Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1945. The fallout: Raw power of A-bomb stuns world

Splitting an atom?

One single bomb with more than 2,000 times the blast of the largest bomb to precede it?

The announcement of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb was so sudden, it "shook the minds of men everywhere," The Journal reported Aug. 7, 1945.

"The imagination has been getting an awful beating lately, but this knocks it into a cocked hat," the paper wrote.

"Never before have scientists so literally stunned the whole world. Certainly not with the discovery of the steam engine, nor the telegraph instrument, nor even the wireless set. These were miracles of science. But their uses had discernible limits. Laymen could sense, even if they could not fully comprehend, their implications.

"It is not so with the force hidden in the atomic bomb. Despite yesterday's explanation, the only fact clearly understood is that its genesis is in agents so powerful as to baffle human imagination."

The end of the war seemed assured, and The Journal tried to look ahead to a new era of atomic power: "The choice will be before all mankind. We can live with atomic force or be destroyed by it."