In ‘This Week in History,’ we meet two pilots who used their piloting reflexes and skills to avoid a thermonuclear disaster on U.S. soil.
Dropping of the atomic bomb twice on Japan in August of 1945 effectively ended World War II. The bombs possessed a power unknown to mankind until the moment its blast radius was made abundantly clear to the world. Japan’s emperor, Hirohito, accurately described it as “a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is, indeed, incalculable.”
With the war over and the Axis powers defeated, a new war had begun. A cold one.
After the Atom Bomb
During the years leading up to the war’s nuclear climax, mathematicians and physicists had assembled in a secretly constructed city called Los Alamos in north central New Mexico. It was a pivotal part of the Manhattan Project. There they created the atomic bomb. Although history’s greatest conflict had ended, the research into nuclear weapons continued.
