The Enola Gay was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bomber plane named after the pilot, Paul Tibbets, mother. That itself is not extraordinary, but on August 6, 1945, Tibbets dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat, Little Boy, from that plane opening up a terrifying new kind of war for humanity and the world.
Little Boy has to be one of the most tongue-in-cheek codenames for a secret weapon ever as the bomb was roughly 10,000 pounds and by comparison was filled with a paltry 140 pounds of Uranium-235. This isotope is less than 1 percent of all uranium in the world but it is also the only fissile kind of uranium.
When these 10,000 pounds of pure destruction were dropped, no one knew quite what genie was being let out of the bottle, from the pilots to the Japanese civilians on the ground even to United States President Harry Truman (who ordered the bomb be dropped because he feared massive casualties should the Allied Powers attempt a Normandy-style invasion of Japan).
In a flash, approximately 70,000 people were killed and over the next several months, a heretofore unpredicted new phenomenon called radiation sickness led to the casualty numbers doubling. This also meant that World War II was over (Japan didn’t surrender until later but that’s a moot point) and that a new age of war had begun.
Fear of Nuclear obliteration was a very real concern for millions of American and Soviet citizens from that point on until the Soviet Union fell to end the Cold War and even though we no longer proliferate (increase our supply) of nuclear weapons, the threat of atomic bombs remains frightening. We may not have had a situation where Nuclear War looked inevitable after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 but efforts to stop Iran from acquiring such weapons, North Korea’s dictator’s toddler-esque temperament, and the relatively new threat of terrorism ensure that the weapon first used in Hiroshima 71 years ago today is never far from public conscious.
There is also the damage that this bombing did and will continue to do to the Nuclear Power industry as unfortunately, most people hear the word Nuclear and think of Armageddon, instead of energy. The accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in Ukraine in 1986 has rendered the city of Pripyat an uninhabitable nuclear ghost town, but I can’t help but feel that that was only the straw that broke the camel’s back over nuclear power instead of the lone agent that caused many European countries to shutter this source of energy. My one hope above all is that 71 years down the road in 2087, some child will find this article and laugh about it with his or her buddies at the paranoia of ignorant generations past in regards to Nuclear War and that they will live in a world were Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which happened August 9th) were the first and last time this awful weapon was deployed.
