Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

“The whole country was lighted by a searing light”: Quoted in “Appendix 6. War Department Release on New Mexico Test, July 16, 1945,” in Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 1940–1945: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 254.

“Now we are all sons of bitches”: Bainbridge was disturbed by the immense explosion — but also exhilarated and relieved. Had the nuclear device failed to detonate, he would have been the first person to climb the tower and investigate what had gone wrong. See Kenneth T. Bainbridge, “A Foul and Awesome Display,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist (May 1975), pp. 40–46. The “sons of bitches” line appears on page 46.

the “inhuman barbarism” of aerial attacks: The full text of Franklin Roosevelt’s statement can be found in Bertram D. Hulen, “Roosevelt in Plea; Message to Russia, Also Sent to Finns, Decries ‘Ruthless Bombing,’” New York Times , December 1, 1939.

attacked the Spanish city of Guernica, killing a few hundred civilians: The Basque government claimed that almost one third of the city’s five thousand inhabitants were killed by the attack. The actual number was mostly likely two to three hundred. But most of Guernica’s buildings were destroyed, and the aim of the attack was to terrorize civilians. See Jörg Diehl, “Hitler’s Destruction of Guernica: Practicing Blietzkrieg in Basque Country,” Der Spiegel , April 26, 2007.

bombed and invaded… Nanking… killing many thousands: More than seventy-five years later, the number of people killed in Nanking remains a controversial subject. Chinese scholars now assert that between three and four hundred thousand civilians were massacred while Japanese nationalists claim that those estimates are absurd and that no war crimes were committed. For a fine, aptly titled introduction to the controversy, see Bob Todashi Wakabayashi, “The Messiness of Historical Reality,” in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity: Complicating the Picture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 3–28.

“The ruthless bombing from the air”: Quoted in Hulen, “Roosevelt in Plea.”

“The immediate aim is, therefore, twofold”: Quoted in Richard R. Muller, “The Orgins of MAD: A Short History of City-Busting,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2004), p. 34.

The first “firestorm”: The historian Jörg Friedrich has written a masterful account of the British effort to destroy Germany with fire. His chapters on the weaponry and the strategies used to kill civilians are especially haunting. For the destruction of Hamburg and the desire to create firestorms, see Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 90–100; and another fine, unsettling book — Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg (New York: Scribner, 2007).

killed about forty thousand: Cited in Lowe, Inferno , p. 276.

attack on Dresden, where perhaps twenty thousand civilians died: Long a source of debate, estimates of the death toll in Dresden have ranged from about thirty-five thousand to about half a million. In 2008 a panel of historians concluded the actual number was between eighteen and twenty-five thousand. Cited in Kate Connolly, “International Panel Rethinks Death Toll from Dresden Raids,” Guardian (London), October 3, 2008.

“de-housing”: Quoted in Sokolski, Getting MAD , p. 34.

daytime “precision” bombing: The American bombing strategy, inspired by the futility of trench warfare during the First World War, sought to avoid unnecessary casualties and to destroy only military targets — a goal more easily achieved in theory than in reality. For the high-minded motives behind the strategy, see Mark Clodfelter, Beneficial Bombing: The Progressive Foundations of American Air Power,1917–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 1–66.

the Norden bombsight: For a fascinating account of this “technological wonder,” a top secret invention that cost a fortune and never fulfilled the lofty aims of its inventor, see Stephen L. McFarland, America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing , 1910–1945 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).

forced as many as two hundred thousand Korean women: The number of Korean women used as sex slaves by the Japanese will never be precisely known. Like the number of Chinese civilians killed in Nanking, it has long been a source of controversy, with Japanese nationalists claiming the actual figure was low. Two hundred thousand is a widely used estimate. For a fine discussion of the issue, see You-me Park, “Compensation to Fit the Crime: Conceptualizing a Just Paradigm of Reparation for Korean ‘Comfort Women,’” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East , Vol. 30, No. 2, 2010, pp. 204–13. The estimate is cited on page 206.

killed almost one million Chinese civilians with chemical and biological weapons: The number of Chinese killed by such weapons will never be known. According to the historian Daqing Yang, during the two weeks between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the first American occupying troops, Japanese officials “systematically destroyed sensitive documents to a degree perhaps unprecedented in history.” Nevertheless, it has been conclusively established that the Japanese attacked Chinese civilians with weapons containing mustard gas, anthrax, plague, typhoid, cholera, and bacterial dysentery. See Daqing Yang, “Documentary Evidence and Studies of Japanese War Crimes: An Interim Assessment,” in Edward Drea, Greg Bradsher, Robert Hanyok, James Lide, Michael Petersen, and Daqing Yang, Researching Japanese War Crime Records: Introductory Essays (Washington D.C.: Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, U.S. National Archives, 2006), pp. 21–56; and Till Bärnighausen, “Data Generated in Japan’s Biowarfare Experiments on Human Victims in China, 1932–1945, and the Ethics of Using Them,” in Jin Bao Nie, Nanyan Guo, Mark Selden, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 81–106.

killed millions of other civilians: The number of people killed by the Japanese throughout Asia will never be known. Over the years, the estimates of civilian deaths in China alone have ranged from ten to thirty-five million. Although those estimates were made by the Chinese government, they suggest the possible scale of the slaughter. Cited in Wakabayashi, The Nanking Atrocity , pp. 4, 8.

the Army Air Forces tried a new approach: For the decision to abandon precision bombing and firebomb Tokyo, see Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II , Volume 5, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), pp. 608–18; William W. Ralph, “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” War in History , vol. 13, no. 4, (2006), pp. 495–522; and Thomas R. Searle, “‘It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers’: The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945,” Journal of Military History , vol. 66, no. 1 (January 2002), pp. 103–33.