Living Under the Cloud

The 12 Americans who on Aug. 6, 1945, boarded the B-29 bomber with the name Enola Gay painted on its nose would forget little about that long day. They remembered staying up through the night and eating breakfast long before dawn. Theodore (Dutch) Van Kirk had pineapple fritters. “I love the damn things,” Van Kirk, 84, says today from his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. “I’ll never forget the pineapple damn fritters.” The Enola Gay left Tinian, in the Marianas chain, at 2:45 a.m. and was scheduled to arrive over Hiroshima, a city at the south end of the Japanese island of Honshu, at 8:15 a.m.; the crew was 15 seconds later than planned. The plane then dropped a single bomb, weighing five tons. Says Van Kirk: “I was timing it with my watch. It was supposed to take 43 seconds, and we all concluded it had been a dud, because it took longer. Then it exploded.” The pilot of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul Tibbets, had put the plane into a 180Ëš turn to the west and was getting away from the target as fast as he could. “All we saw,” recalls Van Kirk, “was a bright flash.”

On the ground, half a mile from where the bomb dropped, Michiko Yamaoka, then a 15-year-old student, saw the same flash. Today she describes it as like a burst of light from an unearthly photo shoot, big enough to cover the sky, “blue-yellow and very beautiful.” Yamaoka was blown off her feet. When she came to, she had burns all over her body, and, she says, she could “hear people calling out for help and the crackle of fire coming from burning houses … people moaning from pain, with eyes popped out and intestines coming out of their stomachs.” As the Enola Gay turned south for the long ride home, Yamaoka and her mother headed for a military compound. On the B-29, Van Kirk remembers, “somebody said–and I thought so too–‘This war is over.'”

Eight days later, it was. Ever since, there has been controversy over when the war would have ended had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima–a second was detonated over the city of Nagasaki on Aug. 9–and how many Japanese and Americans would have died before it did. But, plainly, the most terrible war ever known ended earlier than it would have because of the Enola Gay’s mission. The bombs cost tens of thousands of lives–perhaps 120,000 were killed immediately in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with many more dying later from the effects of radiation–but they saved lives too. When he heard the news of Hiroshima, writer Paul Fussell, then a 21-year-old second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in France and mentally preparing for the hell that an invasion of Japan was bound to be, thought, “We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Right from the start, the nuclear age was wrapped in a paradox. An awful weapon had saved lives; a terrible instrument of war had brought peace. The images from Hiroshima seared the consciousness of a generation, forever serving as an admonishing reminder of mankind’s destructive capacities. “In an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future,” TIME wrote one week after the dropping of the bomb. And yet the very memory of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of cities being reduced to rubble in an instant, provided an odd hope that such terror would never be allowed to happen again. After Hiroshima, the U.S. and the Soviet Union built thousands of nuclear devices, and the threat of nuclear war kept a political and ideological contest within bounds. Buried in silos in the wheat fields of North Dakota, tucked into the torpedo tubes of Soviet submarines parked in the North Atlantic, slung in the bomb bays of B-52s, the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals mutually assured the destruction of both sides if hostilities commenced. The cold war turned into a long peace.

But press that logic further, and you arrive at an uncomfortable place. If nuclear weapons are so great at keeping the peace, why shouldn’t everyone have them? And what happens when the Bomb falls into the hands of those who don’t remember the legacy of Aug. 6–or simply choose not to? Sixty years after Hiroshima, 14 years after the Soviet Union imploded, the great question facing strategists–facing all of us–is less how a nation might array its nuclear forces and more how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons from spinning out of control. The Bush Administration has publicly declared that it is intolerable for states such as North Korea and Iran to get nuclear weapons, but few experts believe that either regime would risk annihilation by actually launching a nuke in anger. More terrifying is the possibility that malefactors operating without such restraints–such as the suicidal jihadists of al-Qaeda–might acquire atomic materials. It is the global terrorist threat that has made this the least predictable moment since the dawn of the nuclear age. Says Sam Nunn, the Democratic ex-Senator: “The terrorist threat is, to me, the most likely use of a nuclear weapon.”

To be sure, the challenge of proliferation has been with us from the start. On Aug. 5, 1945, the day before Hiroshima, the possibility of nuclear weapons was hardly a secret. (At least two crew members of the Enola Gay guessed the nature of their cargo before Tibbets told them on the flight from Tinian.) The key theoretical and laboratory work on nuclear fission had been done and published by 1939, and since the community of physicists included Americans, Britons, Germans, French, Italians, Swedes, Russians, Hungarians and Japanese, no one country ever had a monopoly of nuclear know-how.

Of course, making a nuclear bomb is difficult and expensive. The key ingredient for a bomb builder is the fissile material–either highly enriched uranium or plutonium–which is difficult to produce secretly. Nuclear-radiation leaks, even in minute quantities, can be detected. But making a nuclear bomb isn’t impossible. Under the apartheid regime–at a time when it was subject to international trade sanctions–South Africa managed to build six of them. (Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, South Africa was the only nation to willingly and verifiably give up its entire nuclear arsenal.) Leaving aside North Korea’s claims that it possesses the Bomb, there are already seven declared nuclear powers–the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan–with Israel an undeclared member of the club. But there are plenty of other nations rich and clever enough to build a bomb if they really wanted to.

The world has taken some steps to curtail the spread of nukes. Under a treaty signed three years ago, the U.S. and Russia agreed to shrink their stockpiles; for the U.S., that has meant trimming the number of deployed warheads from the current 5,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. At the same time, the Bush Administration has decided, unilaterally, to cut the total nuclear arsenal from about 10,000 warheads to 6,000 over the same period. In the armed forces, nuclear expertise is no longer a path to the top. “No one’s promoting their career anymore by pushing nuclear weapons,” says Henry Sokolski, who served as a top Pentagon official on proliferation issues in George H.W. Bush’s Administration. Since 2003 the Administration, with those of 10 other nations, has pursued the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which is trying to halt the spread of nuclear weapons through more robust interdiction. U.S. officials say the PSI has curbed Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear efforts and helped persuade Libya to give up its quest for weapons of mass destruction.

But none of that has translated into a serious effort to abolish nuclear weapons entirely. In the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) signed in 1968, the nuclear powers–including the U.S.–promised to “pursue negotiations in good faith” leading to a treaty on “general and complete disarmament.” None of the nuclear signatories to the NPT meant what they said, and in only one of them–Britain–has there ever been a politically significant mass movement in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament. (The young Tony Blair was once a supporter of it.)

While the declared nuclear powers have wobbled in their commitment to get rid of their arsenals, the rise of a global black market in nuclear expertise and materials has made the Bomb more attainable for everyone else. Despite the bust in 2004 of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who transferred nuclear technology and designs to clients like Libya, Iran and North Korea, intelligence officials around the world believe much of his network is still in business. (Today Khan lives under house arrest in Pakistan, but the U.S. has yet to receive Islamabad’s permission to question him.) Meanwhile, Nunn maintains that the U.S. has underfunded the program that he and Senator Richard Lugar established in 1991 to help Russia secure its inventory of tactical nuclear weapons, which many fear has not been under close control since the demise of the Soviet Union. “These are weapons that could be transported by one person, put in the back of a truck and blow up a large part of a city,” Nunn said recently. He continued, “We don’t know how many weapons the Russians have or where they’re located. We hope they do, but we’re not confident of that.”

The closer upstarts get to going nuclear, the more tempting it may be for established powers to restart the arms race. The Bush Administration is determined not just to modernize its aging arsenal but also to develop a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator–known as the “bunker buster”–which would be used to blast targets buried deep underground. Both North Korea and Iran are believed to have buried clandestine nuclear facilities. But John Deutch, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, argues that by talking of a new type of bomb, the Administration is undercutting its own efforts to persuade others to stay out of the nuclear game. Nunn makes the point more colorfully. Other countries, he says, “have a hard time taking instructions from a chain smoker to quit smoking and to help us keep others from starting to smoke.”

The temptation to light up is always there. Having a Bomb gives one bragging rights. Pakistan, for example, is intensely proud of its nuclear arsenal: displayed in every large city is a fiber-glass model of the Chagi Hills, where the 1998 tests took place. Every Pakistani remembers seeing TV films of the hills’ shuddering at the jolt from underground, like a camel shaking off a layer of dust. Russia, which has pledged to update its nuclear arsenal, knows that its bombs are what maintain its pretensions to be a great power. Neither Britain nor France will give up its nuclear weapons, at least partly because if either did, it would leave the other as the sole nuclear state in Western Europe.

Could Hiroshima happen again? For 60 years the sense of power that goes with having a nuclear capability has been tempered by another emotion: naked fear of the horror that nuclear weapons can cause. From John Hersey’s heartbreaking journalism for the New Yorker in 1946, through films, books and documentaries, the hell that was Hiroshima has helped persuade us to stay our hand.

The very existence of the Bomb has made the sort of total war practiced 60 years ago morally unthinkable. For once, humans have not done what they are capable of doing. There have been some 525 nuclear explosions aboveground since Hiroshima; not one of them has been an act of war. We find it hard to celebrate that–we may think, as George Orwell wrote two months after Hiroshima, that the atom bomb ushered into being an indefinite “peace that is no peace”–but we should, perhaps, be thankful for small mercies. Since Aug. 6, 1945, we have lived uneasily with the Bomb, and uneasy with it we should always be. But we have lived. –Reported by Aravind Adiga/New Delhi, Michael Brunton and Roland Lloyd Parry/London, Coco Masters/New York, Tim McGirk/Islamabad, Yuki Oda/Tokyo, Simon Robinson/Johannesburg, Mark Thompson/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

For more photos, first-person recollections and a report on Hiroshima today, visit time.com