From the belly of Enola Gay, it took Little Boy 44.4 seconds to fall 9,400 metres to its detonation height, 580 metres above the Earth.
It was 8.15am (and 44 seconds) on August 6 1945, when the bomb went off.
By then the B-29 bomber, named for the aircraft commander’s mother, was 16km away, flying as fast as its four engines would take it.
“My god,” said the crew when they saw a flash 10 times the brilliance of the sun from behind their welder’s goggles.
“It was definitely bright because we saw it inside that airplane,” pilot Paul Tibbets said later. “The whole sky lit up when it exploded.”
Those on the ground also saw the pika, the “flash”, then felt in their melting bones the don, a thunderclap the equivalent of 15,000t of TNT going off at once.
Four-year-old Masahiro Sasaki was at home with his two-year-old sister, Sadako, a mile from ground zero. Despite the hurricane blast of superheated wind, debris, body parts, fire and radioactive dust, they would survive the day, though Sadako would die 11 years later of leukaemia, one of the 140,000 who perished on the day or in the following years.
There was no moral reckoning for Tibbets. “The thing is it did what it was supposed to do. It brought peace to the world at that time.”
A slippery thing, peace.
It’s weeks since the death of much-banned US musical satirist (and mathematician) Tom Lehrer whose 1967 song So long, mom (A song for World War III) captures the grotesquerie of our age in rollicking music hall style: “While you swelter, down there in your shelter/You can watch me ... on TV.”
In June, the only country ever to deploy nuclear weapons in anger, bombed another country ... to stop it from acquiring nukes. An old joke goes that Americans don’t get irony, and here we are.
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