Walker talks about his boom shockwave. The story begins with the first atomic bomb in new mexico on july 16th, 1945. And documents key events leading up to the august 6th, 1945 bombing. Which the author then tribes in detail. Thanks very much. You can hear me i hope. Thank you for coming on actually the most wonderful evening in this glorious city, which my daughter has pleatly fallen in love with. And her first visit here. Its such a lovely evening. Its great you could come here and listen to Horror Stories about the atomic bomb. I want to talk to you from the heart about what this book is and what it means to me and the journey i have taken over the last two and a half years since i started the documentary. I was asked to make this documentary in april, 2003, by a friend of mine who i do everything to resist the offer to make this film. Not because the money was appalling, which was, but this is a terrifyingly difficult and complex and frightening and challenging subject to have to tackle. Youre dealing with one of the events in world history. And yet, actually, what happened in my case was the thought buzzed around in my brain and it wouldnt go away. It didnt go away and finally almost reluctantly i accepted this offer and started to make a film. The film i made really was exactly was described as a 24hour story. It was a story that starts at 8 15 on the morning of august 5th, 1945 and ends 24 hours later 1,903 feet above a clinic in the middle of hiroshima on august 6th. It took me to so many different places and people. And became a an obsession with me, which is a dangerous thing for a film maker or writer. But in this instance i decided after that is something i couldnt leave and would write a book about. This is a product of that book now. I just say that i remember somewhere in the middle of my research, i started a journey which took many around the world. It was a journey i was privileged to take. This city as in new york, i us went across to new mexico. I spent is a lot of time in new mexico. Its where the missions flew. It caps lates the feeling im trying to put across in this book. Its about the size of manhattan. So muff so that the construction battalions that built the huge air bases from which those missions and others were flown in 1945 actually nailed the streets after the manhattan streets. There was a broadway, an 86th street, you go down 42nd street and its the muld of the jungle. Somewhere near 125th street you find yourself on the runway from which it took off for its mission to hiroshima. These days whats extra ord nar is the only way to get to the island is from japan. Which is interesting. So what you do is take off from japan and fly the 1500 miles and you land very nearby. But what youre doing is flying that mission backwards. Youre flying back over the same featureless sea. You pass over the volcanic rock. And its quite a strange sensation. Youre surrounded by japanese people on board that plane. And indeed i mentioned to two or three of them that this was actually the site of the atomic missions that they were going back to. And they were shocked because whats actually there today is a casino. A place where people go to gamble. And this is on the southern edge of the identisland. Right at ingredient itch village. One of the japanese tourists that was with me actually want ed to get their money back because it was so distraught at the idea this is a place that had been lost in history. It was the site of the first atomic mission. I drove up in a sort of jeep northwards to find these runways. It was absolutely massive. Four huge runways. It was sort of the size of kennedy airport. It was also the busiest in the world. And its completely empty. Theres nothing there at all. Just jungle and these runways. One of which you can just about drive on. The other three had to succumb to that incredibly fertile jungle. And i then took a walk away from these runways. Down a little pathway in a thick jungle. And wound its way towards the coast. About a quarter mile. I was frightened with snakes. I wound my way towards this coast through a little path and found myself where i hoped i was finding myself which was on the site of the actual Assembly Buildings where the bombs, which destroyed here sheet ma were both built. Im standing on the foundations of this building. This was for a few short weeks in the summer of 1945 possibly one of the most secret places on earth. If i had been there 60 years previously, i would be shot on site. Theres nobody there now. Its just me and the birds and the rustle of the leaves and the sound of the sea. And nothing else. Just me. It was a very strange feeling where everybody had gone home so many years ago from what was actually one of the most extraordinary things in his print and at that point, i traveled in a way. I was there where it was developed. When the first atomic bomb was tested, which well talk about in a moment. I followed the bomb and the pilots who trained to deliver this bomb and this really windy, dusty air base, 120 miles west of salt lake city. A place so remote at the time that all the guys that flew are from there hated it. It was actually an extraordinary air base where the state line was right down the middle of the hotel lobby. So you can basically be on one side and get drunk and gamble on the other side. And they all taught me about that. And i also went to san francisco. And underneath the golden gate bridge, the ship sailed with the car ego in a 300pound bucket welded flagship of the cabin floor on its way to the island. From there was taken and delivered and dropped on here sheet is ma. So in a way, i went to all these places. When i was going to try to follow individual stories from policymakers like president s and secretaries of war and very key figures in the japanese come at the time down to ordinary people in hiroshima of when the bomb was dropped. Scientist, people i met, interviewed, spoken to, and the aviators who trained in that windy, dusty, airfield. Its between all these different people as the clock ticks down towards that final second on august 6th. It should give you flavor of what this is all about and the tone its written. Before i do so, i should stress its very important to understand that although i have conceived and written this book in way i hope will be engaging to people who might not otherwise touch the subject. Theres been so many books written that many people dont read about it. And because its daunting, heavily footnoted, academic, whatever. But everything i have written is as far as i can verify true. I have used my own historians training to universities to be able to test skmoois challenge myself constantly. These are not fake stories. Its the test of the first atomic bomb in the desert. On july 16th, 1945, the worlds first atomic bomb looks like a giant four ton sphere. It has things sprouting out of it and sitting on top of a 103foot tower in the middle of the desert. And theres massive storm taking place. And here is this bomb on top of this tower in the middle of the desert. There were bets taking place in base camp which is not very far away. Its a safe distance away. When Nobel Prize Winning scientists are actually taking bets on whether or not this might destroy the earths atmosphere by setting fire to it, this is a serious mathematical probability that this could actually happen. It work out as a mathematical probability. They dont know whats going to happen. Theres rain, wind and thunder. In the middle of all this, the director of the bomb being this ruthless, fat, powerful, who ran the Manhattan Project in his previous job tofs build the pentagon which he did under b budget and in time. This guy, these two guys together formed an extraordinary marriage decided there might be security concerns. She sabotaged that bomb. So they decide to send a man who is a physicist to go and babysit the bomb in the the middle of the storm in a the very last hours. And he just got the card. Hes the guy that sent to go and babysit the bomb. And so i will just read you how my book starts. Its a flavor of what its all about. This story is told to me by donald himself when i sat in his living room a year ago in cambridge, massachusetts. He talked to me and this is exactly how he told it to me. Sunday, 9 00 p. M. Trinity test site, 40 miles south in new mexico. Don horn staired up at the tower. The storm that had been building throughout the day had finally erupted in all its fury. Flashes of lightning licked the mountains to the south and the desert echo ed with the thunder. The tower loomed 103 feet above his head. A network of those reaching upward like a giant electric pilot. By now, the clouds were racing so low across the sky he could barely see the top. Which was just as well really. He didnt want to think what was at the top. He began to climb. The wet steel slipped through his fingers ask the rain stung his eyes making it difficult to see. He worn a safety harness. Rung by rung, he pulled himself up the ladder. Once or twice, he stopped and he could see the guards below him looking up like ants on the desert floor. Thaw seemed a long way down. At the top of the tower, a simple corrugated shag are rested on a square wooden flat form. It was a flimsy structure. A huge dimly desellable shape crouched inside. It was a bare bulb hanging from the roof. Horn i guess switched it on and appeared in side. Hulking on a cradle was a metallic gray 4ton steel drum. It took up almost every inch of space. Even by day, it would have looked ominous. But looked so now with the wind whipping the tin walls and swaying from the ceiling and the lightning and thunder edging nearer. A fantastic complex of cables sprouted from its sides like a spillage of guts. As it was somehow not in there at all, but actually organic. A growing, living, autonomous embryo awaiting the moment of its birth. The device, they just call it. The one thing nobody ever called it was what it actually was. The worlds first atomic bomb. It was a thousand hammer blows. The wind rattled the walls. A scientist standing in a concrete bunker exactly 10,000 yards to the the south of this tower. It would initiate the final act in the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in history. They would press a switch on a panel and 45second countdown. The bomb could fail to go off. Or it could detonate with varying magnitudes of explosion. Or as one never applies it could set fire to the atmosphere and the process is destroying all life on the plan it. I decided to go straight in. I make no apologies of this at all. It goes straight in with that story and start with that moment, which begins three weeks before the book actually ends in here shia ma. Heiroshim hiroshima. What is also important in this story is the japanese side of it. I went as us said and made a lot of different people who was survivors from the bomb. They were told to me. And there was one story that really struck me, which i never forgot. And kept turning around and around in my mind. And ill tell you what the story was. A man in his 80s, i met him in his living room in hiroshima. He was clearly somebody who had a badly burned face from the bomb 60 years previously. He told me about the good things and the bad things. Its a hit in 1945. It was four weddings. If you look at the newspapers from that time, which i have, the newspaper which was printed in hereiroshima, you can see th cinema. He told me about the rumors. The city had not been bombed. It was touched twice by bombs, but compared to almost every single other major japanese city. It was being quite dlubtly reserved. Thats the air forces word for atomic attack. But they saw it differently. They began to wonder what was going on. There was a rumor spreading around the substitute. That was why the city had not been destroyed. Its many miles away. And the president s orders, if you like the opposite. And i just asked them a question. And he burst into tears. I department want to upset him. He said i want to tell you something. Something i have never told anybody before. I want to tell it to you. He said the night before the bomb was dropped was the happiest night of my life. It was a love story. About a woman that he fell in love with early that summer. They had met. And they had fallen in love. And they spent most of that summer together. What made it particularly poignant was their respective families were not happy with this relationship at all. They disapproved of it. Its romeo and juliette. Both his brothers had been killed in the war. More thanes were going to invade. And he would be dead. So that night they went to the the beautiful garden. A beautiful japanese garden. And they lay on the grass or under the stars and they lay for a long time together. And then for the very first time, they held hands. They didnt kiss. They just held hands. Thats all they did. And they lay like that for a long time. Around mud night they parted at the gate. He went one way and she went the other way. And the next day the bomb was tropped. He searched for his lover. About the time that they parted at that garden gate, the crew would have been just sit issing dune to breakfast of pineapple fritters. So those kind of contrast really made poignant. That was one of the stories i told. What i decided to do in the book was to start and finish the book. For various different reasons. Yet its something some might be able to identify with. If us may, just read you the preface to the book. This is not chapter one, which i just read parts of. This is the preface before it. Sunday august 59th, 1945, hiroshima, for the rest of his life, he would never forget how beautiful the garden looked that night. The trees, the lake, the little rain bow bridge, the ancient tea houses dotting the banks, the smell of fresh pine, the perfect stillness of it all. Outside beyond the garden walls, the city slept in the darkness. In the blackout, it was almost possible to believe there was no city out there at all. If they are lying together under the stars, were the only people alive in the world. Thats how he remembered it the night before the bomb. As always, they had to be discreet. The authority is not to mention their own families disapproved of unmarried couples spending frivolous hours. These are times of selfsacrifice and denial. Every day the newspapers urged the citizens to work harder and longer and faster to focus all their energies of a single victory. Japan was facing its greatest test in history. This was no moment for love. It was beautiful. They remembered the first moment hed seen her earlier that summer. She was sitting on a bridge with a party of other girls and laughing. He was very shy. Perhaps there was something about his shyness that appealed toer had. Or perhaps she liked him because there were so few young men still left in the city. He was 20 and shfs younger. Just out of school. A movement were full of grace and years later he remembered there was something in her voice and her smile that was like a breath of summer. They saw each other all through that hot july. Sometimes she sent him letters with just the faintest whiff of sent. The luxury in those times of war. But they never kissed. They never even touched until that final night. She had cried when he told her. Of course, it was inevitable he was young and the war wanted him. Time had run out for both of thoem. He would be in the army by september only a few short weeks away. They lay on the grass and she cried and that was when they touched hands. He would never forget that. At some point in the evening, there was an air raid alert, but still they did not move. There were awful alerts these days as the americans pass north over the city. They flew high in their silver planes. Sometimes so high in daylight all you could see was a white trail in the blue sky. But they always took their bombs elsewhere. A little after midnight, they parted. They said goodbye at the gate. He walked away she never looked back. And then he turned slowly towards his home. The memory of her touch still fresh in his mind. Afterwards he would remember this as the happiest night of his life. He looked up at the sky, the stars were clear and brilliant. Tomorrow was going to be a beautiful day. So thats a little bit of the beginning of the book. If i could, im have i got time just to move on to what i would like to talk about now is obviously the moment the bok impacted on the city itself. This was a really difficult thing to write about for obvious reasons. Its a fantastically banal thing to say. Obviously it was a very difficult thing to write about. And im writing about it from numbers of different perspectives, from the perspective of the ground, from the perspective of the plane, from the bomb makers, also from the politicians as well. It became at one point almost impossible to write. I would love to share with you just what that feels like. Theres a point at which language stumbles when you try to describe this pain and this horror and you literally the expression that i used at one point was that is it the adjectives begin to pile up like dead bodies in the street. That might sound kind of very clumsy. What i mean by that is that you literally theres nothing but silence at some point. You cannot describe this stuff without it sounding repetitive or trivial or pointless. And i did find it very hard to do until i decided to write about how difficult it was to write about it. In a way that became the key to describing what happened. And obviously holding on to individual personal experience. Im not just talking about japanese, im talking about guys in the plane and elsewhere as well. The experiences were fascinating and raw on all sides. What im going to do very briefly is just to read you two small sections, if i may, of the moment of impact. Im just going to the first moment im going to read to you is literally a very clinical description of what actually happened in the first moments when the bomb was actually dropped. Its not personalized at all in the way that other bits that ive read to you have been. Its simply a clinical description of what happened when that bomb dropped. And then im going to read you a little bit about the reaction from the enola gay when the plane was literally just diving away from the bomb having dropped it. Just to set a little bit of background here, were at 31,000 feet over the city and in the enola gay. There are three planes up there. One of them carries photographic instruments, one carries observers, the third is the enola gay which is carrying the bomb. The bomb is dropped over a tshaped bridge in the center of hiroshima which looks really from the air like fingers of an outstretched hand. A lot of rivers. And this bridge at the central, very distinctly standing out from 30,000 feet. The bomb tumbles out of the bomb bay and it drops for 44 seconds through the air. And indeed in tests that were done for this particular bomb design, the ballistics of the bomb were very poor which meant that it actually made the most terrible sound when it dropped. A lot of the scientists i spoke to talked about this. Something ive never read before but i had heard about this from these scientists. It shrieked and wailed like a banshee shout as it came all the way down. It really made a terrible racket. And, you know, one wonders if this might have been would have certainly been the last sound that thousands of people heard without knowing quite what it was. This shriek as this bomb ripped at almost the speed of sound its terminal velocity towards the ground. The bomb explod