Powerful and moving but is it accurate?
Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the biggest part of the Manhattan Project took place at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and in the early reactors where uranium was used to produce plutonium for the more “deliverable” bomb, the weapon that really started the Cold War.
I am very ambivalent about the Manhattan Project - we now know that Germany was indeed working on a bomb and that Stalin wanted to surround Berlin to ensure he got the German research labs, scientists and hopefully the uranium, and it’s possible that my father (who was out there, a naval officer trained in combined ops) would have been involved in any invasion of Japan. But testing the plutonium bomb reminds me of von Thoma’s comment - that once a war is lost the death of any civilian is unnecessary.
But what I’ve read here suggests that this is not the creation story of the atom bomb - except perhaps in the sense of a creation myth. If there is one thing I think we should have learned is that mythologising wars, their personnel and the surrounding events is a bad thing. Children should learn the truth.
