Google Earth & The Trinity Site
If you did not have a chance to go the Trinity Site for the twice yearly open house, here is the location on Google Earth. They recently updated the imagery of the region and you can clearly see the test site. The imagery has not made it way over to the Google Maps website, yet. Here is the kmz file with it's location.Labels: Google Earth, Map, Trinity
Book Review: Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima
Written by BBC filmmaker Stephen Walker, who won an Emmy for his documentary on the bombing of Hiroshima, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima is a fast paced engaging book about the period of time from the Trinity Test through the events of August 6th. The story is told from many points of view-from the eyes of the pilots, the victims, the scientists and world leaders. The book begins in the New Mexico desert, as the first atomic bomb is detonated. With this success, the wheels begin to turn toward the first atomic attacks on Japan.
Shockwave is a tightly written book that gives the reader a sense of the tension that was felt by the scientists at Los Alamos, at the top-secret airbase on the island of Tinian, and Potsdam-where Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were meeting to decide Japan's fate. Walker also takes us to Hiroshima before that fateful day, where he introduces us to several residents, including; a soldier named Toshiaki Tanaka, Taeko Nakamae, a female soldier, and a doctor named Shuntaro Hida. We are also taken to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, where Walker depicts a Japanese leadership torn by a division between those determined to fight to the last child and a peace faction that made overtures to the Soviet Union to convince America to drop its demand for unconditional surrender.
In the predawn hours of August 6th, a B-29, named for the pilot's mother, leaves Tinian Island, some 1,500 miles from Japan. In its bomb bay is the atomic bomb, dubbed "Little Boy". The target is the untouched city of Hiroshima. With these events, the book turns to the stories of the residents and of the Japanese government. Walker recounts Toshiaki Tanaka’s efforts to locate his wife and child. After locating a neighbor, recognizable only by a telltale belt buckle he had worn, Tanaka saw "two figures, like charcoal sticks, fused together on the ground, facing what was once the doorway [to the family-owned liquor store]." He knew that this was his wife and baby daughter.
Although, some readers may draw comparisons to John Hersey's classic, Hiroshima, this book is a rich and moving account of the end of a race of technological discovery and its impact on the world.
Labels: hiroshima, Trinity, World War II
