Announcement came as a shock Aug. 6,1945
Newsman recalls first bomb reports
(Editor's note: A quarter century has passed since President Harry S. Truman gave the American people and the world first public knowledge of the atomic bomb and of the secret wartime scientific achievement that produced it. Chiles Coleman, now in in Atlanta as assistant to the manager of United Press International's southern division, was manning the Washington desk of United Press when the announcement was made on Aug. 6, 1945. In the following personal report he recalls the day.
United Press International
By CHILES COLEMAN
The government kept a lot of secrets well during World War II. None was bigger or better kept than one known as "Manhattan Project."
News that scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom and using the awesome energy thus released to make a bomb was dumped—there is no other word —on the American public and the world at 11 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.
About 16 hours earlier, an American warplane had released the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan.
About three weeks earlier scientists had exploded the first "atomic device" on a remote New Mexico desert, unleashing the greatest force man had ever created.
BUT THE NEWSPAPER reading and radio listening public knew none of this. Wartime censorship regulations and military secrecy rules had done their work well. There were rumors to be heard, deductions to be made from obscure scientific papers published before the war, but there were no facts and no news stories.
The task of keeping it all hidden from the enemy and from the world was perhaps a little easier because everybody "knew," of course, that the atom was by definition the smallest possible particle of matter and couldn't be split.
At the United Press Washington news desk, where I was sitting that Monday morning, the outlook was for a quiet day. President Truman was on his way home from the Potsdam Conference aboard the cruiser Augusta. Presidential press secretary Charles Ross and UP's White House correspondent Merriman Smith were with him. Congress was on vacation. Victory in Europe was three months old. The war against Japan was picking up steam, but news of the fighting was coming mostly from Pacific datelines.
Sen. Hiram Johnson had died a few hours earlier. His obit had cleared the wires and it seemed a good even money bet no story from Washington that day would top it.
AT 10:30 A.M. Eban Ayers, acting White House press secretary, told his regular morning conference with reporters he had nothing new but might have something later. Reporter Charles Degges, at the White House for UP in Smith's absence, asked if it would be a fair, good, or hot story.
"It'll be a pretty good story," Ayers said in what must surely rank as the understatement of the century.
Half an hour later he called the White House reporters back, read a few paragraphs from a three page statement by President Truman and handed out copies.
Degges' bulletin was ripped from a typewriter by an office dictationist and dropped on the desk in front of me. It said:
WASHINGTON, AUG. 6—(UP)
PRESIDENT TRUMAN TODAY
ANNOUNCED THAT AN
'ATOMIC BOMB' HAS BEEN
USED AGAINST JAPAN FOR
THE FIRST TIME WITH POWER
EQUAL TO 20,000 TONS OF
TNT.
July 21 KANSAN 7
1970
I looked again at the words "atomic bomb" with layman's in-comprehension. Then I tried to visualize the explosion of 20,000 Tons of TNT and the impact of the story began to register.
Degges' dictation continued, paragraph by paragraph, out of the typewriter and onto the UP trunk wire behind the bulletin:
IN A STATEMENT ISSUED AT THE WHITE HOUSE MR. TRUMAN REVEALED THAT 16 HOURS AGO—SOMETIME SUNDAY—AN AMERICAN AIRPLANE DROPPED ONE OF THE NEW BOMBS ON HIROSHIMA, AN IMPORTANT JAPANESE ARMY BASE.
THE PRESIDENT SAID THE NEW BOMB OPENED (A NEW AND REVOLUTIONARY INCREASE IN DESTRUCTION" TO SUPPLEMENT THE GROWING POWER OF THE UNITED STATES AGAINST JAPAN, THE NEW BOMB, HE ADDED, IS NOW IN PRODUCTION AND "EVEN MORE POWERFUL FORMS" ARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT.
"THAT BOMB HAD MORE POWER THAN 20,000 TONS OF TNT," THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT SAID. "IT HAD MORE THAN 20,000 TIMES THE BLAST POWER OF THE BRITISH 'GRAND SLAM,' WHICH IS THE LARGEST BOMB EVER USED IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE."
"IT IS AN ATOMIC BOMB"
THE PRESIDENT SAID. "IT IS A HARNESSING OF THE BASIC POWER OF THE UNIVERSE.
THE FORCE FROM WHICH THE SUN DRAWS ITS POWER HAS BEEN LOOSED AGAINST THOSE WHO BROUGHT WAR TO THE FAR EAST."
Even as these words were clattering on teletypes all over the country and the world, the information floodgates were swinging wide all over Washington.
At the War Department, the general in charge of public relations opened his safe and gave reporters stacks of supersecret material prepared in advance. There was a 7,500 word statement by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson about the development of the bomb, long stories about the secret plants at Richlands, Wash., and at Oak Ridge, where a city of 40,000 had been built from scratch in the East Tennessee hills and its very existence kept from the world. There was information about the scientists who perfected the bomb, not really knowing until they tried what actually would happen when they created the first chain reaction and when they exploded the first "atomic device."
THE ARMY TOLD the full story of the New Mexico test, putting Alamogordo, N.M. forever in the history books, and a little later relayed a report from the first reconnaissance over Hiroshima.
There wasn't much information on that. A later lead on the UP wires said:
"Reconnaissance planes state that an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke covered the target area," an announcement said. "As soon as accurate results of the bombing become available, they will be released by the Secretary of War."
Nobody knew that day how many died beneath the Hiroshima bomb, and now, a quarter of a century later, it is still not exactly known. The estimates run from 80,000 to twice that many and higher.
The flood of information continued to swell. From the Capitol came the story of the congressional committees which had authorized the spending of $2 billion—more money then than now—being told only that it would be spent on "Manhattan Project."
From the Augusta came Merriman Smith's dispatch describing a solemn President Truman making the announcement personally to officers gathered in the Augusta's wardroom.
There was only so much space on the wires, in newspaper pages, and only so much time on news
broadcasts. It would be weeks and months before all the suddenly nonsecret information could be absorbed, reported, analyzed and distributed.
But one question rose immediately. All that energy? What could it do besides explode?
Questions were asked, experts sought and quizzed research done. The trouble was, nobody actually knew but everybody was willing to explain the particular far reaching horizon he saw.
Unlimited energy from an inexhaustable, self - replenishing source—Was there anything that couldn't be done with that?
Automobiles could run their useful lifetime on a teaspoon of fuel. Railroad engines might require as much as a cup. All ocean liners, battleships and smaller vessels would need no fuel tanks and the oil industry might as well go out of business. There would be unlimited electric power for all purposes to fill the needs of all people, everywhere, with no more need for dams or power generating plants.
AND ROCKETS. A rocket in that day was not a space booster, but merely a troublesome and devastating weapon that Adolph Hitler had been able to use in World War II and we had not. Thoughtful military men were already asking themselves how bad it might have been in Europe if Gen. Montgomery's troops didn't cleaned out the German launching sites just when they did. Now
all future rockets could be powered by atomic fuel.
All this would take time, of course, perhaps five years, maybe even ten. Nobody worried about radiation shielding cost.
I do remember dropping into one of those stories a couple of paragraphs about one possible future use of atomic power—submarines. In that day submarines ran under water on electric batteries slowly. They had to surface frequently to recharge the batteries. With atomic fuel, perhaps they could go a lot faster and stay under a lot longer.
Thanks mainly to an obscure and exceedingly stubborn Navy captain named Rickover that, at least, came true.
Computer usage analyzed by 30
The usefulness and application of computers to the humanities is being studied by 30 university teachers and researchers at the Summer Training Institute for Humanistic Computation at the University of Kansas June 13-August 8.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, the purpose of the institute is to provide scholars and teachers in the humanities with a thorough basic knowledge in computer skills and information technology.
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