Shockwave (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Various Americans: The book tells about people belonging to the Manhattan Project and the flight crews of the planes that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Various Japansese: Various people who survived Hiroshima. One in particular, Dr. Hida, a doctor who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and describes, in grim detail, what he saw.

Quotes edit see section history

• “"The mushroom cloud 'had every color in the rainbow," says Albury, "greens, blues, pinks, everything." Beneath it some seventy thousand people were already dead or dying.”

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• The point was not lost on General Groves. “You realize of course,” he told the British scientist James Chadwick over dinner one night, “that all this effort is really intended to subdue the Russkies.”

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• It would need 5,000 bombers, each carrying a full load of conventional explosives, to match it. And all this awesome, inhuman power came from a piece of plutonium very slightly larger than a tennis ball.

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• What neither Groves nor Truman knew was that the Russkies had already taken the lesson fully to heart.

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• Meanwhile in California, KCBA’s listeners would spend the next twenty minutes hearing a man counting backward.

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• From the very beginning, public relations and the bomb went hand in hand.

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• It crossed every level of society. General Joseph Stilwell wrote to his wife: “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.” The demonization of an entire people is concentrated in that one sentence. Cockroaches do not merit human sympathy. They get killed instead.

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• When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”

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• Just three weeks separated the test from the destruction of Hiroshima.

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• NOT ALL the bomb’s victims were Japanese. There were also approximately 53,000 Koreans living in Hiroshima in August 1945—some of them working in forced-labor programs. The most recent studies suggest that at least 25,000 died—almost a sixth of the total casualties.

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• “The atomic bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he later wrote. “Not any decision you had to worry about.” The bomb, he always maintained, “was a weapon of war” and nothing more. As an ex–artillery officer from the First World War, he had no qualms about treating it as such.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 2 important cities in Japan. The very first atomic bombs were dropped on these cities. In all, an estimated 30,000 people were killed by the bombings, instantly or due to injuries and radiation poisoning.

First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Stephen Walker (Author)

Awards edit see section history

• Dayton Literary Peace Prize (2006: Nonfiction, Winner)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 940.542521954

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › History › Military › World War II › Hiroshima & Nagasaki
• Books › History › Americas › United States › 20th Century
• Books › History › Asia › Japan