Argumentative Essay: America's First Atomic Bomb

It was a nice Monday morning in the beautiful city of Hiroshima, Japan. Children were off to school, their parents off to work, and there was the usual buzz of a lighthearted city. Little did these people know, that in just a matter of minutes, they, if they were lucky enough to survive, would look upon their homeland and see a devastating land of ruin and loss. (“The Manhattan Project). On that Monday morning, August 6, 1945, in an effort to expedite the end of World War II, the United States had released the most destructive weapon the world had ever seen. “Little Boy,” as it was called in the labs, better known by the public as the first atomic bomb, brought an unforeseeable amount of mass destruction to Japan, “killing tens of thousands

This “victory” over Japan brought a whole new level of patriotism and national pride. The fact that the United States was the first to successfully produce and release this super weapon seemed to spike the American ego. President Truman’s announcement, which came approximately sixteen hours after the bombing, celebrated the triumph and success of all the people who had played a part in creating this war-changing bomb (“Text of Truman”). He announced that the United States had won the “Battle of the Laboratories,” meaning that not only did America have the greatest military, but it also had the smartest scientists (qtd. in “Text of Truman”). Truman continued to boast that “We (the United States) have spent $2,000,000,000 on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won” (qtd. in “Text of Truman”). This made the American people feel like nothing could defeat them. If they could overcome the risks and obstacles that came with creating this bomb, then nothing could hold them

It has been a slow and lengthy process (“The Lesson of Hiroshima”). In 1945, “there were no television cameras to bring into the world’s living rooms a picture of what radiation poisoning did to people” (“The Lesson of Hiroshima”). The general public could not possibly fathom the horrific events that took place in Hiroshima. In an announcement just a few days after the attack, the Ward Department said that, due to the “‘impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke’… it was impossible to make an immediate assessment of the damage” (“Jap City Blasted”). The only stories of how bad the radiation poisoning was in Japan came from Tokyo (“The Lesson of Hiroshima”). Americans did not believe these reports, and disregarded them as lies because of their lack of trust for the Japanese government. On top of this, American scientists, such as Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had actually worked on the bomb, “denied the likelihood of any such after-effects from the bomb blast as the Japanese broadcasts talked about” (“Japanese Stress Hiroshima”). Americans were much more willing to accept the expert advice from a fellow American rather than from a foreign enemy. What’s more, deaths from radiation poisoning were not immediate. Thousands of people died within several months of exposure, and many more later died from cancer that was caused by the radiation (The Manhattan Project). The world did not have all the information