A day after the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb used in war, President Truman's announcement and early wire reports revealed to a stunned public the existence and destructive power of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima lay largely flattened, with tens of thousands already dead and thousands more dying in the following weeks from burns and radiation sickness.
Truman's statement, released from the USS Augusta as he sailed home from the Potsdam Conference, was almost gleeful in tone: he called the bomb 'the greatest thing in history' and warned Japan of 'a rain of ruin from the air' if it did not surrender. American newspapers ran the news alongside diagrams of atomic fission, most Americans encountering the phrase 'atomic bomb' for the first time.
In Hiroshima itself, survivors were still wandering through rubble looking for water and family members, largely unaware that a single weapon, not a massed bombing raid, had caused the devastation. Doctors, themselves wounded, tried to treat burns with no understanding of radiation sickness, a mystery illness that would kill many patients who initially seemed to be recovering.
The full scale of casualties, ultimately estimated between 90,000 and 146,000 dead by the end of 1945, took weeks to become clear even to Japanese leadership, complicated by military censorship and the sheer chaos of the destruction.
Key people: Harry Truman