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From the 1890s, when the young Ernest Rutherford had left his native New Zealand for Cambridge University's Cavendish laboratory, a community of physicists and chemists from France, Germany, Austria, Britain, Hungary, Denmark, Italy, the US and elsewhere had advanced to the point where atomic power, the stuff of pulp fiction, could be envisaged as reality. That age had predated the first world war, was fissured by Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and was eventually engulfed within the vast US war economy. The weapon which Tibbets delivered was one child of a scientific golden age. The controversy surrounding the raid has never ended and the only presidential invitation Tibbets ever received was from the man who ordered the bombing, Harry Truman. The causal link between Tibbets' mission and Hirohito's announcement remained a hotly debated issue. On August 14 1945, the Japanese emperor broadcast to his people that they must "bear the unbearable" and surrender. Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was A-bombed, with up to 40,000 killed.
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"Fellows," he had said, "you have just dropped the first atom bomb in history." Only Tibbets and US navy captain William "Deke" Parsons - who completed the assembly, and armed Little Boy en route to Japan - had been privy to the secret of the Manhattan Project, the US atomic bomb programme. Shock and horror swept over the 12-strong crew, he recalled. In the aftermath of the bomb's release, Tibbets flung the huge B29 into a 155° turn to avoid destruction. Days later, thousands of incinerated, blackened cadavers still adhered to the streets. The site of the explosion reached a temperature of 5,400☏. Of 320,000 people in that city that morning, 80,000 died immediately or were badly wounded by the A-bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy". Just after 8.15am Japanese time, on August 6 1945, six miles above Hiroshima, a Boeing B29 bomber, the Enola Gay, commanded by Colonel Paul Tibbets, who has died aged 92, carried out the world's first atomic attack.