Physicist who helped develop A-bomb reflects on experiences in first visit to Hiroshima

Physicist who helped develop A-bomb reflects on experiences in first visit to Hiroshima


Hinton sits in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima's Naka-ku during her first visit to Hiroshima on Aug. 5.
Hinton sits in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima's Naka-ku during her first visit to Hiroshima on Aug. 5.

Joan Hinton, a physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project -- the U.S. drive to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II -- spoke about her experiences during a recent visit to Hiroshima, where tens of thousands of people perished in the Aug. 6, 1945 atomic bomb attack on the city.

Left with a feeling of despair after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that claimed so many lives, Hinton, now 86, moved to China, where she has lived for the past six decades as a dairy farmer.

On Aug. 5, a day before the 63rd anniversary of the Hiroshima attack, Hinton made a visit to the Atomic Bomb Dome, a building in Hiroshima that was left in rubble to serve as a reminder of the atomic bomb's destructive power.

"Awful," she said, looking up at the steel frame of the dome, before carefully reading through the English explanation placed near the structure.

During an interview at a hotel in Hiroshima, Hinton spoke of her experience as a physicist who had thought pure science was supreme, not knowing the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan.

During the world's first atomic bomb experiment in the outskirts of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, Hinton watched with excitement as the mushroom cloud rose into the air. The explosion marked a moment of fruition for the Manhattan Project, which began in 1942 and employed as many as 129,000 people at one stage in a race against Germany and the Soviet Union to develop a nuclear weapon.

"I thought pure science was above everything," Hinton said.

Hinton, a talented young physicist who had already built a device to measure radiation, joined the project in 1944 at the age of 21. She took on the task of purifying plutonium, and was given a "white badge" that gave her access to all data and research facilities in the project -- one of only around 100.

At the time, Hinton says, people didn't think that the bomb would be used to kill many people in the war -- Germany had surrendered unconditionally two months before the nuclear experiment took place.

But on Aug. 6, the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Hinton, who learned about the bombing in the newspaper, was lost for words.

"We didn't know," she said.

After the war, Hinton took part in a movement against the use of nuclear weapons. She traveled to Shanghai, China, in 1948, amid a civil war and later moved to Inner Mongolia.

Questioning her disappearance from the United States, an American magazine labeled her an atom bomb "spy." Her whereabouts became known in 1951, when an English-language paper in China published a letter she addressed to the Federation of American Scientists. Part of the letter read as follows:

"The memory of Hiroshima -- 150 thousand lives. One, two, three, four, five, six ... 150 thousand -- each a living, thinking, human being with hopes and desires, failures and successes, a life of his or her own -- all gone. And I had held that bomb in my hand."

Sixty-three years have passed since that morning when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Even now hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, suffer from aftereffects of the bombing, and there are still people who hate the United States.

It's not easy for Hinton to find words to say to the survivors: "What should I say?"