Binding: Paperback
Description: The US decision to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 remains one of the most controversial events of the twentieth century. However the controversy over the rights and wrongs of dropping the bomb has tended to obscure a number of fundamental and sobering truths about the development of this fearsome weapon. The principle of killing thousands of enemy civilians from the air was already well established by 1945 and had been practised on numerous occasions by both sides during the Second World War. Moreover the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was conceived and built by an international community of scientists not just by the Americans. Other nations (including Japan and Germany) were also developing atomic bombs in the first half of the 1940s albeit hapharzardly. Indeed it is difficult to imagine any combatant nation foregoing the use of the bomb during the war had it been able to obtain one. The international team of scientists organized by the Americans just got there first. As this fascinating new history shows the bomb dropped by a US pilot that hot August morning in 1945 was in many ways the world's offspring in both a technological and a moral sense. And it was the world that would have to face its consequences strategically diplomatically and culturally in the years ahead.
Title: Hiroshima The World's Bomb
Author(s): Rotter Andrew J. (Charles A. Dana Professor Department Of History Colgate University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780199569762
Pages: 384 Pages, 18 Black And White Plates
Publication Date: 10/25/2009
Series: Making of the Modern World
Category: Nuclear Weapons