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He jauntily walked down the aisle to the stage, looking to one scientist like a prizefighter who had just won his big match. Following his conversation with Groves, Oppenheimer called the laboratory staff together in the auditorium in T Building. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at Los Alamos, was telexed the same two lines from Parsons but Groves added a personal, explanatory note: “Flashed from the plane by Parsons one five minutes after release.” It was just before 11:30 in the morning, Washington time.
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Visible effects greater than New Mexico test.” A smiling Groves shared the news with everyone in the office, then telephoned George Harrison, an aide to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, at the War Department, who in turn cabled Stimson in Potsdam and called Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, who had spent the night in his office in Washington waiting for news: “Results clearcut, successful in all respects. Navy, immediately sent a coded message to Gen. Los Alamos’ chief explosives expert, Captain William S. Every exposed human being or animal within half a mile was reduced to black char in less than a second. Roofing tiles bubbled at 1,300 yards, and objects like granite were chipped or grated at seven hundred yards. Temperatures reached 5,400 degrees, and on the ground the heat ignited flammable objects like wood and cloth as far away as four thousand yards. The large ball of fire, at first seeming to churn within itself, quickly changed to swirling purple clouds and boiling flames that surged upward. Seconds later the airplane was severely jolted twice by shock waves. A few minutes later a brilliant flash lit the interior of the Enola Gay. Paul Tibbets, quickly banked right 155 degrees in a steep turn. Suddenly relieved of five tons of weight from the first atomic bomb to be used in a war, the airplane lurched up several dozen feet, and its pilot, Cmdr. on August 6, 1945, Major Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier aboard the Enola Gay, released “Little Boy”-a blunt-nosed, gun-metal-gray object-from an altitude of 31,600 feet over Hiroshima. James Kunetka is the author of The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer, the Unlikely Partnership That Built the Atom Bomb, from which this article is adapted.Īt 9:14:30 a.m.