Teenage Dessert

Newsreel Narrator: 1931...

Japanese troops leave for the conquest of Manchuria.

Japan, the first of this war's aggressor nations,

starting out a full 14 years ago

on a career of international conquest and pillage.

Japan seized a whole new empire,

grew even more self-confident and aggressive

as she fed on other people's suffering.

Germany and Italy, who would plunge Europe into war,

became fully...

President Roosevelt: A date which will live in infamy.

No matter how long it may take us

to overcome this premeditated invasion...

the American people, in their righteous might,

will win through to absolute victory.

President Truman: We are now prepared to destroy

more rapidly and completely,

every productive enterprise

the Japanese have in any city.

Let there be no mistake.

We shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

Man: Let's go!

Hey!

Both: Thank you!

Shigeko Sasamori: 1945,

the, uh, first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

I was 13 years old.

I was a normal, ordinary girl, I think.

To me, orphaned under two,

if I didn't get the bomb,

what kind of life I had.

Often I thought about it.

Completely different, of course.

Maybe I...

just ordinary.

Met man and get married,

have a housewife, and mother and things.

My fantasy goes, uh, different directions.

(Keiji Nakazawa speaking Japanese)

(Yasuyo Tanaka praying in Japanese)

Amen.

(Yasuyo Tanaka speaking Japanese)

(Yasuyo Tanaka speaking Japanese)

Ah!

Domo konichiwa.

(Sakue Shimohira speaking Japanese)

(Katsuji Yoshida speaking Japanese)

Joseph Grew: To the 70 million people of Japan,

Hirohito, their emperor, is a god,

through direct descent from the great sun goddess,

Amaterasu.

They believe that he personally owns Japan,

its land, its resources,

and even themselves.

And they believe that it is the right

and destiny of Japan's emperors

to rule the whole world.

To bring about the fulfillment of this destiny

and to destroy all nations and peoples

which stand in the way of its fulfillment

is the sacred duty of Japan's army and navy.

The army of Japan is a well-trained,

sternly disciplined force of fanatics,

steeled to reckless courage

by a primitive moral code,

which assures to every man who dies in battle,

an immortal life among the Shinto gods.

The Japanese are not easy to know.

I have lived among them for 10 years.

And I can testify

that they are as different from ourselves

as any people on this planet.

The real difference is in their minds.

You cannot measure Japanese sense of logic

by any Western yardstick.

Their weapons are modern,

their thinking is 2,000 years out of date.

Shigeko Sasamori: When the men go to the war,

we have little flags,

and singing the song.

Oh, what was it?

What was it? I forgot.

(Shuntaro Hida speaking Japanese)

Banzai!

-Banzai! -(shouting)

(Shuntaro Hida speaking in Japanese)

(Satoru Fukahori speaking Japanese)

We are going to destroy Japan's armies,

Japan's navy,

Japan's air forces,

Japan's war factories,

Japan's whole power to wage war.

(Satoru Fukahori speaking Japanese)

Morris Jeppson: In 1945, at the time,

I had just turned 23.

On the sixth of August,

I had a role to play,

um, as the Weapon Test Officer on the Enola Gay

mission to Hiroshima, Japan.

Lawrence Johnston: So, I was a civilian employee

of the University of California,

which was the manager for Los Alamos.

And the job that I ended up doing there

was developing the detonators

that made the Fat Man bomb viable.

Harold Agnew: People say, "What'd you do in those early days?"

And my answer is always,

"Whatever I was told to do."

And I guess, uh,

I wasn't learned enough

or sophisticated enough to appreciate what it meant,

in the long run, for the future of the world.

Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk: When Paul called me, you know, about the project,

and he got a hold of me one night and said,

"Dutch, I'm forming a new group.

He says, "I'd like to have you for my group navigator."

He says, "I can't tell you what it is,

but," he says, "if it works,

we are gonna either significantly shorten or end the war."

Agnew: We had been waiting for the results

of the test in New Mexico,

which we learned had been successful.

Jeppson: Captain Parsons gave a briefing.

He had witnessed the Trinity test,

and he had brought movies to show us.

The projector failed,

so he told about the test.

And he said, truly, it was a gigantic explosion,

maybe in the 10 to 20, uh,

kiloton range.

And that certainly--

those numbers certainly had impact with all of us.

We knew it was going to be a big weapon.

Johnston: The Little Boy bomb was a situation

in which you have uranium-235,

which is almost ready to explode.

And you shoot a slug of uranium

into a hollow cylinder of uranium,

and each of those was almost ready to go off all by itself.

But when you combine the two of them, suddenly,

the chain reaction goes ahead and it explodes.

Agnew: I guess it was the fifth of August,

we were assembled, and it was explained to us

that we were gonna leave early the next morning.

There was a big ceremony there.

Had lights set up, and TV cameras,