms, planes, ships, bombs and torpedoes. The slogan ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ was the emotional gas tank of all that struggle and passion.

Now consider this conventional claim of one result of Fat Man over Nagasaki:

The Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, the factory that manufactured the type 91 torpedoes released in the attack on Pearl Harbor, was destroyed in the blast.
– (Wikipedia)

How likely is it that this factory had been spared? Especially since we know (see above documentation) that Nagasaki was in fact bombed prior to August. So Nagasaki, far from being untouched nuclear-virgin real estate, was likely totally bombed out long before. And based on the description and logic above, most especially the military works of the Urakami Valley would have been targeted all along. Some may argue that this area would have been spared, because threaded among the arms plants were hospitals, schools, and churches. To that I say – please. This campaign was under the direction of General Curtis LeMay. If you tell me that Curtis LeMay spared anything on humanitarian grounds, I can only reply with Michael Corleone’s classic comeback: “Now who’s being naïve?”

The Urakami Valley had already been totally demolished days, weeks, or even months prior to August 1945. That state of ready-made desolation, far from ruling out Nagasaki as a nuclear target, is precisely what most perfectly qualified the Urakami Valley for the staging of a fake attack. Let’s confirm this supposition with a closer look at the situation on the ground.

As usual, this is just my professional opinion, based on private research.

I have already written a shortish paper on the Bikini Atoll tests, showing photographic evidence they were faked. Some have misread my arguments there, thinking I was implying that only the Bikini tests were faked, while the Trinity and Japan events were real. On the contrary. I never meant to imply that. I mentioned the Trinity tests in that paper only to show that the Bikini and Trinity stories contradicted one another. The wind we are shown at Trinity apparently didn't exist at Bikini.

At any rate, I thought my conclusion there made it clear I suspected all tests and events to have been faked. If that wasn't clear, I will clarify it here. I suspect all tests and events were and are faked. If they had any real events to show us, they wouldn't need to show us faked events.

What got me back into this topic was a chance return to the Wikipedia page for the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station in Laurel Canyon, which station played a prominent role in my exposé of the Tate/Manson event. If you remember, that was a small military station hidden away in the hills of Los Angeles, which was built in 1941 to create government flms. It expanded in 1947, year one of the CIA. It produced thousands of propaganda flms, and this is admitted. It was said to have been closed in 1968, but we now know that was a lie. Lookout Mountain is thanked in the credits to Return of the Jedi in 1983, so it must have still been open then. They want you to think it was closed in 1968, so that you can't connect it to the Tate/Manson event in 1969. But the Wikipedia page has actually been rewritten in the past year to change the date of closing to 1968. When I was writing my Tate paper, I saved a copy of the Wiki page, and at that time the date of closing was listed as 1969, not 1968. So they have rewritten the Wiki page in response to my Tate paper. It is not the frst time a Wiki page has been rewritten or scrubbed in response to my papers. The frst instance happened many years ago, in response to my paper on tides on my science site. In that case, they permanently deleted their page on Tidal Theory, and completely rewrote the page on Tides, deleting all the math I critiqued in my paper—although it is mainstream math and can be found in many other books and websites.

Operation Greenhouse ---------------------------- Filters are being removed from a US Air Force Boeing B-17 drone after a flight through the radioactive cloud.

Anyway, I would have expected the Lookout Mountain page to have been completely deleted, but curiously it has expanded. Most of that expansion is misdirection, as with the changing of the date of closing, but not all the misdirection is successful. Several photos have been added, including this one:

Operation Greenhouse was the nuclear test series from 1951 at Enewetak Atoll. Don't you fnd it strange that this event is a motion picture with a script? I can understand recording the event, but scripting it? Why would you need to script a nuclear test? Remember, you normally script a fctional event, not a real one. Real events don't need scripts. Once again, we see them placing prominent clues right in front of your nose. They should call this Operation Yeah Tell Me Another One, General.

If we go to the page for Enewetok, we fnd this photo:

That photo has the subtext:

Filters are being removed from a US Air Force Boeing B-17 drone after a flight through the radioactive cloud.

What? You can't flter radioactive particles with some white sheet placed over the windows, or whatever is going on there. And if the plane is a drone, why use flters at all? The only reason to fy a drone through a radioactive cloud is to monitor the ion levels. But if you are monitoring ion levels, you don't need a flter, do you? You would need a flter only if the plane were manned. I suspect the plane was manned. Why? Because I see it sitting there. According to other stories at the time, drones were used only for “suicide” missions, since they couldn't be taken off or landed successfully. Pilots had to take them to altitude and then bail out, after which they could be fown by remote control. But since they couldn't be landed by remote control, they had to be crashed somewhere on purpose. In other words, used as a missile against an enemy target. This is the story we get from the death of Joseph Kennedy, Jr., remember, who is said to have piloted one of these missile planes in WW2.* He and another pilot were to have taken the plane to altitude and then bailed. But the payload onboard exploded for some reason before they were able to bail, killing them both. I have shown that story is another hoax, but not because they could take off and land drones back then. It is a fction because there is no way Kennedy would be chosen for that mission. It is also an obvious fction because the plane was followed by a flm crew. There would be no reason for a flm crew to follow such a mission, unless they were there to flm the explosion, as alleged proof of Kennedy's death. But the part about these planes requiring pilots for take off and landing is true. The B-17 required precise eye and hand coordination in the cockpit for a successful landing.

The reason they are telling you this B-17 was a drone is so you don't ask questions about that stupid flter. If they admitted the plane was manned, you might start to ask how radioactivity can be fltered in a cockpit like that. The short answer is, it can't. Radioactivity is very small ions, like alphas and betas. Betas are high energy electrons. Electrons are tiny, and cannot be fltered by screens. Neither can photons. The cockpit would have to be completely shielded all around. Shielded, not fltered. But if it is shielded, it can't be fown, since the shields would prevent all visibility. So the story fails both ways.

Major General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity shot tower remains.

That is the next ridiculous photo we fnd. Here is the subtext:

Major General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity shot tower remains a few weeks later. The white overshoes were to prevent the trinitite fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.

I will give you a few moments to stop laughing. They are standing at ground zero a few weeks after the test, with no protective clothing except white canvas bags over their shoes. A 20kt bomb is supposed to have exploded just 100 ft above that point they are standing, and yet all we see is a little pile of dirt, not even scorched. Look at the ground. It is just cracked dirt. It should have been heated to extremely high temperatures and turned to magma or aerosoled. We are told they are wearing the medical booties to prevent trinitite from sticking to their shoes, but do you see any trinitite? Trinitite is supposed to be a kind of glass, created by taking the dirt and rocks to high temperatures. Do you see anything that resembles glass there? I don't. It just looks like cracked clay, as in any normal desert. And does glass stick to your shoes? No. If you brought the desert foor to extremely high temperatures and then allowed it to cool very fast, it would be the opposite of sticky. It would be very hard and non-porous, again like glass.

We are told the desert sand was largely made of silica, but from the photo above, we can see that isn't true. They are standing on cracked clay, not sand.

And why no hole? Remember, all the faked photos we see of these events include a giant column and mushroom. Where do you think the column and mushroom come from? We are led to believe they come from an uplift of sediment on the ground. Where else would they come from? Well, if you uplift a huge column of sediment on the ground and broadcast it into the sky, then there will have to be a huge blast crater or hole. Instead, we see just a miniscule pile of dirt here.

The shot tower

You will say, “Why expect a crater? Do you know what nuclear bombs detonated 100 ft. up do to the surface below them?” No, and neither do you. All we can ask for is consistency—which we aren't getting with these stories. For example, in the Baker detonation at Bikini, which was only about 13% stronger than the Trinity blast, we are told it created a crater in the ocean foor 2000 ft. wide and 30 ft. deep. And that was with the ocean as a buffer. Baker was detonated halfway down to the sea foor, we are told. So there was 90 ft. of water between the explosion and the created crater. But Trinity was only 100 ft. off the desert foor, with nothing but air between. And yet we are told it left a crater 30 ft. wide and 5 ft. deep. Again, that's 2000 ft. wide for Baker versus 30 ft. for Trinity. It looks to me like they just didn't want to dig a big hole at the Trinity site, so they blew it off.

However, as we can see from the photo above, there isn't a crater at all, not even one fve feet deep. Oppenheimer and his pals are at the base of the shot tower, which was the tower on which the detonation took place. They are staring at one of the four legs, and the guys behind them are staring at another.

Do you see any crater between them? I don't.

Finally, we are expected to believe these guys are just hanging out in a highly radioactive area with no protective clothing, at a time when there would still be fallout from the sky? I will be told the fallout ends after two weeks or something, and that the ground is also not radioactive after a few weeks. But that contradicts all the other stories we have been fed. Like this one: on the Bikini Atoll page, we saw the natives being taken back ten years after the last blast [in 1968], “based on scientifc advice that the radiation levels were suffciently reduced”. However, in 1982, a French team found that radiation levels were still not safe and the islanders were again removed. That's 24 years after the last blast. And yet we see Oppenheimer himself standing at ground zero in a suit and tie just a few weeks after the Trinity test!

Ground Zero

Here's another picture of ground zero. That isn't from some family's vacation, that is a government photo from soon after the test. It is one of a few published on the Trinity page at Wikipedia. Not only does it not match the previous photo, but again, there is no hole, no scorching, no glass, no evidence of a 20kt explosion 100 ft above that. I have seen more damage at the beach caused by schoolchildren making sand castles. And who are these bozos? They look like a couple of bums. Is that the sort of photo you would expect to stand as proof of the Trinity test on a huge mainstream website 70 years after the fact? You would expect either a feet of 5-star generals and other bigwigs, or a cadre of men in lead suits. You would not expect a couple of guys who appear to be looking for old tires. Again, the joke is so in-your-face you just have to laugh. We can all this one Operation Sure-It-Did.

Also remember that the Trinity test was said to have been on July 16, 1945. Hiroshima was August 6, 1945, three weeks later. Not only does that make no sense as a matter of testing, it makes no sense given the state of the war in July. The testing of important devices normally takes much longer than that. You don't just test something once and then put it into use three weeks later. Even with something as relatively insignifcant as new cosmetics, they test them over months or years on many subjects, and then wait to monitor after-effects. They don't just rub the lotion on one guinea pig, go “Oh, he didn't die immediately,” and put the lotion on the shelves the next week. So this rush to drop a bomb tested only once should look very suspicious to you. It should look even more suspicious given that Japan was already beaten. It is not like they were about to attack the mainland US and we had to blast them as protection. We had been blasting the Japanese mainland since early March, and they were not able to stop us. According to the mainstream story, Tokyo was frebombed March 9, killing 100,000 people. From March to July, we frebombed 66 other Japanese cities, causing another half million deaths. How many US cities did the Japanese bomb in that period? Less see. . . oh that's right, zero.

We are told the bombs were dropped to prevent more loss of life on our side, but that is just more misdirection. The Japanese weren't attacking us at that point. Why would they? Put yourself in their shoes. If your homeland is being bombed to pieces, you are going to pull back and put everything you have left on preventing more attacks at home. You aren't going to send your forces out on offensive missions, you are going to keep them at home in a defensive posture. The only way we were going to lose men at that point was by fying them over Japan or sailing them near her. If we didn't want to lose men, all we had to do was stay away. Whether or not the Emperor “unconditionally surrendered” is beside the point. The point is he wasn't capable of doing us any harm, surrender or no surrender. He was beaten, and whether or not he said “Uncle” was meaningless. It was certainly no justifcation for continuing to bomb him.

In short, you can rest easier on this matter, because there is no chance we dropped any nuclear bombs on Japan. It simply didn't happen. Japan knows that, Russia knows that, and the only ones who don't know that are the citizens of the US, who have been propagandized into a state of mass idiocy. The whole nuclear scare wasn't used mainly to keep the Russians at bay (since the Russians also never had any nukes). It was used mainly to keep US citizens in a state just short of panic for 70 years, and to keep military and Intelligence expenditures absurdly high.

In this same line, you should fnd it very curious that the bomb tested at Trinity was a plutonium device, like Fat Man allegedly used at Nagasaki. The bomb used frst at Hiroshima was a uranium bomb, so it was never tested. Why would you choose to frst drop the bomb you haven't tested, instead of the bomb you have tested? It makes no sense. This also makes no sense:

After the war ended, it was not expected that the inefficient Little Boy design would ever again be required, and many plans and diagrams were destroyed.

What? Do you know how much the Manhattan project cost? Around 25 billion dollars. Does it make any sense that they would spend billions to build a successful nuclear device and then destroy the plans and diagrams? Actually, this story reminds me of the story they told a few years ago, when some retired NASA investigators were looking for the original NASA footage of the Moon landing. They were told that NASA had lost it. As it turns out, NASA had actually erased and reused the tapes in the 1980s. I am not joking. To explain it, we are told NASA was facing a major tape shortage at the time. Oh, well, I guess that makes it OK. We only spent around 100 billion on the Apollo project, so who expects to have any permanent record of it? Word of mouth is good enough. Besides, they probably needed the tape space to record Battlestar Galatica episodes.

But there is more. Concerning the failure to test the frst nuclear device allegedly used in war, we are told:

There were several reasons for not testing a Little Boy type of device. Primarily, there was little uranium-235 as compared with the relatively large amount of plutonium which, it was expected, could be produced by the Hanford Site reactors. Additionally, the weapon design was simple enough that it was only deemed necessary to do laboratory tests with the gun-type assembly. Unlike the implosion design, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the gun-type design was considered almost certain to work.

The things they expect you to swallow! Please read the last two sentences closely, since the second contradicts the frst. In the frst sentence, the weapon design is simple, and the only thing that needs to be tested is the gun-type assembly. In the second sentence, notice that this reverses: the gun-type assembly is certain to work, so it is implied it doesn't need to be tested. But the implosion design is now sophisticated. Your brain is being stirred! In truth, neither statement is to the point. This weapon was alleged to be a frst of its kind, as we know. It was alleged to be the frst nuclear explosion invented and the frst to be used. It cost huge amounts of money and allegedly required the coordination of the top physicists in the West, including several stolen from Germany. So how could the weapon design be simple? It didn't just require “coordination of explosive charges”, it required the frst chain-reaction fssion explosion, which up to then was just theoretical. The idea that this would never be tested in the feld is ludicrous.

Plus, if these things didn't need to be tested before the frst use in war, why did the later bombs need to be tested by the hundreds, blowing the shit out of large parts of the world? As usual, there is no coherence in the story being told us.

Then there is the big difference between the Gadget and Fat Man. The Gadget is what was exploded at Trinity. Fat Man exploded at Nagasaki 24 days later.

The Gadget Fat Man The Gadget Fat Man

Amazing, isn't it, that they could refne their tech that much in just three weeks? I will told that second picture is just the bombshell, but since the diameter of it is only 60 inches, the Gadget we see in the frst picture wouldn't ft inside it. The gadget inside Fat Man would have to be smaller and simpler, while supplying the same output. Well, that begs the question: if Fat Man was already built and was smaller and simpler, why was the Gadget so large and complex? They were built at the same time. Although we are told they had been working on this for years, in truth they had been working on it for only one year. The frst enriched uranium didn't arrive at Los Alamos until June of 1944. You can't work on a uranium bomb without any uranium. Plus, all this contradicts what we are told on the Trinity page about the building of Jumbo. Jumbo was the container built in case the Trinity Gadget failed to detonate properly, so that the plutonium could be saved. They didn't have enough for a second test, you see. So how did they have enough for the Fat Man?

I will be told that by July they did have enough for a second detonation. But here is what it says at Wikipedia concerning that:

By the time it [Jumbo] arrived, the reactors at Hanford produced plutonium in quantity, and Oppenheimer was confident that there would be enough for a second test.

This is the explanation for why Jumbo wasn't used at Trinity. But this indicates that at the time of the Trinity test, they weren't sure whether the new plutonium would be used in a second test, or in a bomb headed for Japan. They also weren't sure the amount of plutonium was suffcient. Oppenheimer having to say he was confdent indicates there was a big question mark there. Regardless, this certainly indicates that Fat Man had not been flled at that time. Are we to assume it had been already been built empty, just in case the Trinity test was successful and Truman ordered an immediate delivery to Japan? Even if they had enough plutonium from Hanford to fill Fat Man, they would have to ship the plutonium in, fll the Fat Man, calibrate it, load it, and so on, in less than three weeks. In fact, we are told they did it in about nine days, since Fat Man left Kirtland on July 26. It strains belief that all this would be so rushed, since 1) it makes no sense to rush work on such a device—it should be extremely dangerous to rush work on such an important device, 2) there was no rush. Japan had already been defeated and there was no reason to bomb them at all, much less to bomb them with the frst nuclear devices.

108 long tons of high explosive

As more evidence in this direction, you may not know that before the Trinity test was run, a “rehearsal” was run two months earlier. In this rehearsal, 108 long tons of high explosive were detonated in the same place. Curiously, this conventional explosion was spiked with radioactive isotopes and gamma producers, and they admit that.

That is the conventional stack of explosives. You may want to ask yourself how a conventional explosion is a “rehearsal” for a nuclear explosion. Since nuclear explosions are sold to us as completely different in kind from conventional explosions, the latter cannot be a rehearsal for the former. Do you rehearse a mile swim by running a mile? No. You cannot learn anything about a nuclear explosion by running another conventional explosion. The only way to rehearse a large nuclear explosion is by running a smaller nuclear explosion.

The spiking with radioactive isotopes is another obvious clue, since they are trying to make the conventional explosion look like a nuclear one. But who would they be fooling with that? They can't fool themselves, because they are the ones who spiked the punch. They can only be fooling you.

Compare it to the way they now run drills for the newer faked events. Remember how there were all sorts of drills occurring on 911, simultaneous with the actual event? Same thing with the 7/7 events in London, where identical drills were happening on the same day. Same thing with Sandy Hook and most of the other “tragedies” you have been sold recently. There are always “rehearsals” just before or during the events themselves. We see the same thing with the Trinity test, which has this strange rehearsal two months earlier, with a conventional blast made to look like a nuclear blast. Why? Well, when you see pictures of the Trinity test, do you have any way to know whether they are from the event in July or the event in May? No. They are not time-stamped, are they? Do you know the difference between a nuclear blast and a large conventional blast, on sight? No. No one does, because there is no such thing as a nuclear blast. There are large conventional blasts and then there are faked nuclear blasts, pasted up in photo labs or faked in large flm studios like Lookout Mountain.

They admit the plume from the rehearsal blast was visible 60 miles away, and Major Shields said it looked “beautiful”. Why no photos of it? Why can't we compare the two? Well, one reason is that they ran this rehearsal at night, at 4:37am. Why would they do that? Why would you want to be fumbling around with this stuff in the dark, out in the middle of the desert? See more below.

[Added later: I just tripped over the number 108 above. Why 108 long tons, rather than 100, 109, 110, or any other number? Because this number is another numerology marker. It has come up in several of my papers, both on my science site and on my art site. In accelerators, the proton has a mass increase limit of 108 times. I am the frst to have shown why. When I discovered that, my partner at the time—who was studying Eastern religions—said to me “Oh, that is weird. That number is very important in Hinduism”. Shiva has 108 names. There are 108 Mukhya Shivaganas. Buddhist rosaries have 108 beads. The number is also important in Judaism, which may be more to the point here. The number 18 is associated with Chai, and 108 is a low multiple of that, being 6 × 18. 108 is also important in the martial arts. It is a tetranacci number. It is the hyperfactiorial of 3. Since Oppenheimer was was Jewish and involved in studying or at least quoting Eastern religions, I take it that the number 108 was not an accident. Right after the alleged blast, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.

[The number 108 is also aces and eights, dead man's hand. It is also Chai.]

Operation Sandstone Bikini Atoll Operation Sandstone Bikini Atoll

Here is another paste-up:

That is from the Enewetok blast, during Operation Sandstone. But it is an obvious fake, since it has lines all over it. Look at the long vertical line in the lower half, to your right. Even worse is that the refection in the water isn't in the right place. See how the refection is leaning to your left? That is impossible, unless the ocean itself is tilted. The refection should be directly between the image and the photographer. In other words, the two bright spots should line up vertically. Another problem is that they once again failed to fake a surge in the sea. I showed you this problem in my analysis of the Bikini photos. There should be a big circular tidal wave around the explosion, but there isn't. We see a lot of water moving up, but no water moving out. You will say there seems to be a partial surge, but that isn't a surge, that is the atoll itself.

Another problem is again those little clouds hanging around, not responding to the blast at all. You will say the blast is limited at that point to the mushroom cloud, but that isn't true. The explosion would travel quite fast through the air, much faster than the water spout could form. By the time the water spout formed to that extent, the shockwave in the air should have reached those nearest clouds and blown them away or at least stretched them, so they pointed at the event.

We also get this from the mainstream account:

Observers watching from ships in the lagoon saw a brilliant flash and felt the radiant heat.

If they felt the radiant heat, they also got a dose of radiation, since the two would travel together. We aren't shown what these observers were wearing, but in the Bikini publicity photos, one of the sailors was shirtless. The things they expect you to believe!

And what lagoon are they talking about? In the same atoll? Surely not. We are told the sound took 45 seconds to reach them, so they were about 15 km away, or 9 miles. Since the atoll is about 15 miles in diameter, they were in a lagoon in the same atoll! So go back to the explosion picture, above. The observers were inside that circle.

Six miles away Baker Watching from six miles away Baker is faked

---------------------------- Bozos much much closer to the blast

At the Trinity test, the soldiers were even closer, watching from only six miles away. We know those soldiers were unprotected, since we have seen the photos. They are in fatigues. If either of these blasts had been real, that would have been a very bad idea. And they should have learned their lesson from Trinity in 1945, not repeating it at Enewetok in 1948.

That's the Trinity photo again. So many things wrong there. To start with, the explosion is pretty pathetic compared the way they faked the later ones. Trinity was about 20kt, while Able and Baker in the Bikini Atoll were only slightly bigger at 23kt. And yet Baker is faked to look like this.

What a difference 3 kt makes, eh?

But there are even bigger problems with that photo from Trinity. Look closely at the soldiers. Why are the nearest soldiers in black shadow, while the ones just in front of them are shadowed in light gray? It makes no sense. The sun doesn't cast a selective shadow. It is either black or gray, but not both. It's a poor paste-up, to make it look like a lot of soldiers are there when they aren't.

We have a similar problem here, since this photo is an obvious fake. Not only are these bozos much much closer to the blast, still with no protective clothing or even goggles, but again the shadows make no sense. The blast is brightly lit from the right, but the foreground characters are only dimly lit from the right. Besides, these are supposed to be professional photographers. They would have wanted the best picture of the blast, which would have been with the sun behind them, not to their right. They would have known that the sun rises in the east, and would not have positioned themselves to the south. The middle ground in the photo also makes no sense, indicating what we have here is only a studio foreground and a fake background.

I want to pause on what I said about goggles for a moment, since I haven't stressed it before. If these events had been real, they would have emitted a dose of gamma rays, which are a terror on the eyes. And distance makes less of a difference with gamma rays than with other particles, since gamma rays are photons. They travel the speed of light, c, which means they would travel the distance to these stupid photographers in about .00001 second. In that time, they would lose no energy, so standing back a few miles doesn't help. Gamma rays have such a high energy that most goggles wouldn't help. Closing your eyes wouldn't help, since the rays would go right through your eyelids like they weren't there. The photographers should be looking through double and triple shielded binoculars, like the guy on the turreted rig in the photo below. Instead, we are supposed to believe they are just standing there with their eyes open.

The only color photo of the event

That's the only color photo of the event, said to have been taken by environmental physicist Jack Aeby. It is supposed to have been taken at f4. Since this was at 5:30 in morning, why didn't he open the lens up all the way, to f2.8, say? He wanted to be sure the shot was garbage? It looks like the flm was ISO 1600, instead of 100, since why else would it be so grainy? His shutter speed was 100. What, he had never heard of a tripod? And why did the US government have to get its only color photo from an amateur? They couldn't afford to hire any professionals who knew how to use color flm and tripods? C'mon, this story is such obvious bullshit. Operation Get-Outta-My-Face.

We are told,

The photography group employed some fifty different cameras, taking motion and still photographs. Special Fastax cameras taking 10,000 frames per second would record the minute details of the explosion.

If so, then why are all the images from Trinity the sort of garbage we have seen: grainy, blurry, shot from a distance, and in 7/8 shadow? Why is Aeby's pathetic photo still trotted out? Why are the flms of this quality? That flm is 24 frames per second, not 10,000. Or this quality? There we are told the camera was capable of 15 million pictures per second. If so, why are the flms still crap, looking like balloon sequences pieced together in a lab? If that last link doesn't make you laugh, you really aren't getting the joke.

Filming family Lookout Mt. tech Filming this family on the ground as Kennedy drives by Lookout Mountain tech

---------------------------- 38 minutes before sunrise

Remember, we saw precisely this same sort of misdirection with the later Moon landings and the Kennedy assassination. With the Moon landing, we had to watch grainy, ghosted second-generation images, flmed from fickering monitors. With the Kennedy assassination, we had to study Zapruder's shite flm shot with a Bell and Howell Zoomatic, although we now know professional cameramen were standing curbside during all the action.

Why are those guys filming this family on the ground as Kennedy drives by? Is that the second coming of the Holy Family playing in the grass, that the cameramen should utterly ignore the President driving by and being shot, etc.?

At the Lookout Mountain page, we fnd this:

So it is not like the military didn't have any tech. They didn't need to be relying on amateur cameramen positioned 50 miles away. They feed you these garbage photos because it helps them hide. These ridiculous low resolution photos are harder to analyze, so they prevent analysis.

We fnd more problems with the alleged time of the Trinity test. We are told it was originally scheduled for 4 MWT. Since we were still on Roosevelt's war time in July, 1945, sunrise in central New Mexico on July 16 would have been at about 6:07am. Why would you schedule an important test in the middle of the night? And if the test was scheduled for 4am, why were all these cameramen there? They couldn't have gotten any images, beyond the initial fash. But this is even more important, since we are told the detonation went off at 5:29 MWT. That's is still 38 minutes before local sunrise. Just check the charts. So how did they get all the daylight images above?

Are you telling me that is 38 minutes before sunrise? Wow, the Moon must have been really bright back then, before the astronauts landed and painted it black. Look at those amazing shadows the Moon used to cast in the old days!

I will be told 5:29 would be twilight, since it isn't fully dark right up until offcial sunrise, of course. But we are supposed to be a full 38 minutes before sunrise here, and it wouldn't even be legal to shoot a deer then. And if human eyes don't like twilight, cameras like it even less. With that little light, there is no way you could shoot at 100 and f4, for instance, as Jack Aeby was said to have done. Plus, these cameras should have had flters on them, to protect the flm from radiation. That dims the light even more, of course. So none of the story we have been sold makes any sense.

I will be told these guys are being lit by the explosion, not by the sun, but we can see that isn't true, either. If they were lit by the explosion, their shadows would be right behind them. But we can see the shadows are to the left. Plus, the detonation only “lit the mountains for one or two seconds”. This is minutes after that.

The length of the shadows actually proves this is not at sunrise, much less before sunrise. The seated soldier in the middle of the photo above is about ½ inch tall on my screen. His shadow is 1.5”, giving us an increase of 3 times. Which means the sun is about 18 degrees above the horizon. That indicates a time of about 8am. We can call this Operation My Watch Has Stopped.

William Laurence, the New York Times' spook on the ground at Trinity, wrote of the event this way:

A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance, the rhythm of primitive man dancing at one of his fire festivals at the coming of Spring.

That loud cry should have been the cry of hundreds of idiots having their eyes blasted into permanent blindness by gamma rays and the fertility in their testicles permanently blighted. Conveniently, that didn't happen.

Also strange is that in the movies of the pre-event, we see many signs telling the soldiers to keep quiet about what they are about to see. Why? The test was not a secret. How could it be? It could be seen for hundreds of miles, over most of New Mexico. It was in the newspapers in the west later the same day, and of course they were bragging about it within a matter of weeks. Hiroshima was only 21 days later, and the full nature of the test was made public at that time. So why all the warning signs to the soldiers on the ground? I suggest they were being ordered to keep quiet about the fake. Many probably knew or intuited this explosion wasn't a nuclear explosion, and that is what needed to be kept secret. This also explains why all these soldiers had no problem hanging out near the event with no protective clothing. They knew you didn't need protective clothing around a conventional blast. Once you know what was really going on, the flms from the event begin to make sense.

As back-up for the Trinity story, we are told some fallout reached as far away as Indiana, ruining Kodak flm there. Interesting that flm was ruined in Indiana weeks later, but cameras only a few miles away were unaffected. In other words, fallout ruined flm thousands of miles away, but gamma rays spared all the local cameras. A miracle really. Let's call it Operation Horse Hockey.

Here's a funny story that I take straight from the Wikipedia page:

I was staring straight ahead with my open left eye covered by a welder's glass and my right eye remaining open and uncovered. Suddenly, my right eye was blinded by a light which appeared instantaneously all about without any build up of intensity. My left eye could see the ball of fire start up like a tremendous bubble or nob-like mushroom. I dropped the glass from my left eye almost immediately and watched the light climb upward. The light intensity fell rapidly hence did not blind my left eye but it was still amazingly bright.

The intensity falling rapidly would have nothing to do with it. Your eyes would either be destroyed in the frst two seconds or they wouldn't. But just ask yourself if the story makes any sense beyond that. This guy takes a welder's glass but only covers one eye? How stupid are we supposed to think he is? He was a lawyer, not a welder, so if he took the trouble to fnd and bring with him the welder's glass, why would he use it on only one eye? If we are prone to believe anything about this story, we must assume he was advised by the scientists to buy the glass and use it. So he either would do that or would not. In no case would he use it on one eye only, since that would just be asking for a dose of extreme pain and permanent blindness. The only way to decode this fake story is to see that he wants to give you accounts of both the intense light and the bubble. He therefore makes up an asinine story that will allow him to do both, seeing one with one eye and one with the other.

I could go on indefnitely exposing these nuclear tests, but I am quickly tiring of it. Like the rest, it is really too easy and gets boring after a few pages. I may come back to the subject later, but for now I need to switch to something else.

*In fact, it was the B-17 that was used in these missions. See Operation Aphrodite. Some readers have already written in to tell me these planes could be taken off and landed by remote control, but if so, why would pilots have been used for take-off? Why have Kennedy fy this plane to altitude when it could be done without him? Also notice that it is admitted Operation Aphrodite was completely unsuccessful, with no planes hitting their targets.

B-29s firebomb Tokyo. PHOTO: 73rd Wing Photography ---------------------------- B-29 and payload ---------------------------- How did these concrete buildings survive a ground zero atomic blast?

Following my article Sunday on the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I received some challenges from readers of The New Nationalist (TNN) and Renegade Tribune, which re-ran the article, concerning the notion that the attack was in actuality another in a series of highly destructive firebombings that had been underway in Japan (and Germany) throughout 1945.

As I stated in the comments section, the focus of the article was only about the unnecessary prolonging the Pacific war. However, I agree. The firebombing theory does need to be addressed. It’s not implausible, especially given that by the time of Hiroshima the U.S. Strategic bombing command had terror bombing and cooking civilians down to a exact science.

It is an established fact that napalm chemical firebombing of wooden Japanese cities was extremely destructive. In May 1945, Tokyo was hit with incendiary payloads from 334 B-29 Superfortresses, burning 16 square miles and destroying more than half of the city. The Hiroshima operation involved 4 sq. miles. Using the Tokyo ratio, it could have been achieved with 83 planes.

Hiroshima was a wooden shantytown constructed in a concentrated area. It was a sitting duck for a carefully crafted firebombing terror attack with an atomic-bomb psyop added on for full effect. In the previous article, regular TNN commenter “Brabantian” mentions evidence from Swedish engineer and nuclear expert Anders Björkman. The smoking gun: The day and hour Hiroshima was bombed, U.S. air command logged a fleet of 66 bombers for an operation in nearby Imabari Japan. But this city no longer existed. It had been wiped out in two previous raids. This was the fleet that firebombed Hiroshima.

Liddell Hart’s “History of the Second World War” claims that Japanese on the ground didn’t know they had been A-bombed until long after the end of the war. Allied occupation authorities also clamped down on eyewitness testimonies. Testimonies that did come out often had a scripted, deceptive quality to them. The accounts themselves could have been describing a napalm bombing, but then suggestive phrases are inserted into the narratives, such as “strange yellow ray” and “sun ray.” There are also accounts of a single B-29 flying over; but flying at 32,000 feet, the bomber would not be visible from the ground, nor would a small fleet.

However, one eyewitness, Father John A. Siemes (source: Yale’s website- the Avalon Project) provided more details as to how this may have gone down.

It was rumored that the enemy fliers had spread an explosive and incendiary material over the city and then had created the explosion and ignition. A few maintained that they saw the planes drop a parachute which had carried something that exploded at a height of 1,000 meters. No one knew anything for certain concerning the nature of the bomb.

1 2 3 A raging firestorm, not a nuclear explosion?

---------------------------- A View of ground zero in Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945, showing total destruction resulting from dropping of the first atomic bomb. The hypocenter (point directly below the bomb explosion) is visible in this photograph, approximately above the Y-shaped intersection at center-left. (U.S. National Archives)

The bombing planners drawing from their science of mass killing, first spread incendiary material to prep the target. This soaked kindling could have then been lit like a match from a small high-flying fleet of B-29s. This makes it possible to destruct the target with even less than 66 aircraft, and would make it a highly contained and controlled operation.

In pursuing this issue, we note the absence of “mushroom cloud” photos from the ground in Japan. Among the very few photos of the Hiroshima bombing that do exist, the three at right suggests a raging firestorm, not a nuclear explosion. The photos appear consistent with the others shot at different distances and angles. These firestorms were described at Hamburg in 1943, Dresden in 1945 and the various other Japanese incinerations of 1945.

The Daily Telegraph on Jan. 9, 2013, published this new photo (below) taken of the bombing. It, too, resembles a firebombing and developing firestorm.

In the book “Osada’s Children of the A-Bomb,” a survivor describes a scene that is altogether different from an A-bomb, stating, “I looked up to the sky, a streamer of smoke, perhaps 50 yards high, rising from the centre of Hiroshima, about 2 miles distant. At the top of the column of smoke was a ball of fire which seemed to me to be about the size of a large oil tank.”

U.S. Major Alexander P. de Seversky, who in 1945 inspected the bombed-towns of Japan, testified:

In Hiroshima I was prepared for radically different sights. But, to my surprise, Hiroshima looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities in Japan. There was a familiar pink blot, about two miles in diameter. It was dotted with charred trees and telephone poles. Only one of the cities twenty bridges was down. Hiroshima’s clusters of modern buildings in the downtown section stood upright.

It was obvious that the blast could not have been so powerful as we had been led to believe. It was extensive blast rather than intensive.

I had heard of buildings instantly consumed by unprecedented heat. Yet here I saw the buildings structurally intact, and what is more, topped by undamaged flag poles, lightning rods, painted railings, air raid precaution signs and other comparatively fragile objects.

At the T-bridge, the aiming point for the atomic bomb, I looked for the “bald spot” where everything presumably had been vaporized in the twinkling of an eye. It wasn’t there or anywhere else. I could find no traces of unusual phenomena.

What I did see was in substance a replica of Yokohama or Osaka, or the Tokyo suburbs – the familiar residue of an area of wood and brick houses razed by uncontrollable fire. Everywhere I saw the trunks of charred and leafless trees, burned and unburned chunks of wood. The fire had been intense enough to bend and twist steel girders and to melt glass until it ran like lava – just as in other Japanese cities.

The concrete buildings nearest to the centre of explosion, some only a few blocks from the heart of the atom blast, showed no structural damage. Even cornices, canopies and delicate exterior decorations were intact. Window glass was shattered, of course, but single-panel frames held firm; only window frames of two or more panels were bent and buckled. The blast impact therefore could not have been unusual.

Finally, one of the biggest red flags for me that this may not have been atomic was a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1990. The 40-year study of thousands of Japanese who survived the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki found radiation exposure did not cause genetic damage that could lead to human mutations.

The researcher, John Boice of the National Cancer Institute, said, ”Ionizing radiation is known to cause heritable mutations in many species of plants and animals, but intense study of 70,000 offspring of atomic bomb survivors has failed to identify an increase in congenital abnormalities, cancer, chromosome aberrations or mutational blood protein changes.”