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The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the twinned events which led to the conclusion of the Pacific War.
It saw the United States of America drop Earth's first nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as launch an aborted attempt on Kyoto, in the hopes of forcing Japan to surrender. It proved successful and the Japanese capitulated, leading to the official end of World War II.
The unleashing of nuclear weapons cast a shadow over the rest of the 20th century, as the Cold War set in.
The unprecedented scale of the bombing also caused it to become the focus of much controversy. Debate persisted for decades about whether the bombing was justified.
History
Foreseeing
In the 17th century, during Japan's long period of isolation, Asami of Clan Rikushira used "Gaijin" technology to read the mind of Izzy Sinclair in order to learn about the future. Izzy's memories revealed the fate of Hiroshima and the defeat of Japan, a revelation which drove Asami to madness. She vowed to wipe out the "treachery of the West" and change the future before the Eighth Doctor convinced the Gaijin to stop her. (COMIC: The Road to Hell)
Origin
The United States was brought into the Second World War by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. (PROSE: Only Connect) Committed to a war with the forces of Japanese Empire throughout the Pacific Ocean, (PROSE: Endgame) the US also joined the ongoing fight against Japan's primary ally in Europe, Nazi Germany. The US and Germany became locked in a "close-run" race to be the first to develop nuclear weapons. (AUDIO: Colditz) Germany surrendered on 9 May 1945. (PROSE: Just War, AUDIO: Just War)
Aided by the United Kingdom and scientists from several other nations, (PROSE: Endgame) the US continued development on the Manhattan Project, led by Professor Robert Oppenheimer. On Monday, 16 July 1945, the successful Trinity detonation in the Jornada del Muertro desert signalled the completion of the project. (PROSE: Atom Bomb Blues)
The deployment debate
After the defeat of the Third Reich, the Allies became confident that Japan would eventually follow suit as the Americans and Australians, with token assistance from the British, continued to force them out of their Pacific strongholds. (AUDIO: Churchill Victorious)
However, Allied leaders remained worried about the willingness of the Japanese to hold out. As casualties on both sides of the conflict continued to mount even with an end in sight, some Allied assessments estimated that the war could be extended for another five years if the situation was allowed to continue unchanged. The new atomic bomb offered a potential alternative to clearing the devoted Japanese garrisons off each of their occupied Pacific islands in traditional pitched battles. Despite this, some of the scientists who worked on the bomb were opposed to its use and argued that it should only be deployed on an uninhabited island as a show of force to compel the Japanese to surrender. Other Allied commanders feared this would not be enough.
The decision fell to Harry S. Truman, who became President of the United States after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Informed by his advisers that only a direct order from the Japanese Emperor would convince Japan's armed forces to surrender, Truman decided that the atomic bomb should be deployed against Japanese cities. (PROSE: Endgame)
The bomb runs
Three bombs were developed assigned Japanese cities as targets: Big Momma, Little Boy and Fat Man, although the first of these would become unknown to history.
Kyoto
On 5 August 1945, the Sky Jack took off from Iwo Jima and headed northwards towards Japan on a top secret mission to drop the first bomb, Big Momma, on Kyoto. Despite the secrecy, the Sky Jack was spotted by Japanese Zeros and attacked. All but three members of the crew were killed and the aircraft began rapidly losing fuel at a rate which meant it was not possible to reach Kyoto. The crew's only hope of survival was to reach the Ogasawara Islands but doing so risked the Japanese discovering the existence of the atomic bomb and potentially capturing it for their own use. Captain Lasseter ordered the pay load to be dropped into the ocean and hoped that the other two bombs would be more successful. Before the crew could dispense with the bomb, the Sky Jack suddenly fell into a black hole, where the crew spent three years before the Eleventh Doctor returned them home. Kyoto was spared and the details of Big Momma and the bomb run would remain a secret. (COMIC: Sky Jacks)
Hiroshima
The second bomb, Little Boy, was designated the target of Hiroshima. The bomb run was successful and the bomb obliterated the city. The destructive power of Little Boy was roughly the equivalent of 13,000 tons of TNT. At least 100,000 Japanese men, women, children and babies burned to death. (PROSE: Endgame) Some people were incinerated, leaving behind nothing more than a silhouette burned onto walls. (PROSE: Amorality Tale) The Doctor, in one of his first three incarnations, saw the bright pulsating image of the bomb's energy imprint on the TARDIS scanner. (PROSE: The Heat-Seekers)
Nagasaki
Four days later, the Americans dropped Fat Man, an even more powerful plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki. (PROSE: Endgame) The city was also flattened. (COMIC: 4-Dimensional Vistas) Approximately 150,000 more people were killed by the Nagasaki bomb, bringing the total number of dead to a quarter of a million Japanese civilians. (COMIC: Sky Jacks) Further deaths among people from both cities occurred later as a result of radiation poisoning. (PROSE: Endgame)
Result
The destruction of the two cities ultimately convinced Japan's rulers of the need to surrender. The Japanese Emperor was forced to give the order to do so. (COMIC: The Road to Hell) Japan surrendered to the Americans (PROSE: Log 384) on 2 September 1945, ending the Pacific War (COMIC: Sky Jacks) and thus fully bringing World War II to its formal conclusion. (PROSE: Base of Operations) The date became celebrated as VJ Day (PROSE: Deadly Reunion) or Victory in the Pacific Day. The Allies celebrated the occasion with what the Eleventh Doctor described as "one hell of a victory party." (COMIC: Sky Jacks)
Aftermath and legacy
Japan subdued
With the cessation of hostilities, American troops landed in China to deal with the Japanese troops that had been fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese attempted to destroy all evidence of their human experimentation carried out by Unit 731 and Zhong Ma Fortress before it. The Americans quickly discovered the truth, but through an agreement intended to keep the research out of the hands of the Russians, many of the perpetrators were exonerated. (PROSE: Log 384)
The bombing and subsequent surrender led to Japan becoming humbled as a nation. (COMIC: The Road to Hell) The flag of the blood-red sun, under which the Japanese Empire achieved much of its conquests, (PROSE: The Shadow of Weng-Chiang) was replaced by the post-war flag, a simple white flag with a red circle in the centre. (PROSE: Atom Bomb Blues) The damage was already done in China, however, and the Kuomintang had lost the country to the Communists by 1951. (PROSE: Endgame)
The world post-Hiroshima
Earth historians acknowledged that the atomic bomb changed the world. (PROSE: A History of Humankind) The US enjoyed a monopoly on atomic weaponry for four years but its secrets were eventually betrayed to the Soviet Union by some of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project. The Soviets developed their own bomb in 1949. (PROSE: Endgame) The resulting Soviet nuclear programme led to the nuclear stand-off which characterised the Cold War, a fragile stalemate maintained by the ever-present threat of mutually assured destruction. (TV: Cold War)
Both the East and the West realised the danger of a Third World War fought with nuclear weapons. A secret organisation known as "Tightrope" brought together spies from both sides to de-escalate tensions as they arose. By 1951, the world situation cooled as the new status quo set in. (PROSE: Endgame) Nevertheless, both sides persisted with programmed of nuclear proliferation. The US effort was aided by the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, who was deeply embarrassed when the Manhattan Project ended successfully and proved many of his theories and calculations wrong. Highly resentful of Oppenheimer, Teller's ideology completely flipped and he became one of America's most ardent proponents of nuclear proliferation and came to be known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb". (PROSE: Atom Bomb Blues)
The harnessing of the power of the atom also heralded the dawn of the nuclear age. The prospect of cheap and efficient nuclear power was met with much optimism in the immediate post-war period. By the 1970s, however, Jo Grant opined that this had been wishful thinking. She looked to the nuclear power plant of Durlston Heath as an example, as it housed an expensive and obsolete reactor which was likely to be decommissioned. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
Despite a number of scares throughout the remainder of the 20th century, the Cold War remained cold and nuclear weapons were never again deployed in anger. (TV: The Mind of Evil, Day of the Daleks, Robot, Cold War, PROSE: Deadly Reunion, Endgame, AUDIO: The Mega, Storm of the Horofax, et al.) By the 1990s, the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. (AUDIO: Protect and Survive, PROSE: Invasion of the Cat-People)
Sarah Jane Smith found reports on every nuclear incident to have occurred on Earth since Hiroshima in Gregory Arkady's office in Tahkail, Russia on 25 April 2086. (COMIC: Black Destiny) In one of Earth's possible timelines, the ruins of one city reminded Sarah of Hiroshima. (PROSE: Categorical Imperative)
Controversy
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained a topic of intense and impassioned debate for decades after the war, questioning whether or not the act was justified as a means of bringing the war to an end.
Those who fought in the war believed it was necessary. Captain Lasseter, the commander of the Sky Jack on the Kyoto bomb run, objected to the Eleventh Doctor's description of the bombing as "needless". (COMIC: Sky Jacks) Likewise, a veteran of the Pacific theatre, Kent Howard, was convinced that nothing less could have been done to subdue the barbarity and viciousness of the Japanese, and he vociferously defended the decision when the Eighth Doctor expressed his own distaste. (PROSE: Endgame)
The counterculture movement of the post-war generation disagreed. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Harold Macmillan in Britain and Charles de Gaulle in France began to develop nuclear programmed in their own countries, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) sprang up in opposition. Some of their membership went so far as to express the view that a prolonged war against Japan would have been preferable if it meant nuclear weapons were never created. (PROSE: Come Friendly Bombs...)
The Doctor's stance was not as clear-cut, although he was often very consistent in his opposition to the bombing itself. As above, his eighth and eleventh incarnations voiced their disapproval, but to put their opinions in context, the former was suffering from amnesia, and was told the history of the bombing by Kim Philby, the British agent in MI6 who was actually working on behalf of the Soviet Union. (PROSE: Endgame) The latter believed he had destroyed his own people in the Last Great Time War with another super weapon, an act which he regretted, and drew comparisons with the US attempts to end the war with Japan. (COMIC: Sky Jacks)
Even so, these attitudes were largely unchanged from those of the Seventh Doctor, who compared the suffering unleashed at Hiroshima with that experienced at Auschwitz, Kwai, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Bombing of Dresden and the Blitz on Coventry. He called all of these "crimes against the universe itself." (PROSE: Just War) He also expressed revulsion for the fate of Hiroshima on numerous other occasions. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus, Atom Bomb Blues) The Fifth Doctor likewise mentioned the destruction of the cities with some disgust. (COMIC: 4-Dimensional Vistas)
Yet, as demonstrated by the actions of his third incarnation, the Doctor was not entirely opposed to the existence of the atomic bomb. In March 1943, he secretly made slight alterations to the Manhattan Project which were intended to keep it on course. He confided in Jo Grant, as she herself became caught up in the protests of the CND, that he believed there were times in human history where their possession of nuclear weapons would become necessary in order for humanity to defend itself from external threats. He felt that as long as human morality progressed in time with human technology, then the invention of nuclear weapons was no more a blight on human history than the invention of more primitive weapons such as the knife or the firearm. (PROSE: Come Friendly Bombs...) He had previously expressed these same hopes in the first incarnation. (AUDIO: Out of the Deep)
Alternate timelines
In one alternate timeline created after the Seventh Doctor and Ace arrived at Colditz Castle in October 1944, Ace's Walkman fell into German hands. The anachronistic laser technology gave them the edge required to create the atomic bomb before the United States. Atomic bombs were instead dropped on New York City and Moscow. The US and the Soviet Union surrendered and the Axis won the war. The timeline was only averted after the Seventh Doctor and his alternate eighth incarnation manipulated Elizabeth Klein into travelling back in time to 1944 so the initial alteration could be prevented. (AUDIO: Colditz, Klein's Story)
In one of many alternate Earths created by the Monk and the Ice Warriors, the bombs were never dropped. Consequently, the Pacific War was still ongoing as late as 25 July 1963. (COMIC: 4-Dimensional Vistas)
Parallel universes
Chapel of the Red Apocalypse
In one parallel universe in which the war played out largely similarly to how it did in N-Space, time-travelling, dimension-hopping Japanese-American doomsday cultists from the 21st century of the Doctor's reality tried to hijack the Manhattan Project in a bid to destroy the universe. With a plan the Seventh Doctor thought absurd, the cult, based in the Chapel of the Red Apocalypse, intended the destruction of the universe to be so great that it would reverberate throughout the multiverse and alter every other timeline into one in which the Japanese Empire emerged victorious in the war.
The Doctor foiled their schemes by influencing slight alterations to the timeline of the Trinity detonation, having it delayed a day to Tuesday, 17 July 1945. Unaware of the chance, the cultists struck too early and exposed themselves, after which they were either killed or fled. The Doctor doubted their plan would ever have succeeded but he took the effort to thwart them just to be certain. (PROSE: Atom Bomb Blues)
Germania
Across the Known Worlds of Germania, a collection of parallel universes in which the Nazis won the war, the atomic bomb was largely developed by Germany before the US.
In Germania I, the Terra Optimus, where Nazi Germany reached its highest potential, the Germans invaded Britain. Hull and Coventry were both destroyed by atomic bombs.
In Germania LD, the Germans likewise invaded Britain in 1940 and fought their way into the Midlands. Eventually, they dropped the bomb on Hull and threatened to drop a second on Coventry before the British surrendered.
In Germania LXVIII, Adolf Hitler was a communist who became allies with Russia. When the Greater German Reich dethroned him, an atom bomb was dropped on Stalingrad despite Germany's standing alliance. With Germania I leading the Greater German Reich, atomic weaponry was exported to other Germanias
In other worlds, Japan's war was successful, either through the spreading of her influence across Asia or through the join conquest of the US with Germany.
In another world, Germany became the main superpower rivalling the US during the Cold War and it was these two nations that had a nuclear standoff.
During the Second Time Front, August Hitler suggested the dropping of a bomb on one Germania's London. Although held by the Nazis, it was invaded by the Roman forces of the Empire of Empires. London's destruction wiped out the first wave of the Roman Expeditionary Force.
Ultimately, the Greater German Reich was defeated by the Empire of Empires, with Germania I formally surrendering on 10 May 1970. The conquered Germanias came under the jurisdiction of the Empire, governed by their Roma counterparts. (PROSE: Warlords of Utopia)
Behind the scenes
- Contrary to the fictional depiction of events in Sky Jacks, in the real world, Kyoto was ultimately rejected as a potential target for one of the bombs owing to its cultural importance.
- The atomic bombings are usually referred to in-universe simply by the names of the cities, "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki". Hiroshima is more commonly referred to than Nagasaki, with Timewyrm: Exodus and Just War mentioning the former but not the latter, even though in context, they use Hiroshima to represent the bombings as a whole. Atom Bomb Blues seems to acknowledge this by having Ace remark that many people, including herself, tend to forget the name of the second city.
- The BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel, The Final Sanction, contains many parallels with the atomic bombings. The novel explores the moral dilemma faced by the humans as they consider whether or not to deploy the apocalyptic G-bomb against Ockora in order to end the war against the aggressive Selachians.