What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there." He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb.
So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened.
ST: So Ramsey told you about the possibilities. PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe.
ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs? All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. ST: Did Oppenheimer tell you about the destructive nature of the bomb? The whole interview is here, but these are my favorite excerpts: The late, great writer Studs Terkel interviewed the pilot of the Enola Gay (named for the pilot's mother), which dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. It's a subject fraught with emotions and politics, such that the only people really qualified to weigh in were those who were there. You use anything at your disposal.The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 - and, by most accounts, ended World War II - are nothing if not controversial. "You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. "I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview.
Tibbets died at his Columbus home after a two-month decline caused by a variety of health problems, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend. " said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War."He said, 'What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch - and that was me,' Tibbets grew tired of criticism for delivering the first nuclear weapon used in wartime, telling family and friends that he wanted no funeral service or headstone because he feared a burial site would only give detractors a place to protest.Īnd he insisted he slept just fine, believing with certainty that using the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives than they erased because they eliminated the need for a drawn-out invasion of Japan. The attack marked the beginning of the end of World War II. Throughout his life, Tibbets seemed more troubled by other people's objections to the bomb than by him having led the crew that killed tens of thousands of Japanese in a single stroke. Columbus, Ohio | Paul Tibbets, who etched his mother's name - Enola Gay - into history on the nose of the B-29 bomber he flew to drop the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, died Thursday after six decades of steadfastly defending the mission.