SHOCKWAVE: Countdown to Hiroshima

This vivid recreation of the countdown to 6 August 1945, when the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is based on eyewitness testimony and recreates the lives of the scientists, airmen and victims as the hour approached for the cataclysmic impact of Little Boy on the city below and on world history. Three weeks earlier a test was carried out in the Mexican desert and we meet J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos laboratory, who is losing weight and is unable to sleep as he wrestles with whether to go ahead with the test. Churchill and Roosevelt had already sanctioned the bomb back in February, with the proviso that Stalin was kept in the dark to prevent him making the power grab that they believed should belong to America. Meanwhile William L. Laurence, a brilliant science journalist who had predicted the development of the atomic bomb, was unaware that the FBI had withdrawn his articles from every library across the US. As the airmen on Tinian Island waited for their mission, 69 scientists sent a petition to President Truman, Roosevelt's successor, asking him not to use the bomb. It was lost in a sea of bureaucracy. The Japanese were beginning to wonder why Hiroshima, a major military base, was the only city left untouched by American bombing, and we follow Japanese citizens Taeko Nakamae in her work at the post office and Dr Shuntaro Hida as he is unexpectedly called away from the city, saving his life. The American airmen receive their final briefing, but no-one mentions the words "nuclear" or "radiation". The storm is about to be unleashed. 356pp, paperback, notes, bibliography, black and white photos.