ST: So Ramsey told you about the possibilities. PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe. ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs? All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. ST: Did Oppenheimer tell you about the destructive nature of the bomb?
The whole interview is here, but these are my favorite excerpts: The late, great writer Studs Terkel interviewed the pilot of the Enola Gay (named for the pilot's mother), which dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. It's a subject fraught with emotions and politics, such that the only people really qualified to weigh in were those who were there. The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 - and, by most accounts, ended World War II - are nothing if not controversial.
