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The outside world learned of the Hiroshima bomb--but not of its gruesome effects--from a terse White House announcement approved by President Truman, who was steaming home from Potsdam on the U.S.S. Augusta. The big news was saved for the beginning of the third paragraph: "It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East." This was the first public announcement anywhere indicating that nuclear weapons even existed.
Japanese radio offered its citizens, few of them presumably listening in Hiroshima, a more tentative report: "Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. Our enemies have apparently used a new type of bomb. The details are being investigated."
In truth, Tokyo initially knew almost nothing about what had happened in Hiroshima. As General Marshall noted later, "What we did not take into account was that the destruction would be so complete that it would be an appreciable time before the actual facts of the case would get to Tokyo." As Washington waited impatiently for word of surrender, the Japanese Cabinet tried to find out what on earth had happened to Hiroshima. Since the first reports seemed unbelievable, some Japanese leaders wanted desperately not to believe them. Others decided that even if Truman's announcement was true--that Hiroshima was hit with an atomic bomb--Japan should continue to fight. "I am convinced," War Minister Korechika Anami told his colleagues in the Cabinet, "that the Americans had only one bomb, after all."
Such a response had been anticipated by General Groves, who argued all along to the Manhattan Project's civilian overseers that at least two atomic bombs would be necessary to effect Japan's surrender: the first to demonstrate the awful destructive power of a nuclear weapon and the second to convince the Japanese military that there were more where that came from.
On Aug. 8, Fat Man--a bulbous bomb, nearly 12 ft. long and 5 ft. in diameter, weighing 10,000 lbs.--was loaded into another of the 509th Group's B-29s at Tinian. The plane and its complement of escorts took off the next morning at 3:47 and headed for Kokura, a city that contained a major weapons arsenal, on the north coast of the island of Kyushu. Finding the target obscured by clouds and facing a fuel shortage on the strike plane, Major Charles W. Sweeney decided to fly over the alternate target on his way to an emergency landing on Okinawa.