On August 6 1945, a 5-ton atom bomb was dropped on a bustling Japanese city named Hiroshima. The destruction was eye-watering and the effects of the bomb are felt to this day. Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima captures all of the events leading up to the explosion piece-by-piece in staggering detail.Written by BBC filmmaker Stephen Walker, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima captures all the details from the very inception of the bomb to the Trinity testing in Los Alamos to that beautiful Monday morning in August when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It offers exclusive content from the point of view of the scientists in Nevada to the pilots who flew to Japan to drop the bomb.
The book begins in Los Alamos, New Mexico when the first nuclear bomb codenamed ‘Trinity’ is detonated. The scientists involved in the trinity test namely ‘The Manhattan Project’ observes the test and as the results are satisfactory, the road to Hiroshima begins. The book is tightly written as it gives us a real experience of the nail-biting tension felt by the boffins at Los Alamos, the gritting training at Tinian Island and at Potsdam, where Truman, Stalin and Churchill regularly meet to decide Japan’s fate. To add an emotional factor, the author introduces us to a few residents of Hiroshima and how the war transformed their everyday lives.
On a quiet Monday morning in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, a bomb dubbed ‘Little Boy’ by its creators, is dropped onto the city. An explosion of unimaginable proportions rocks the city to its core and left more than a third of the city’s 300, 000 population dead and the remaining tortured by the radioactive fallout and severe cases of poisoning. The buildings and the little shops in the city were nowhere to be seen. In their places were piles of rubble. From that day forward, the world goes into the atomic age and hence causes fear, distrust, tensions and thoughts of the extinction of the human race.
Author Stephen Walker has done a truly fantastic job of capturing all the tensions of the events. Although some book fanatics might draw comparisons to ‘Hiroshima’ by John Henry, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima is a truly terrifying experience of the actualities of the atomic bombings and of the Second World War. If you are intrigued by the happenings of World War II, then this is a book which you should definitely read.