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But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood."
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"I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation," he wrote. "As the man who commanded the last atomic mission," he wrote in War's End, "I pray that I retain that singular distinction."Ī few weeks after the war ended, Sweeney visited Nagasaki with Tibbets. Sweeney also, however, kept a less belligerent view of his place in history. "There's no question in my mind that President Truman made the right decision." "I saw these beautiful young men who were being slaughtered by an evil, evil military force," he said in 1995. He dismissed those who claimed the atomic bombing was unnecessary because, with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese would have surrendered anyway. He always maintained a robust justification of the decision to launch the age of nuclear warfare. Sweeney's job was to drop measuring instruments. The first time Sweeney had seen this radioactive rainbow was just three days before, when he flew another B-29 alongside Colonel Paul Tibbets' Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiro- shima, killing 130,000 people. From the centre of the brownish bile sprung a vertical column, boiling and bubbling up in those rainbow hues - purples, oranges, reds - colours whose brilliance I had seen only once before and would never see again." "I could see a brownish, horizontal cloud enveloping the city below. It was a mesmerising sight, at once breathtaking and ominous. As the only man to witness from the cockpit both atomic blasts, he wrote in his 1997 memoir, War's End, that the Nagasaki explosion was fiercer than the one caused by the uranium bomb on Hiroshima. Immediately after dropping the plutonium bomb, codenamed Fat Man after Winston Churchill, Sweeney turned Bockscar to avoid the blast. 70,000 people died in the blast, which was equivalent to 22,000 tons of TNT, and another 70,000 had succumbed by 1950. It exploded 1,500ft above the Mitsubishi sports stadium, not far from the Catholic cathedral - Nagasaki was Japan's main Christian city - instead of on flatter land near the shipyards, where it would have done more damage. Only when a gap appeared in the clouds above Nagasaki was the bomb released. The original target, the industrial city of Kokura, situated, like Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu, was obscured by clouds and haze. The plane - often called Bock's Car, the name given it by its usual pilot, Captain Fred Bock, but officially described as Bockscar, the name written on its nose - was also forced to fly much further than planned.