Chris Calle: 1940s - Mankind Faces Atom

Description

On July 16, 1945, as dawn's early light broke over the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a flash of light brighter than several suns shattered thetranquility. The first atomic bomb had exploded with a force equivalent to nearly 20,000 tons of TNT creating a towering mushroom-shaped column of smoke that rose some 40,000 feet. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," observed physicist Robert Oppenheimer as he witnessed the ferocious birth of his creation. The world had entered the Atomic Age. On August 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 Enola Gay dropped Little Boy, a four-ton atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another atomic bomb -- dubbed Fat Man for its ungainly shape -- was released over Nagasaki. On September 2, 1945, the Japanese government formally surrendered, ending World War II.