By a friend of mine who runs a company in london. I did Everything Possible to resist the offer to make this film. Because it was a complex and frightening and challenging subject. You are dealing with one of the seminal events in World History obviously. There are all kinds of cliches about the world changing. And yet what happened in my case around thoughts buzzing in my brain, did not go away. Almost reluctantly i accepted that and started to make a film. The film, really was exactly as story,cribed, a 24hour a story that starts at 8 15 in andmorning august 5, 1945 ends above a clinic in the middle of hiroshima. It took me to so many different voices and People Places and people and became an obsession, which is a dangerous thing for a filmmaker and nascent writer. I decided after that the subject was something i could not leave and i would write a book about. This is the product. I say that i remember somewhere in my research, i started a journey which took me around the world. It was one i was privileged to take. I went to the eastern seaboard of the United States. I went across to new mexico and spent a lot of time in new mexico and to San Francisco and actually eventually across to japan and down to the tiny in the western pacific, a little dot in the middle of nowhere, where the first atomic commissions flew in 1945. I had an externally experienced extraordinary experience. I amcapsulates the feeling trying to put across in the book. It is about the size of manhattan, this island. It looks a bit like manhattan as well from the air. So much so that the construction battalions built the huge airbases from which those missions and others were flown in 1945, named many of the streets after manhattan streets. 96th, 112thoadway, area somewhere around 125th you find yourself on the runway. The only way you can get to tinion island these days is from japan. You take off from japan and fly 1500 miles to 1tinion and effectively are your you are doing a mission backwards. You cross over volcanic rock of iwo jima, your flying at approximately the same height you are flying at approximately the same height as guys were flying, 35,000 feet. You are stranded by japanese japanese surrounded by people and i mentioned to them this was the site of the atomic missions they were going back to. They were shocked, because what is there today is a casino. It is on the southern edge of the island, round about Greenwich Village if you think of it that way. One of the terrorists or or gamblers tourists want to get their money back because they were distraught that this place was lost in history, the site of the first atomic mission. I drove up in a jeep northwards to find these runways, which are still there, rotting in the jungle. This was the biggest airbase in the world in 1945. Four huge parallel runways, the size of kennedy airport. It was almost the busiest in the world. It is completely empty. There is nothing there but jungle and coral runways, one of which you can drive on. The other three have succumbed to the fertile jungle. Away from these runways, down a little pathway that actually traversed in quic thick jungle. Im terrified of snakes, and god knows what. I wound my way towards this coast, this little path and found myself where i hoped i would find myself, which is on the site of the actual Assembly Buildings where the bombs which destroyed hiroshima and august kike were both and nagasa were both built. Aboutread about and spoke with scientists, this was for a few short weeks possibly one of the most Sacred Places on earth. If i had been there 60 years previously, i would have been shot on sight for being in this place. The soundothing but of the sea, nothing else but me. There is a strange feeling to be in this place everyone had gone home so many years ago from what was one of the most Extraordinary Events in history. I realized i traveled in a way in the bombs footsteps. I had been in los alamos, at the factory. I had been at the site in alamogordo where the first bomb was tested in the desert. I followed the bomb, and the pilots who had trained to deliver this bomb in this windy, miles west of 120 salt lake city, so remote at the time that all the guys that flew from their hated it. The state line between utah and nevada went down the middle. The state line hotel lobby, you could be served on one side and then gamble on the other side of the lobby. They told me about that. I went to San Francisco. Underneath the Golden Gate Bridge in 1945, the uss indianapolis, which i am sure many of you are familiar with, sailed with its cargo of uranium bucket welded to the lieutenants floor on its way to tinion island and was dropped on hiroshima. I went to all these places. I followed in the bombs footsteps and they gave me a sense of what my book was about. The seminalto take , and i was going to try and follow individual stories from policymakers like president s and secretaries of war and key figures in the japanese government at the time, down to ordinary people in hiroshima upon whom the bomb was dropped. People i have interviewed and spoken to and the aviators who trained in the windy, dusty, salt lake airfield for so many months before they were shipped out to tinian. Core of my book. My book moved between all the different people as the clock goes down on that and on that 1945,second august fifth, which we commemorate this saturday. What i would like to do if you i mind, and it can be want to read two or three excerpts from my book which is to give you a flavor of what this is about. I should stress it is very important to understand although i have written in this horrendous in a way to be engaging for people who wont touch the subject, so many monographs about hiroshima, many people dont read about it. It is daunting, heavily footnoted, academic, but everything i have written is a source i can verify. I have used my own historians training to universities to be able to test myself and challenge myself constantly with primary sources, with many interviews i have done around the world. So the stories are real. These are not fake. It is one of the situations where they say the truth is much smarter much more extraordinary than fiction, much more in this instance. Start, which is the test, the first atomic bomb in the media the new mexico desert. 1945. On july 16, the worlds first atomic bomb looks like a giant four tons sphere. It has wires and things sprouting out of it and it sits on the top of a tower in the new mexico desert in alamogordo. There is a massive electrical storm taking place. One of new mexicos worst ever taking place. Here is the bomb on this shack on the top of a tower in the middle of a desert, and everyone is panicking about the weather because there are concerns about what it might be doing to the bomb. There is serious concern this bomb, once detonated, might possibly set fire to the earths atmosphere and destroy the planet completely. Nobody knows what will happen. They were debating. There are bets taking place in base camp, which is not far away from this tower, a safe distance away, three or four miles away, when nobel prizewinning scientists are actually taking bets on whether or not this bomb might destroy the earths atmosphere by setting fire to it. This is a serious mathematical probability although slight this could happen. It was worked out. They dont know what is going to happen. There is rain, wind and thunder. In the middle of this, general groves and oppenheimer, the director, and general growth being this ruthless, fat am a powerful, hardass son of a bitch who ran the manhattan project, and his previous job was to do it under budget and in time, these two guys together formed a rather extraordinary marriage or partnership decided there might be security concerns. The japanese, somehow some spy might get up there and sabotage the bomb. They sent a man who was a physicist to babysit the bomb in the middle of this storm in the last hours. He gets the bum card. He is the guy that gets to babysit the bomb. Here is the flavor of what it is about. The story was told to me by donald himself, when i sat in his living room a year ago in cambridge, massachusetts. This is exactly how he told it to me. Sunday, july 15, 9 00 p. M. , trinity test site, 40 miles o, new mexico. R don stared up at the tower. The written the wind and rain ripped through the steel lattice work. The storm had erected in all its fury. Flashes of lightning licked the mountains to the south. The tower loomed 103 feet above his head, a network of black braces and girders reaching upward like a giant electric pylon. By now the clouds were so low across the sky, he could barely see the top which was just as well. He did not want to think what was at the top. He began to climb. The wet steel slipped between his fingers and the rain stung his eyes. He wore no safety harness. He pulled himself up the ladder. Once or twice he stopped, and he could see the guards looking up like ants on the desert floor. They seemed a long way down. At the top of the tower, a simple corrugated tin shack rested on a square wooden platform. It was a cheaply made structure, not designed to last. It was not much bigger than a garden shed. He stepped off the ladder beside it. A huge, dimly discernible shape crouched inside. There was a 60 watt bold hanging from the bulb hanging from the roof. He switched it on. There was a metallic gray bloated four ton steel drum that took up almost every inch of space in the shack. Even by day looked ominous, but especially so now with the wind whipping the tin walls and the bulb swinging from the ceiling and the lightning and thunder edging nearer. A fantastic complex of cables sprouted from its side like spillage of guts or arteries, as if it were not inert but actually organic, a growing, living, autonomous embryo awaiting the moment of its birth. In acknowledgment of its essence, its creators had given it a name, a number of names. They called it the beast, the gadget, the thing, the device. At times they called it it. The one thing nobody called it was what it was, the worlds first atomic bomb. He squeezed down beside it, the rain pelted on the tin roof like 1000 hammer blows. The wind rattled the walls. In a few hours, a scientist called Joan Standing in a concrete bunker 1000 yards from the tower would initiate the final act in what was the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in history. He would press a switch on a panel and began a 45 second countdown. At the end of that time, a number of things could happen. The bomb could fail to go off, or it could detonate with varying magnitude of explosion. Or, as one believed, it could set fire to the earths atmosphere, destroying all life on the planet. Nobody knew. Of theves you a flavor tensions that were building. I decided to go straight in. I make no apologies, to go straight in and start with a moment that begins three weeks before the book ends in hiroshima. What i think is also very important in this story, obviously, is the japanese side of it. I went to hiroshima and met a lot of different people who were survivors from the bomb, and heard many stories, some of which i narrowed down and used in this book, almost exactly as they were told to me, through an interpreter. There was one story that really struck me, which i never forgot, and kept, kept turning around and around in my mind. I will tell you what the story was and how i used it. I met a man who mustve been in his mid80s. I met him in his living room in hiroshima. He was clearly someone who had a burned face from the bomb 60 years previously. We were talking about various different things, about what hiroshima was like before the war and what it was like in the months leading up to the time the bomb was dropped. He told me about good and bad. He told me about the movies people went to. The hit movie in hiroshima in 1945 was called four weddings. If you look at the newspapers from that time, which i have one 1945, you august 6, can see there were adverts for weddings. Of four he told me about the grass, the rumors, the city had not been ,ombed it was touched twice not bombs like every other major city. Razed to the ground. History hiroshima was deliberately reserved. That was the air forces wo rd. They began to wonder what was going on. There was a rumor which was president trumans mother was a prisoner in the city, being kept captive. City had notthe been destroyed. It was on the personal orders of the president not to bomb it, because his mother was in it. She was in missouri and his orders were the exact opposite. She told me all these things and we talked about the day itself. I asked a simple enough question. I said you remember the night before the bomb . There was a pause. And then he burst into tears which is terribly embarrassing for me being english. I didnt want to upset him. I said is anything the matter . He said i want to tell you something that i have never told anybody before. I want to tell it to you. He said the night the bomb was dropped was the happiest night of my life. He started to tell a story. It was a love story. About a woman he had fallen in love with and met earlier that summer. He was 19 she was 19 and he was 21. She was sitting on a bridge when they met. They had fallen in love and spent most of the summer together. What met made it poignant was their families were not happy with this relationship. It was a room you and julia juliet thing. And then came a time he had to tell her he received his call up papers for the army. Been inhis brothers had the army and he was facing death, the americans would be invaded and he would be dead, another statistic. O wentt night he and reik to a very beautiful garden, which is still there to this day, restored after the bomb, beautiful japanese garden, and they went into the garden at together, two of them and they lay on the grass under the stars. These are his words, not mine. They lay for a long time together. Then for the very first time they held hands. They didnt kiss. They just held hands. That is all they did. They lay like that. Around midnight, they passed the gates. He went one way, she went the other way, and the next day the bomb was dropped. He searched for his lover in the ruins of the city. Partedhe time that they at that garden gate, the crew would have been sitting down to breakfast of pineapple fritters, that is what they had for breakfast, before being shipped off. O the planes to take those kind of contrast he made i found poignant. I decided in this book to start and finish the book with the love story for various different reasons. It moved me hugely, and it was an interesting way to start a book, start with a love story. The two people in the garden on that night, something all of us in some way might be able to identify with. I will read you what i call the preface to the book. This is not chapter one, which i read part of. Sunday, august 5, 1945, the garden in hiroshima. For the rest of his life, sunao will never forget how beautiful the garden looked, the trees, the lake, the rainbow bridge, the ancient teahouses, the smell of fresh pine, the white herons, the perfect stillness. 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, no houses, no army, no war, as if he and reiko were the only people live in the world. That is how he remembered it the night before the bomb. As always they had to be discreet. The authorities, not to mention their own families, disapproved of unmarried couples spending frivolous hours in each others company. Every day the newspapers in hiroshima urged citizens to work , toer and longer and faster focus their energies on the goal of victory. Japan was facing its greatest testing history. This was no moment for love. But reiko was beautiful. Sunao remember that first moment he saw her, sitting on a bridge with a party of other girls and laughing. He was shy. There was something about his shyness that appeal to her, or perhaps she liked him because there were so few healthy young men still left. He was 20 and she was younger, out of school. Her movements were full of grace. He would remember something in her voice and smile that was like the breath of summer. They saw each other through the hot july. Sometimes she sent him letters with the faintest whiff of sent, her luxury. , they never kissed or touched until that final night. She had cried when he told her. It was inevitable he was young and the inevitable. He was young and the war wanted him. He would be in the army by september, a few short weeks away. They lay on the grass and she cried and that is when they touched hands. He would never forget that. At some point there was an air raid alert, but they did not move. There were often alerts as the americans passed north. They would see the planes sometimes so high in daylight all you could see was a brilliant white trail in the sky. They took their bombs elsewhere. A little after midnight, they parted. They said goodbye at the gates. Reiko walked away. Her go. Tched she never looked back. He hurried towards his home, the memory of her touch fresh in his mind. 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 that is a little bit of the beginning of the book. I have got time to move on. I would like to talk about the moment on impact on the city itself. This was a difficult thing to write about for obvious reasons. Banals a fantastically thing to say. I worried about from the perspective of the ground, the plane, the politicians. It became at one point almost impossible to write. I would like to share what that feels like. There is a point at which when you trybles to describe this pain and horror. The adjectives begin to pile up like dead bodies in the streets. I mean there is nothing but silence. Describe this without it being repetitive or trivial. I decided to write about how difficult it was to write about it. That became the key to describing what happened in holding onto individual personal experiences. The experiences were fascinating and raw on all sides. What im going to do briefly is to read you two small sections of the moment of impact. I will redo a clinical description of what happened read you a clinical description of what happened. I will not personalize at all in the way other bits have been. It is a clinical description of what happened when the bomb dropped. Then i will review a little bit about the reaction from the plane, when it was literally just diving away from the bomb having dropped it. Areive background here, we 31,000 feet in the city over the city. There are three planes are one of them carried photographic instruments, another with observers, the third with the bomb. It is dropped over a t shaped bridge, which looks from the air like fingers on an outstretched hand, a lot of rivers. Very distinctly standing out from 30,000 feet. The bomb tumbles out of the bomb secondsgoes 30 or 40 through the air. The ballistics of the bomb de