`Suddenly a glaring whitish pinkish light appeared in the sky accompanied by an unnatural tremor which was followed almost immediately by a wave of suffocating heat and a wind which swept away everything in its path. Within a few seconds, the thousands of people in the streets and the gardens in the centre of the town were scorched by a wave of searing heat. Many were killed instantly, others lay writhing on the ground screaming in agony from the intolerable pain of their burns. Everything standing upright in the way of the blast - walls, houses, factories and other buildings - was annihilated and the debris spun around in a whirlwind and was carried up into the air."
This is what a Japanese journalist saw on the morning of Monday August 6th, 1945, when the US airforce dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. More than 80,000 people were killed, thousands were wounded, and half the city was destroyed. Those who survived waited for radiation sickness and cancer to consume their bodies. At ignition, the bomb was 10 times brighter than the sun. The 20th century, in its drive for ever more sophisticated science and technology, had surpassed itself. Now mankind could unleash enough destruction to bring about the end of the planet.
When Japan went to war with China in 1894 and acquired its first colony - Taiwan - it showed the European powers that they were not alone in their imperialistic ambitions. The second World War was an ideal opportunity for Japan to move into colonies such as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and British Malaya to take advantage of oil deposits, tin and rubber. On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese airforce bombed the US base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii to eliminate its last rival for control of the Pacific, killing 2,300 people, destroying 200 aeroplanes and sinking four battleships.
Within six months, its armed forces were in control of Singapore, the whole of Malaya, parts of Burma, Hong Kong, parts of Thailand, Indochina, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and most of New Guinea. But, led by the ultra-nationalist General Tojo, Japan overstretched itself and was slowly beaten back by US forces, which were superior in the air. After the dropping of the second atomic bomb on the naval base of Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.
Otto Hahn and Fritz Straussmann discovered nuclear fission in 1938. As war approached, the great powers began studying the possibility of using uranium fission as a weapon and a source of power. In the US, Enrico Fermi succeeded in producing a chain reaction in a uranium pile. A team of scientists and engineers headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer developed the bomb in a lab in the New Mexico desert. Nuclear fission gave way to thermonuclear fusion: in 1952 the US developed the hydrogen bomb, 500 times more powerful than the one which destroyed Hiroshima. It was tested at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1954. From 1949, when the atomic bomb was first tested in the USSR, the Soviets kept pace with the US in the build-up of the arms race, which spread to other countries around the globe (India tested its first atomic bomb in 1974).
Politicians stressed that possession of nuclear arms was a way of preventing destruction rather than causing it ("Atoms for Peace" was a slogan of Eisenhower's presidential campaign). However in 1962, during Kennedy's stand-off with Khrushchev over the Cuban missile bases, the world waited to see if it would be permitted to survive the weekend. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was set up in the UK in 1958. The full effects of nuclear power are still unknown, although the Chernobyl accident of 1986 gave many in Europe a chilling foretaste of the risks. The bomb has given the English language some new words - blonde bombshell, bikini - showing that in spite of its deadly powers it can be reduced by that small, wonderful, and so far indestructible human weapon: a sense of humour.
