I found this article a short while ago while web surfing. Lots of good color pics to see and information to read…[8-|]
Nice pics.
I saw her flown by Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew it on the Hiroshima mission, at a Confederate Air Force airshow in the 70’s. They did a recreation of the dropping of the bomb complete with an actual explosion and resulting mushroom cloud. That didn’t make for good PR with the Japanese, who as I recall weren’t too happy about it. They also did a recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and I don’t recall anyone complaining about that.
Beautiful display and a very fitting tribute to Colonel Tibbets, his crew and all of the rest of the people involved in developing and delivering the 2 bombs. War is a very terrible and nasty thing in each and every aspect of it and the use of nuclear weapons is the ultimate of that terribleness. There will forever be debates about whether it was right or wrong to use them. Personally, I don’t see any appreciable difference between 300 or 400 planes dropping many thousands of incendiary bombs on a city thereby destroying several square miles of buildings and killing 100,000 people versus doing the same thing with one airplane and one bomb.
Darwin, O.F. [aln]
Excellent article & reference. Thanks for sharing.
Regards, Rick
I can think of one big difference - radiation.
But…I can’t help but think that’s a good as well as a bad thing. Bad in the sense that, yeah, radiation burns and radiation poisoning are pretty terrible ways to go. But good in the sense that radiation, nuclear winter, etc have make atomic weapons so terrifying that they haven’t been used since.
If they were just really, really big bombs without those horrible side effects, I have to imagine that things might well have escalated to nuclear exchange at moments where cooler heads ultimately prevailed.
Doogs,
You are correct in saying radiation is not present with incendiary bombs, but equally horrible burns are. The MAD principle, (Mutually Assured Destruction) is most definately the only thing that has kept the US and USSR from throwing multiple thousands of nukes at each other. When I worked with nuclear strike mission planning for the B-52s during the height of the Cold War the US had something like 20 to 25,000 warheads ready to use. Assuming that Russia had somewhere near that figure, there were upwards of 50,000 of those things aimed at each other. Even if only half of them got through to the intended targets, I cannot imagine the total destruction of 25,000 Hiroshimas, all within a few hours. Those post-apocalypse horror films of the 1950s would become all too real.
Darwin, O.F. [aln]