- 2 days ago
During World War Il, the US begins to work on a top-secret project that results in the atomic bombings on Japan - and a global conflict lasting decades.
第二次世界大战期间，美国着手开展一项绝密计划，该计划最终导致了对日本的原子弹轰炸，并引发了一场持续数十年的全球冲突。
• 核心主题：本集探讨了二战期间美国绝密的“曼哈顿计划”，以及针对广岛和长崎的原子弹轰炸。
• 长期影响：文中详述了这些核打击如何开启了原子时代，并为随后数十年的全球冲突、苏联的崛起以及超级大国之间的核军备竞赛埋下了伏笔。
第二次世界大战期间，美国着手开展一项绝密计划，该计划最终导致了对日本的原子弹轰炸，并引发了一场持续数十年的全球冲突。
• 核心主题：本集探讨了二战期间美国绝密的“曼哈顿计划”，以及针对广岛和长崎的原子弹轰炸。
• 长期影响：文中详述了这些核打击如何开启了原子时代，并为随后数十年的全球冲突、苏联的崛起以及超级大国之间的核军备竞赛埋下了伏笔。
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00:00:28You
00:00:30If you define a Cold War as a state of conflict with a nuclear-armed opponent where you can't get
00:00:39at each other, even though you are functionally hostile to each other, then we're in a new Cold War with
00:00:46the Russians.
00:00:50More Russian forces on the move.
00:00:52Surface-to-air missiles in the country's Far East due to join what Moscow says are military exercises near Ukraine.
00:01:01It's easy in some ways to say that the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
00:01:09But if you open the newspaper on any given day, we're still living with the aftermath of the Cold War.
00:01:18What we're seeing is still that story playing out.
00:01:20Columns of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles are reported to be pouring across the Ukrainian border tonight.
00:01:28Swarms of helicopters flying in low over the countryside, creating panic and terror for the people living there.
00:01:36After months of preparations, the Russian president Vladimir Putin has launched a major military operation against Ukraine.
00:01:43The war in Ukraine has begun.
00:01:54It's close.
00:01:56It's close.
00:02:04It's close.
00:02:08Putin is obsessed with Ukraine.
00:02:11He does not want to recreate the Soviet Union.
00:02:15He wants to recreate the Russian Empire.
00:02:37Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical
00:02:41catastrophe of the 20th century for him winning the war in Ukraine is not just you know destroying
00:02:51Ukrainian statehood I think it's a war to basically replay results of the Cold War
00:03:05the Cold War did end but now we are living through a new edition of the Cold War
00:03:11and it's a very dangerous Cold War
00:03:35these people showing films of London being vaporized by a nuclear weapon and laughing
00:03:41about it on the nightly news these are shocking shocking situations
00:04:04we are not seeking a new Cold War
00:04:09it is something that we thought that we will never see again the pictures that we saw from
00:04:15the Second World War I mean right now how can this be happening
00:04:50what do we do
00:04:52what do we do
00:06:22The Cold War, which began in phases, ultimately became a global existential struggle between the United States and its allies
00:06:32and the Soviet Union and its allies.
00:06:39At its peak, the Cold War touched every continent, with the exception of Antarctica, and practically every country in the
00:06:47world.
00:06:50It shaped the decolonization of great, large European empires.
00:06:59It shaped domestic politics in the great capitals of Europe, North America, and Asia, for many, many people around the
00:07:16world.
00:07:18It affected their daily lives, and in some cases, it killed them.
00:07:25It created a need for intelligence services, for secret activity that never went away.
00:07:37Vladimir Putin cannot be understood without reference to the Cold War.
00:07:41His worldview is a product of the way in which the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s and early
00:07:5090s.
00:07:53It set off an arms race that changed virtually everything about American life, but also really destabilized global relationships and
00:08:02caused infinite amount of harm around the globe for most of the 20th century.
00:08:07It seemed so obvious and so clear.
00:08:10It seemed so clear. We were so good. We were the country that finally was virtuous in addition to being
00:08:16powerful.
00:08:17Everybody in America was supposed to embrace this single narrative, and it was logical that we would then be threatened
00:08:24by a hostile, evil force that wanted nothing but destruction and nihilism.
00:08:32The Cold War was the first war in history that held the possibility of ending in apocalypse.
00:08:45That's what made it different, and that's what made it so psychologically threatening.
00:08:53If you got it wrong, we weren't talking about the loss of a thousand people.
00:08:58We weren't talking about the loss of, God forbid, 10,000 people.
00:09:02We were talking about the potential loss of millions of people, perhaps a billion people.
00:09:10That was a scale of awfulness that was never before within the power of statesmen.
00:09:20Why was it there? Because of nuclear weapons.
00:09:35The arrival of nuclear weapons is what helps the Cold War to play out.
00:09:41They can't be disentangled from one another.
00:09:54The question of when to use nuclear weapons has always haunted every country that has them.
00:10:08I'm not sure there would be a Cold War without nuclear weapons.
00:10:15Over the history of nuclear weapons, we've gotten very close to catastrophe numerous times.
00:10:32We survived that not because we were smart.
00:10:36It was because we were lucky.
00:10:44Einstein supposedly said,
00:10:47I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
00:10:52but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
00:11:00So that's the nuclear world we live in.
00:11:06Once humans stop seeing other humans as human,
00:11:10the most horrific acts are possible.
00:11:14There seems to me to be evidence that lessons that we thought were learned
00:11:19were not learned,
00:11:20and that history is not history,
00:11:22but we are in an ongoing tide.
00:11:37Nuclear fission splitting heavy elements
00:11:41was discovered just at Christmastime in 1938
00:11:46in Nazi Germany,
00:11:48Berlin,
00:11:50by two curiously chemists
00:11:52and a physicist.
00:11:55And they were experimenting with bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate
00:11:59with a particular kind of subatomic particle called a neutron.
00:12:10When a neutron enters the uranium nucleus,
00:12:13it's rather as if the moon hit the earth.
00:12:17Even if it's just flying at normal room temperature,
00:12:20when it goes in,
00:12:21everything goes crazy.
00:12:30It's sufficient energy for one fission of one atom
00:12:35to make a grain of sand visibly jump.
00:12:40It's enormous.
00:12:42It's very exothermic in physics terms.
00:12:46Puts out a lot of energy for a very little input.
00:12:50German scientists published a paper in a British journal, Nature.
00:12:55And the whole world woke up one day to headlines
00:13:00in the New York Times and the London papers.
00:13:03They split the atom.
00:13:09One of the more brilliant scientists in American history,
00:13:12Robert Oppenheimer,
00:13:14started thinking,
00:13:15well, what can you do with the energy
00:13:16that comes out of this amazing reaction?
00:13:20Within a week,
00:13:21he had a drawing on the blackboard
00:13:23of an atomic bomb.
00:13:27If you could get this reaction
00:13:29to cause another reaction
00:13:30and another reaction
00:13:31and another reaction
00:13:32until you had, like, 80 generations,
00:13:36you could blow up a city.
00:13:40Oppenheimer saw that immediately.
00:13:42Almost all the physicists did.
00:13:49History provides us with a cast of monsters.
00:13:55Hitler was a one-person show.
00:14:13Hitler was the worst
00:14:15that mankind had ever created.
00:14:20The idea that Hitler would have his thousand-year Reich
00:14:23powered with atomic bombs
00:14:26terrified people.
00:14:29particularly those who were Jewish
00:14:31and had escaped
00:14:32what was already beginning
00:14:33to be the Holocaust.
00:14:40And, of course,
00:14:41the United States was not yet at war.
00:14:50This nation will remain a neutral nation.
00:14:56Albert Einstein,
00:14:57the most famous scientist in the world
00:15:00at the time,
00:15:02drafted a letter
00:15:03that would go under Einstein's signature
00:15:06to President Roosevelt.
00:15:10essentially, the letter said that
00:15:12we believe it will be possible
00:15:14in a relatively short time
00:15:15to build weapons
00:15:17of remarkable destructiveness.
00:15:20And we want you to be aware of that
00:15:22and to take action
00:15:23so that we, the Western world,
00:15:26have this weapon first.
00:15:28The fear is a Nazi atomic weapons program.
00:15:33And the sense is
00:15:35that this is a race
00:15:37with Berlin.
00:15:39British scientists,
00:15:41Canadian scientists,
00:15:42and American scientists,
00:15:43they are convinced
00:15:44that smart physicists in Germany
00:15:47are trying to give Adolf Hitler
00:15:49the ultimate weapon
00:15:51to win his war of conquest.
00:15:56When World War II started in Europe,
00:15:59Joseph Stalin was the leader
00:16:00of the Soviet Union,
00:16:01and the Soviets and the Nazis
00:16:04were allies.
00:16:06The Hitler-Stalin pact
00:16:08resulted in the carving up
00:16:10of Eastern Europe.
00:16:11The Soviets gained the Baltic states.
00:16:15They also gained
00:16:17the eastern part of Poland.
00:16:18And they also gained
00:16:20a piece of Romania.
00:16:22And they misunderstood Hitler
00:16:24as much as the Western democracies
00:16:26misunderstood Hitler.
00:16:35In 1941,
00:16:37Hitler betrays
00:16:38his new Soviet allies
00:16:40by invading the Soviet Union.
00:16:44Initially,
00:16:45it looked like the Nazis
00:16:46would beat the Soviets.
00:16:48Soviets were caught by surprise.
00:16:52Stalin actually
00:16:54can't even bring himself
00:16:55to talk publicly
00:16:57to the Soviet people
00:16:58for days.
00:17:00He is so distraught
00:17:02at his own strategic stupidity
00:17:04of trusting Berlin.
00:17:07And the war was not only
00:17:09what was happening in Europe,
00:17:10but also what was happening
00:17:11in Asia.
00:17:13The Japanese sought empire
00:17:15in Asia.
00:17:17They wanted to control China.
00:17:19They ultimately
00:17:20would control Southeast Asia.
00:17:22They would control
00:17:23the Philippines.
00:17:24They even had
00:17:26their sights on India.
00:17:31Hirohito,
00:17:32the Japanese emperor,
00:17:34was the leader.
00:17:37in the US,
00:17:40At the time of Japan,
00:17:41the king was the
00:17:43king of the
00:17:44the court,
00:17:45the civil court,
00:17:45and the
00:17:46king's final
00:17:48leader.
00:17:51At the time,
00:17:52the king was the
00:17:54emperor.
00:17:59And the
00:18:00king of the
00:18:02military ship.
00:18:11In 1940, the Japanese entered an alliance with Berlin and Rome.
00:18:19The Americans mistakenly assumed that the Japanese would never attack a territory of the United States.
00:18:32Some of the committee that was going to plan the Manhattan Project, the program to build the first bombs, met
00:18:38on December 6th, 1941 in Washington and woke up the next morning to Pearl Harbor.
00:19:12It took Pearl Harbor to bring America into the war.
00:19:15Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.
00:19:30The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
00:19:37No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might,
00:19:49will win through to absolute victory.
00:19:56During World War II, we basically have the Axis powers, which are Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan.
00:20:06And the Allies, being the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
00:20:17The United States did assist the Soviet Union by giving them weapons,
00:20:27by coordinating to a certain extent on military campaigns.
00:20:31But the one thing the United States was not going to do was to share its scientific secrets with the
00:20:38Soviet Union, particularly when it came to the Manhattan Project.
00:20:48The Army takes over the Manhattan Project in 1942.
00:20:55That's when General Dick Groves was chosen to run the Manhattan Project.
00:21:05I must endeavor to conduct this program in such a way as to serve the best interests of the United
00:21:14States.
00:21:15Groves was a military engineer.
00:21:18Before the Manhattan Project, he had been in charge of making sure the Pentagon got constructed, so he knew how
00:21:25to do big projects.
00:21:26The Pentagon was the largest office building in the entire world at the time.
00:21:32He's gruff. His number two person described him as the biggest SOB he had ever worked for.
00:21:37He was incredibly arrogant, thought he knew more than everybody.
00:21:42He says, I need this project to have the number one priority of the entire war, formally.
00:21:48And what this means, this high-level priority, is that he can get any resource he wants.
00:21:53He can get any scientist or person he wants.
00:21:57He put together a program that eventually involved a number of sites around the country where uranium would be separated
00:22:06into the rare isotope that chain reacts.
00:22:17Plutonium would be bred in giant graphite-fueled reactors in eastern Washington, where there was plenty of cold water to
00:22:26keep the reactors cool.
00:22:28And where it was far enough away from anywhere that if they blew up, nobody would be killed, except the
00:22:33people who worked there, of course.
00:22:44He put this whole program together and hired some 600,000 people.
00:22:57Groves saw something in Oppenheimer and chose him to direct this laboratory.
00:23:05When they were looking for a place where the bombs themselves would be designed and built, Oppenheimer said, well, let's
00:23:13go look in New Mexico.
00:23:17What?
00:23:18What?
00:23:42Los Angeles became a secret lab cut off from the rest of the world.
00:23:45It was surrounded by barbed wire.
00:23:49People who worked there had to get a special pass to go in.
00:23:54The children who were born in the hospital there were given the post office box address
00:24:00because the location could not be revealed.
00:24:12The people who were there during the war remember it as an amazing place, almost like the Olympian
00:24:21heights of the gods.
00:24:25When you think about what they were doing, it's really kind of ironic.
00:24:28They were working on a weapon, whatever their good intentions that was going to kill a lot
00:24:33of people.
00:24:34It would really be its only use.
00:24:36But they knew that they were working on something that if the Germans got it first would destroy
00:24:41the world.
00:24:43The task of defeating Hitler may be long and arduous.
00:24:48There are a few appeasers and Nazi sympathizers who say that it cannot be done.
00:24:55They even asked me to negotiate with Hitler, to pray for crumbs from his victorious table.
00:25:05This cross I have rejected and I will reject it again.
00:25:14Franklin Roosevelt began the atomic weapons program.
00:25:23He expected to live long enough to decide whether or not to use atomic weapons.
00:25:44We'll never know if he would have dropped bombs on anyone.
00:25:50He dies in April of 1945.
00:26:16His vice president, Harry S. Truman, knows nothing about the Manhattan Project.
00:26:23So that there can be no possible misunderstanding, both Germany and Japan can be certain beyond
00:26:32any shadow of a doubt that America will continue to fight for freedom until no vestige of resistance remains.
00:26:42It was about ten days afterwards that the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, thought it was time that the new
00:26:48president should know about the bomb.
00:27:00Stimson's memo is all about the diplomatic questions raised by the Manhattan Project.
00:27:04What is the world going to look like after an atomic bomb is used?
00:27:08He's trying to impress upon Truman, this is not just a weapon.
00:27:12This is the most important turning point of the human race.
00:27:271945, military progress in Europe was edging further than scientific progress on the bomb.
00:27:37The British, the American and the Red Armies begin the last battles with a common front in a broken and
00:27:43dismembered Germany.
00:27:47Hitler was largely alone, shaking in his bunker.
00:27:55In 1945, that man shot himself after killing his wife.
00:28:05The threat posed by Adolf Hitler was over, though Nazi ideology did not sadly disappear.
00:28:16German men and women, soldiers of the German army.
00:28:24Our leader, Adolf Hitler, fell.
00:28:37Much remains to be done.
00:28:39The victory won in the West must now be won in the East.
00:28:45The whole world must be cleansed of the evil from which half the world has been freed.
00:29:01The question then became, how do we secure a victory against Japan?
00:29:06And there was a great deal of concern that the war against Japan could last for months, if not years,
00:29:13beyond the defeat of Germany.
00:29:19Even after Pearl Harbor and the rage and the shock that that event brought,
00:29:26you know, the U.S. government still had to galvanize public opinion to involve it in another world war.
00:29:39There was still the enormous task of making Americans hate the Japanese enough to fight them in the way that
00:29:47they needed to be fought for defeat.
00:29:49There was an enormous information and propaganda campaign to portray the Japanese in a certain way.
00:29:59You say you can destroy us by outfighting.
00:30:02You cannot.
00:30:04You cannot outfight us because the path ahead of you lies straight up the steep and rocky mountain of Japan.
00:30:11I live a slippery with blood.
00:30:13You are blood.
00:30:15And there was, you know, a heavy racial overtone to it.
00:30:20I mean, Germans, when they were depicted, they were sinister enemies.
00:30:24They were, you know, to be killed, they were targets, but they were still seen as icy human beings.
00:30:31But the Japanese were often portrayed almost as a subspecies.
00:30:35There really is a sense for the American public that the Japanese are subhumans.
00:30:42There can be no peace in the world until the military power of Japan is destroyed.
00:30:59The American public of Japan in the world and the Japanese are outfrored.
00:31:18There was a firebombing raid on Tokyo, March 9th and 10th, 1945.
00:31:50It killed 87,000 people.
00:32:04And it was just horrendous.
00:32:09Bomber pilots eviscerated 16 square miles of Tokyo in one night air raid.
00:32:22Japanese civilians were being killed.
00:32:29People burned like matchsticks.
00:32:34They tried to flee to rivers, and the rivers caught on fire.
00:32:40But there was no sign yet that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
00:32:50And then the Battle of Okinawa happens.
00:33:13The Battle of Okinawa ended on June the 22nd.
00:33:17And Okinawa was an extraordinarily costly battle for American troops and American ships and American sailors.
00:33:26We lost something like 12,000 men at Okinawa.
00:33:33They lost about 200,000.
00:33:36It was a terrible bloody slaughter the closer we got to the home islands.
00:33:41And there was great concern in the military that we would have to invade the home island of Japan.
00:33:49We're going to destroy Japan's armies, Japan's navy, Japan's air forces, Japan's war factors, Japan's whole power to wage war.
00:34:01After Okinawa, it became even more clear that we needed to find a way to end a war without an
00:34:06invasion.
00:34:10Truman faced the responsibility for finding a way to end a war against Japan on American terms at the lowest
00:34:17possible cost in American lives.
00:34:2165 million people killed in the Second World War.
00:34:26The worst war in human history.
00:34:29Anything that would end such a war, you can see why people thought of it as a deliverance.
00:34:47At the moment when the U.S. military was making plans for the invasion of the home islands,
00:34:54the scientists at the Manhattan Project said,
00:34:57we're about to test this idea.
00:35:02Because implosion was such a new technology,
00:35:07nobody really quite knew how all this would work.
00:35:10It was clear that they had to test it before they used it in the military.
00:35:21In order to test the bomb, you had to find a place that was remote.
00:35:28Where the bomb could go off and you could have some plausible deniability is to tell people what it was.
00:35:40We didn't want the radioactive fallout to be going down toward a populated area.
00:35:45So they looked around and they decided that Alamogordo,
00:35:49what is now the White Sands Test Area out in the New Mexican Desert,
00:35:53would be the best place to do it.
00:35:55This test was scheduled for the morning of July 16, 1945.
00:36:11They didn't want to stir up a bunch of dirt and make it radioactive,
00:36:14so they put the bomb up on top of a tower a hundred feet high.
00:36:31It was just the innards of the weapon, a tangle of cables and wires.
00:36:36They didn't have the radar on it and all the other, the tail and so forth.
00:36:42This assembly was put in a little tin corrugated iron cabin up on top of a steel tower.
00:36:50And one of the scientists was delegated to sit with it all night after it had been completely put together.
00:36:56There was a storm front that was passing through.
00:36:59That made him a little nervous because he thought, well, if lightning hits this tower, I'm dead.
00:37:04Bomb goes off and I'm vaporized.
00:37:11Fortunately, the rain stopped about 4 a.m. and sky cleared.
00:37:19The scientists had come down from Los Alamos in large numbers.
00:37:25All the scientists who had worked at Los Alamos wanted to be at Trinity to see the results of their
00:37:31labor.
00:37:31There was, like, quite a whole delegation out there.
00:37:36Scientists were on a hillside about 20 miles away.
00:37:41There were some big, massive bunkers buried in the ground almost 10,000 yards away.
00:37:50One of the concerns was, would the bomb have a higher than anticipated mushroom cloud?
00:37:57Would it carry contaminated fallout throughout populated parts of the country?
00:38:04For them, it was a real possibility, but they tested it anyway.
00:38:09Five, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, go.
00:38:51We knew the world would not be the same.
00:38:53A few people laughed.
00:38:56A few people cried.
00:38:59Most people were silent.
00:39:04I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu.
00:39:14Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
00:39:21I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
00:39:36People jumped up and started looking at it.
00:39:48There was a general sense of real relief because this technology that they had invented in a period of about
00:39:56eight months, this brand new technology, had worked.
00:40:07It was thought that the area surrounding the Trinity test site was largely uninhabited.
00:40:14But in reality, nearly half a million people lived in New Mexico, Texas and Mexico within 150 mile radius of
00:40:22the Trinity test site in 1945.
00:40:26About 40 miles away is a camp, a girls dance camp.
00:40:30About 10 girls who were about 13 years old are fast asleep in their bunks.
00:40:36Suddenly, boom, an enormous explosion shakes their bunkhouse and throws the girls out of their bunks.
00:40:43They and their dance instructor run outside.
00:40:46And one of them later recalled that the sky was just painful to look at.
00:40:50It was so bright.
00:40:51And she said, quote, it was as if the sun came up tremendous.
00:41:00And then a few hours later, these girls look up and there's white ash falling from the sky.
00:41:06And they think that it's snow.
00:41:11So they put on their bathing suits and they go to a local stream to play in the snow.
00:41:15And they're pressing it into their faces, they recalled.
00:41:18And they said, it's hot instead of cold.
00:41:20Why is this snow hot?
00:41:21And that in their reasoning, they said it's hot because it's summer.
00:41:25And only one of them survived to 30.
00:41:30New Mexicans had not been told ahead of time that the test would take place.
00:41:34They were not evacuated ahead of time, nor were they evacuated or told afterwards.
00:41:39In fact, the government put out a press report that a munitions dump had exploded nearby.
00:41:45And that's what these people had experienced.
00:41:48It didn't do much to explain why the snow was falling from the sky or why all their family pets
00:41:55were dying all of a sudden.
00:41:56Or their livestock was starting to turn white in patches.
00:42:02The blast in the Trinity test literally turned the sand into green glass.
00:42:27Truman got news that this test had been successful during the Potsdam conference.
00:42:47Truman and Stalin and Churchill were trying to work out what the balance of power was going to be among
00:42:53the allies who were expecting to win the war.
00:42:57The big three meetings are held in Kaiser Wilhelm's former palace.
00:43:01Here the fate of Germany and the end of Japanese aggression will be settled.
00:43:07They are meeting the Soviets for the first time, Truman and Simpson.
00:43:11Truman is meeting Stalin in person.
00:43:16The West certainly didn't understand whom they were dealing with when it comes to Stalin.
00:43:23He had a lot of charisma.
00:43:26He made a good impression on people when he wanted to make that impression.
00:43:31It was at this historic conference that the dividing of Germany into four zones of occupation took place.
00:43:38The American officials are very distressed at Potsdam because they're starting to realize that the world is being divided up
00:43:46in a way that they didn't quite anticipate.
00:43:48That these allies, who were always sort of enemies of my enemy, were actually quite paranoid and expansionist and hard
00:43:56to trust.
00:43:57It was becoming clear that once the Soviets took over territory, they essentially kept the territory.
00:44:04The Russians were going to enter the war against the Japanese on the 15th of August.
00:44:10And Truman was hoping that he could get the war over with before Stalin entered the war in the East
00:44:17so that Japan wouldn't be divided the way Germany was going to be divided.
00:44:26Truman was notified about the test of the plutonium bomb at Alamogordo and how powerful it was and how it
00:44:34exceeded expectations.
00:44:36And that was great news for Truman because he thought it might help him in his negotiations with Stalin.
00:44:45And so one question that came up was, so do we tell Stalin about the bomb?
00:44:57The recommendation to Truman was tell Stalin it would be important for the two of them to discuss how the
00:45:05bomb should become somehow an instrument of peace rather than of war.
00:45:11But Truman ignored that advice.
00:45:13Truman was very bucked up by the news of the successful test.
00:45:18And Churchill waxed eloquent about it, saying, now we can tell the Russians where to get off.
00:45:26Truman went over to Stalin and said, we have a weapon of unusual destructive force.
00:45:34Stalin said nothing, just nodded.
00:45:38And that was the only official exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
00:45:52Even while we celebrate victory in Europe, British and American chiefs of staff plan strategy for victory in Japan.
00:45:58And their heads of government prepare an ultimatum to the people of Japan.
00:46:03Truman sought unconditional surrender from Japan.
00:46:08We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim unconditional surrender.
00:46:13The alternative is prompt and utter destruction.
00:46:17The Japanese didn't want to surrender, and they certainly didn't want to surrender unconditionally because they feared that that would
00:46:25mean the end of the empire and that the emperor would be forced to abdicate.
00:46:34There was a division within the Japanese government between those who wanted to seek peace as long as the emperor
00:46:39could remain on his throne and those who wanted to fight on for as long as possible in order to
00:46:44hopefully get better surrender terms.
00:46:46And there was in fact paralysis within the Japanese government about what to do.
00:46:54My grandfather, Shigenori Togo, was foreign minister of Japan.
00:47:01Throughout the beginning of Eastenia, until the very end, he had only one motive.
00:47:06Avoid unconditional surrender.
00:47:09Because if you agree to unconditional surrender, Togo might run the risk of the fate of the imperial family becoming
00:47:18dubious.
00:47:20That he couldn't.
00:47:25There is a group, the conflicting opinions inside the government, also inside the military groups that it's better to fight
00:47:35till the end, till the death.
00:47:39On the other hand, there is a rational people that said we faced such casualty, it's time to end the
00:47:47war.
00:47:48When the post-armament declaration reached Togo, 26th of July, the hardliners in the military said that this is not
00:47:57good.
00:47:59We should make the world know that the post-armament is not acceptable.
00:48:06We were really angry at the Japanese for not surrendering when we knew they had been defeated.
00:48:13The hatred between the United States and Japan was unparalleled.
00:48:25I was born in Los Angeles.
00:48:29In 1940, we went to Japan to visit our alien grandparents.
00:48:35My parents had to go back to the state because they still had some business there.
00:48:42They left my older brother and me in care of my grandparents.
00:48:51Here we were in the middle of Hiroshima, living with our grandparents.
00:49:00And then before my parents could come back for us, the war started.
00:49:08And we were in the middle of Hiroshima for the duration of the war.
00:49:21More than 100,000 men, women and children, all of Japanese ancestry, removed from their homes in the Pacific Coast
00:49:28state.
00:49:29Two thirds of the evacuees are American citizens by right of birth.
00:49:35Shortly after they returned to the United States, my parents were sent to a concentration camp along with 120,000
00:49:43other Japanese Americans.
00:49:45There were 10 of them, I believe, all together scattered around the United States.
00:49:51They suffered tremendously in the camp.
00:49:54I mean, they lost everything.
00:49:56Can you imagine somebody telling you, you have to get out of your house.
00:50:01You got two suitcases full of things you could carry with you.
00:50:05And the police were in the concentration camp for three, four years.
00:50:10The entire community bounded by a wire pin and guarded by military police.
00:50:16Symbols of the military nature of the evacuation.
00:50:22Maybe somebody would have said, well, you know, maybe it's not right to use a weapon as powerful against a
00:50:28civilian population if we'd had it against Germany.
00:50:36But the racial factor against Japan, I think, prevented any real second thoughts.
00:50:43It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July the 26th was issued at
00:50:51Potsdam.
00:50:53Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum.
00:50:57If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like
00:51:04of which has never been seen on this earth.
00:51:08Here we have a bomb more powerful than anything ever before developed.
00:51:12If it worked the way scientists thought it would work, if in fact an atomic bomb could wipe out a
00:51:20city with one bomb,
00:51:22hopefully the shock of that would finally be enough to convince the Japanese government that it was time to surrender.
00:51:31Also, the Red Army was coming into Manchuria.
00:51:36It's very clear that the American policymakers were rushing to get the war over with before the Russians came in.
00:51:43We didn't want them to get very far into Manchuria.
00:51:45We certainly didn't want them in Japan.
00:51:48Leslie Groves had been charged with creating the atomic bomb and getting it ready for wartime use.
00:51:55And he pursued this with relentless determination.
00:52:00And by mid-July, the first bomb was nearly ready for use.
00:52:11In order to have a good target, a few cities were set aside.
00:52:19You want a city that is going to really have a good before and after picture so that you can
00:52:25show what this weapon is capable of,
00:52:27both to scare the Japanese and to sort of scare the rest of the world about what the power of
00:52:32this thing is.
00:52:33Hiroshima, Nikita, Kokura, and Kyoto were on the list.
00:52:38And Stimson famously vetoed Kyoto because it was kind of the intellectual center of Japan.
00:52:46He insisted that Kyoto be taken off the list.
00:52:51He goes to Truman.
00:52:52And the framing he uses is essentially that Kyoto is a civilian target.
00:52:56Hiroshima is a valid military target.
00:52:59The Japanese will never forgive us if we destroy a major civilian target.
00:53:04He refers to Hiroshima repeatedly as a purely military target.
00:53:09This is not totally correct.
00:53:11Hiroshima, yeah, it has a military base in it, but it's 90% civilians.
00:53:16It's a real city. It's not just a military base.
00:53:20It's not clear Truman understands all this.
00:53:39We woke up early in the morning, morning of August 6th.
00:53:47Put on our school clothes because school was in session.
00:53:51And on the way to school, we were told that the school was canceled that day
00:53:56because enemy aircraft, that would be American aircraft,
00:54:01were still in the area.
00:54:04And they were afraid of, you know, additional bombing.
00:54:10We were 0.8 mile from the Hypo Center, which is considered pretty close.
00:54:31And this was the only-
00:54:33All this was an opportunity for students.
00:54:35This was a great day of the year-old year.
00:54:37And that was a very first year-old year-old year-old year-old year.
00:55:00Oh, my God.
00:55:24My brother, he saw the airplane and the secondary, he saw something was released, a very small, tiny block. That
00:55:33was an atomic bomb.
00:55:36It didn't come down straight. And for a while, it went with the airplane and made a curve and drop.
00:55:45And then he turned back and exploded.
00:56:15There was a flash.
00:56:17Everything I was seeing turned white. Couldn't see anything, no color at all.
00:56:26And then there was a strong brush.
00:56:31I felt like I was like in the tornado or a typhoon.
00:56:43And then unconscious. Everybody became unconscious.
00:56:49And then when I opened my eyes, everywhere was just a problem.
00:57:19I was like, oh, my God.
00:57:21My mother called me and entered into the house.
00:57:25Then the bomb was falling down.
00:57:28If I was outside, it would have died.
00:57:37My mother had a big bed.
00:57:41She had a big bed.
00:57:43She had a large bed.
00:57:43She had a large bed.
00:57:45She had a large bed.
00:58:12I don't recall seeing the flash, nor hear the boom.
00:58:17I was knocked out instantaneously.
00:58:19I was knocked out instantaneously.
00:58:20When I came to the bathhouse, I was on top of me.
00:58:50My body was on top of me.
00:58:54I was on top of me.
00:58:59After the back of my back, I was scared.
00:59:08I had no idea how to do it.
00:59:15I feel like I'm going to get out of here.
00:59:48It was taken to the entire city.
00:59:54The people who were in the air were in the air,
01:00:00and the people who were in the air were in the air.
01:00:15I think it's a great deal.
01:00:18It has been a lot of pain.
01:00:21It has been a lot of pain.
01:00:45We saw the hordes of people from the inner city with tremendous injuries, skins, and
01:00:53the body would be dripping from the bodies.
01:00:57The pattern of clothes would be etched on the bodies.
01:01:05People that were directly exposed to the ray, they would burn so terribly.
01:01:09To get some relief, they would jump into the river only to die.
01:01:21The school was on the right side of the mountain.
01:01:26The school was on the right side of the mountain.
01:01:29The first time it was hit by the mountain.
01:01:33The road came down to the mountain.
01:01:37It turned out to be dark, and then there was a lot of rain that came down, and there was
01:01:42a lot of rain that came down.
01:01:45The rain was suddenly hit, and it turned out to be a little bit of rain.
01:01:54At that time, it was not clear that it was the light of the light of the sun.
01:02:08Then, when I was in the middle of the night, I was looking to see the city from the city,
01:02:14and it was burning in the night, and it was burning in the night, and it was burning in the
01:02:27night, and it was burning.
01:02:30and they have no feeling.
01:02:32With most children,
01:02:36many children,
01:02:36and with their children,
01:02:37they didn't have to go away.
01:02:41There were many people there.
01:02:45The fire was a lot of people
01:02:47and there was a lot of people with the smell.
01:02:49So,
01:02:50that's why,
01:02:52the hot weather,
01:02:54the hot weather,
01:03:1270,000 people died within the first hour.
01:03:17140,000, twice that number,
01:03:21would have died by December of 1945.
01:03:39Three days later, on August 9th, Nagasaki was bombed.
01:04:06The initial target for the second bomb was actually not Nagasaki, it was Kokura.
01:04:12But because of cloud cover, the crew decided that they couldn't drop it on Kokura,
01:04:19so they went to the secondary target.
01:04:21The second bomb's called Fat Man.
01:04:27The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb,
01:04:30and it yielded about 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
01:04:36The Fat Man was a plutonium bomb,
01:04:38and it yielded about 22,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
01:04:45It actually gets dropped on Urakami,
01:04:47which is a district of Nagasaki just north.
01:04:53Urakami, historically, has been the kind of center of the Catholic community in Nagasaki.
01:05:00There were 8,500 Christians killed in the cathedral.
01:05:05There were two priests hearing confessions,
01:05:06and a couple dozen prisoners immediately killed.
01:05:11The cathedral is destroyed.
01:05:17We don't know exactly how many people died in Nagasaki.
01:05:20The most recent estimates, about 80,000.
01:05:24The deaths are calculated as of December 1st,
01:05:28because about 15 or 20 percent died from acute exposure to radiation.
01:05:35When Truman initially hears about the Hiroshima mission,
01:05:38he's thrilled.
01:05:40And he stays unambiguously positive about it
01:05:43until Stimson gives him the first damage reports of Hiroshima.
01:05:50This is unambiguously a city.
01:05:53This is not a military base.
01:05:56Truman had just gotten back from Potsdam,
01:05:58and Stimson came to see him, and he had some photographs of Hiroshima.
01:06:02And he said, as far as we can tell, the bomb killed 100,000 people.
01:06:08Truman was shocked by that.
01:06:11Truman starts to report having these, like, stress headaches
01:06:14and other sort of physiological symptoms of stress and discomfort.
01:06:18He starts describing the atomic bomb from this moment on,
01:06:21not as the greatest thing in history,
01:06:23but as a weapon that should not be used as a regular military weapon of war.
01:06:28It's a real turning point, the learning about these casualties.
01:06:35On August 10, 1945, General Groves sends a memo
01:06:39to the Chief of Staff, General Marshall,
01:06:43and he says, you know, we were planning to have a third bomb on Japan
01:06:47by the end of the month,
01:06:48but we've had some real success in speeding it up,
01:06:51and we're going to be ready to drop that bomb in a week.
01:06:56Truman went to a cabinet meeting, and he said,
01:07:01I have ordered that no further bombs be used
01:07:04without my express authorization.
01:07:06It's literally a scroll on a piece of paper in handwriting,
01:07:10you can't do this without the president's authorization.
01:07:13This is the beginning of presidential control
01:07:16of nuclear use in the United States.
01:07:19I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government
01:07:25in reply to the message forward to that government
01:07:28by the Secretary of State on August 11.
01:07:31I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration,
01:07:37which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.
01:07:45There's a lot of dispute about Truman's motives in using the bomb in Japan.
01:07:52You have the dominant narrative being the bomb ended the war,
01:07:58it saved American lives.
01:07:59The Japanese would not have surrendered without it.
01:08:02It was ultimately a good, right, that was used.
01:08:05But then you had a counter-narrative.
01:08:08We didn't need to use the bomb.
01:08:10Japan would have surrendered.
01:08:12We didn't need a land invasion in order to be victorious.
01:08:20Some have said the atom bomb wasn't the end of World War II,
01:08:23but it was the first strike in the Cold War.
01:08:28Why did they use the bomb?
01:08:29Against two non-military targets, civilian cities.
01:08:32There was very small, tiny little military installations,
01:08:37but they were not military bases.
01:08:40You can't get the precise answer, but you can get pretty close to it.
01:08:45It seemed very clear to policymakers that the war could end
01:08:48so long as you told the Japanese that they could keep their godlike figure
01:08:52in a powerless role.
01:08:55And secondly, the war would end when the Russians came in.
01:08:58That would collapse the politics.
01:09:00That would be the turning point.
01:09:03This is a letter from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
01:09:06to President Truman, July 2, 1945.
01:09:10We have the following enormously favorable factors on our side.
01:09:15Japan has no allies.
01:09:17Her navy is nearly destroyed,
01:09:19and she is vulnerable to a surface and underwater blockade
01:09:23which can deprive her of sufficient food and supplies for her population.
01:09:28He's basically saying that the United States is totally in control of the Japanese war,
01:09:33and that we have capacity to deal with them in any way we want, which is true.
01:09:40So it was not a question of whether the war would go on.
01:09:43It's a brutal question of using the atomic bombs in order to end the war without the Russians.
01:09:48Many American policymakers knew the Japanese couldn't face the great powers when the Russians came in,
01:09:54and that the Russian attack would end the war.
01:09:58They desperately wanted to end the war before the Russians got to Japan,
01:10:01and much better if they could end it before they got very far into Manchuria.
01:10:05So it's a diplomatic and political use at that point in time, and it's a major tragedy.
01:10:11Some would say a war crime.
01:10:13What do you make of this point that we didn't need to have dropped the bombs?
01:10:17You know, I find that truly scurrilous for someone to say all these years later.
01:10:27We didn't know. We didn't know if the bombs would work.
01:10:31We didn't know if they would force the Japanese to surrender.
01:10:35We didn't know if Stalin was going to come in when he came in,
01:10:39or when he would come in, or if he would come in.
01:10:41We didn't know any of that. What we did know was that the Japanese were prepared
01:10:46to sacrifice every one of their human beings who lived on those islands to fight.
01:10:52The closer we got to Japan as we marched up the islands in the South Pacific one by one,
01:10:58the harder they fought.
01:11:00There was no indication that the war was just suddenly going to end.
01:11:04The Japanese were going to say, oh, sorry, time to stop.
01:11:08But it didn't work that way.
01:11:14In the United States, there was overwhelming support for the bombs.
01:11:19Ecstatic support.
01:11:21The vast majority, over 75% of people polled, said that they approved of the use of the bombs.
01:11:27In one poll that was conducted shortly after the bombings, 23% of those polled said that they wished that
01:11:34even more atomic bombs could have been used on Japan before that country had surrendered.
01:11:38That's how strong the feeling of vengeance was.
01:11:43It really wasn't until John Hersey's bombshell reporting in The New Yorker, where The New Yorker gives over an entire
01:11:51issue of the magazine to his first person reporting from Hiroshima,
01:11:57that brings the power and the awful horror of the bomb home to the American public.
01:12:06The Americans really began to reckon with the cost and the horror of what they had unleashed on the world.
01:12:17In the 1946, you're starting to see more voices that go against the Manhattan Project narrative that are starting to
01:12:26say things like, maybe the bombs weren't necessary.
01:12:30A lot of those voices are senior military officials. It's Admiral Leahy. It's General Eisenhower.
01:12:41The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was in some ways a marriage of convenience.
01:12:47And it broke down more quickly, I think, than anyone anticipated.
01:12:54The Soviet Union thought, we won the war with Germany. We occupy half of Europe.
01:13:01Our standing now is great. Our power is so much greater than it was before the war.
01:13:07And then suddenly the bomb comes and introduces a whole new element of uncertainty into the balance of power.
01:13:17So on the 20th of August, so two weeks to the day after Hiroshima, Stalin signs a decree, build the
01:13:26bomb as soon as possible.
01:13:31The invention of nuclear weapons changes everything that comes after it.
01:13:42You begin to see the US and Europe and the Soviet Union lurch towards this idea of a Cold War
01:13:52that's going to pit the two superpowers against each other.
01:13:57The Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in
01:14:05Eastern and Central Europe.
01:14:09The United States is the only country to have ever used an atomic weapon in warfare.
01:14:15These weapons really changed the fate of the 20th century.
01:14:20They changed the nature of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly once the Soviet Union
01:14:27had access to these weapons.
01:14:30They were so big and so destructive that basically they couldn't be used.
01:14:37This is one of the reasons that we think of the Cold War as a Cold War.
01:14:41It could not be hot.
01:14:43For the Cold War to be hot between the two rival powers would have been a suicide pact.
01:14:51So instead, the Cold War was conducted through economic means, through psychological means,
01:15:01and through proxy battlefields across the world to avoid situations in which US and Soviet troops might engage each other
01:15:11directly in a way that might lead to an all-out nuclear war.
01:15:15The calculated pressures of aggressive communism have forced us instead to live in a world of turmoil.
01:15:23I do have in my hand the names of 57 individuals who are either communists who are certainly loyal to
01:15:31the Communist Party.
01:15:35Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
01:15:46I think the driving force that was in us all, that were aware of it, was fear.
01:15:53When you can't control things, fear can ravage you.
01:15:58Or if some raining.
01:16:06Si, you're going to be Janeikov now and see it.
01:16:06What I thought was coming in last.
01:16:16You're going to be doing well, you're going to be playing once again lashing.
01:16:17It's also going to be a good results.
01:16:18Go do карabalog Trade in the Region.
01:16:18To be honest, you're out of place.
01:16:18He was making McM civickinds and genius.
01:16:18You're out of place.
01:16:19It's the purpose of making a coffee smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke.
01:16:19He says it.
01:16:22There's good plans for you.