Part 2: The Day the Sun Rose Twice

I sat there in the attic, the dust motes dancing in the single beam of sunlight cutting through the gloom, feeling the weight of the world in my hands. The leather cover of the journal was cracked, smelling of old tobacco and oxidation. My father, the man I thought I knew—the man who taught me how to throw a curveball and how to change the oil in a Chevy—had been living a double life. Or rather, he had lived a life before us, a life buried in the sands of New Mexico.

I turned the page. The date was strictly noted, but the handwriting was different. It wasn’t the steady, block letters of the engineer I knew. It was hurried, spiked with adrenaline and exhaustion. He was writing about the beginning, about how they got to the desert in the first place.

The Birth of the Manhattan Project

According to Dad’s notes, it didn’t start with a bang, but with a whisper—a terrifying whisper from across the Atlantic. He wrote about late 1938, a time when the world was teetering on the edge. German scientists had split the atom. They discovered that when a uranium atom is bombarded, it releases a massive amount of energy. That was the spark.

Dad wrote: “They found the key to the universe, Jack. But in the hands of the Nazis, it wasn’t a key; it was a lock on our freedom.”

The fear was palpable in his words. The Germans were ahead. They had the lead. And that fear drove the greatest scientific mobilization in human history. He described a letter, signed by none other than Albert Einstein, sent to President Franklin Roosevelt. It was a warning, stark and cold. Einstein warned the White House that this new technology could create weapons capable of destroying humanity. He warned that the Germans could use this “newly fined” technology to build a bomb that could wipe out entire ports and cities.

That letter changed everything. On September 17, 1942, the United States officially began the race. They called it the Manhattan Project.

Reading the numbers in Dad’s journal made my head spin. He wasn’t just one guy in a lab; he was part of a massive, secret army. He wrote that over 130,000 people were involved in the project. The budget was astronomical—two billion dollars poured into the desert to build something the world had never seen.

He described the isolation. Los Alamos, the national laboratory in New Mexico. He called it a “city of secrets.” Every detail, even the smallest screw or wire, was kept absolutely confidential. They were ghosts working in the machine. The scientific director was Robert Oppenheimer, a man my dad described with a mix of reverence and pity, calling him the “father of the atomic cow” (a code word they sometimes used, or maybe just Dad’s grim humor).

They were building two things. Two different types of monsters. One used uranium, the other used plutonium. For three years, they labored. Three years of “pregnancy,” as Dad oddly phrased it, waiting for this terrible child to be born.

The Gadget

I skipped ahead to July 1945. The war in Europe was over. Germany had surrendered. But in the Pacific, the fighting was only getting bloodier. And in the desert, the scientists had finally built it.

They called it “The Gadget”.

The entry for July 16, 1945, was stained with what looked like sweat.

“We are at the Jornada del del Muerto,” he wrote. “The Journey of the Dead Man. Fitting name.”.

It was about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. They hauled the Gadget out there to see if the math was right. To see if they had actually bottled a star. Dad described the tension in the bunker. Men who were atheists were praying. Men who were believers were cursing.

Then, it happened.

(05:00) When the game explodes…

Dad didn’t describe a sound at first. He described the light. “Bright light flashed,” he wrote. “Within just a few seconds, it blinded the stars.”.

He said the heat hit them like a physical blow. It was terrible heat, radiating with an intensity equivalent to the temperature of the sun itself. Think about that. They brought the sun down to the earth.

And then came the cloud. The image that would haunt the 20th century. A giant comb ball, a mushroom-shaped smoke column that punched through the atmosphere, rising up to 12 kilometers high.

The destructive power was calculated at 20,000 tons of TNT.

Dad wrote: “We looked at the monitor. The results far exceeded our expectations. We have opened a new page in human history, but I fear the ink is blood.”.

That was the moment. The “First Step.” They knew it worked. And because they knew it worked, the clock started ticking for Japan.

The Pacific Stalemate

I looked up from the journal, staring at the dust swirling in the light. Outside, a car honked, pulling me back to Ohio, to the present. But my mind was stuck in 1945. Why? Why did they have to use it?

Dad addressed this. He anticipated the question I would ask 80 years later.

He wrote about the state of the war. By August 1945, the Pacific War was coming to an end, but it was a slow, grinding, bloody end. The US military, along with allies, had broken the backbone of the German, Italian, and Japanese alliance. They had won at Midway. They had rained bombs on the Japanese mainland.

But the Japanese were not surrendering.

Dad described the enemy with a grudging respect but a deep frustration. “They are resilient,” he wrote. “They have a spirit of martyrdom. They view death as light as a feather, or a red cage.”.

This was the “Samurai blood”. He wrote about the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific. The Japanese lost more than 77,000 soldiers there. Their fate was sealed. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. But Japan? Japan refused to accept defeat.

“They believe,” Dad noted, “that if they just prolong the war, if they make us bleed enough, America will make concessions.”.

They were wrong. Japan had suicide weapons—the Kamikaze. But America… America now had the atomic bomb.

The Decision: A Million Lives

This was the hardest part to read. The justification. The math of death.

Dad recorded the debates happening high above his pay grade, filtered down through rumors at the base. President Harry Truman, who had taken over after FDR, was angry. He was tired of the telegrams notifying mothers that their sons weren’t coming home.

Even though America was winning, the losses were staggering. Dad wrote down a number that made my stomach turn: 1 million. It was estimated that if the US had to invade the Japanese mainland—Operation Downfall—the number of American soldiers killed could reach up to 1 million.

One million husbands, fathers, and sons.

And there was something else. Something personal.

“We haven’t forgotten,” Dad wrote, underlining the words so hard the paper tore slightly. “We haven’t forgotten December 7, 1941.”.

Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack. The humiliation. The Americans had been attacked by “Australia” (a slip of the pen, he meant the axis forces in the Pacific, launching from the sea) and lost humiliatingly.

President Truman was clear: “When you fight a beast, you use the beast’s methods.” (Paraphrased from Dad’s notes about fighting a “confidant”). Washington politicians believed the bomb would be a “shot in the arm” to kill the enemy’s will.

It had two purposes, Dad noted cynically:

1. End the war quickly.

2. Show Moscow—the Soviet Union—that America held the ultimate card. A weapon that could decide any war.

The Potsdam Warning

Before the horror, there was a chance. A slim one.

In July 1945, President Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration. It was a final warning. He reminded the Japanese that if they sought to prolong the war, the consequences would be dire—more dire than anything they had seen.

But the Japanese authorities didn’t flinch. They mobilized their soldiers for a final stand. They were pinning their hopes on the Soviet Union acting as a mediator, not knowing the Soviets were preparing to turn on them.

They ignored the warning. And so, the machinery of death began to turn.

The Target List: The Luck of Kyoto

I turned the page to a section titled “The Targets.”

Four cities were on the list. Four cities marked for deletion.

1. Kyoto: The cultural heart, the industrial center.

2. Hiroshima: The largest military port, full of warships and ammunition.

3. Yokohama: Military factories.

4. Kokura: The largest arsenal.

Kyoto was the primary target. Dad wrote that it was chosen because it was a gathering place for Japanese intellectuals, science, and technology. If they hit Kyoto, they would wipe out Japanese civilization.

But then, a strange twist of fate occurred. A moment of humanity in the midst of inhuman planning.

Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, stepped in. Dad wrote this anecdote with a sense of disbelief. Stimson had spent his honeymoon in Kyoto. He and his wife had walked those streets. He remembered the beauty of the temples.

Because of a honeymoon decades prior, Stimson struck Kyoto off the list.

“Lucky Kyoto,” Dad scrawled. “So Kokura and Nagasaki became the replacement cards.”.

And Hiroshima… Hiroshima remained at the top.

Little Boy

July 31, 1945. The bomb was ready. They called this one “Little Boy”.

It wasn’t like the “Gadget.” This one used Uranium-235. Dad described it as a monster disguised as machinery. It was 3 meters long, with a diameter of 71 centimeters and a mass of 4,000 kilograms. Inside, it held 64 kilograms of Uranium.

The design was simple, brutally so. It worked like a handgun. Dad drew a small sketch in the margin. “Shoot one piece of uranium into another. When they collide and reach critical mass… boom.”.

The mission was set for August 1st, but a typhoon rolled in. The gods of wind and rain bought Hiroshima five more days of life.

Finally, General Curtis LeMay gave the order. The date was set: August 6, 1945.

Tinian Island: The Night Before

The journal entries shifted location. Tinian Island, Northfield military base.

Noon, August 5th. Dad wasn’t there, but he knew the men who were. He described the scene as military technicians pushed “Little Boy” out of the warehouse.

The pilots stood around, staring at it. They looked worried. They had never seen a bomb like this. It looked like an “armored egg,” Dad wrote. It had strange tail wings, square and boxy, like a ventilation fan.

They sealed the gap in the nose of the bomb. This was the final step. To ensure the internal environment was stable for maximum destruction.

Then, they loaded it.

On the afternoon of August 5, the belly of a massive B-29 bomber opened up. They used a hydraulic elevator to lift Little Boy into the dark hold of the plane.

There were seven planes in total for this mission. Seven B-29s.

• Three for weather observation.

• One for explosion measurement.

• One for filming.

• One standing by in reserve.

• And one to drop the bomb.

The drop plane had a name painted on its nose: Enola Gay. Named after the pilot’s mother.

The commander was Colonel Paul Tibbets.

The Midnight Briefing

It was midnight. August 6, 1945. The pilots gathered for the last time. Dad wrote that only a few of them actually knew what they were carrying. Most just knew it was “special.” They knew it was big.

At 2:45 a.m., the engines of the Enola Gay roared to life. The heavy bomber lumbered down the runway and lifted off into the black sky.

At 3:00 a.m., inside the plane, a bomb expert named William Sterling Parsons climbed into the bomb bay. He was hanging there, suspended in the dark belly of the beast, with the ocean passing underneath. He unplugged a green plug and replaced it with a red one.

The bomb was armed.

The sky was clearing. The clouds were parting. Captain Tibbets received the weather reports. He consulted with the Manhattan Operation Command.

The decision was made. The primary target was clear.

Hiroshima..

The Morning of the End

I could almost feel the cold air of the high altitude as I read the next lines.

6:30 a.m. The Enola Gay began to climb. It was aiming for 31,000 feet.

Below them, the sun was rising over Japan. Dad wrote, “It was a nice weather day.”.

Can you imagine that? A beautiful morning. The sun coming up over the harbor. The water sparkling. People waking up, making tea, getting dressed.

At 7:00 a.m., the Japanese radar in Hiroshima detected the American planes. The air raid sirens began to wail across the city. The eerie, rising and falling mechanical scream that meant death was coming.

But then… nothing happened.

The Japanese army looked at the radar. Only a few planes. Usually, American raids involved hundreds of bombers. This was just… three? Maybe weather planes. Maybe reconnaissance.

To save fuel and preserve their air force, the Japanese command decided not to scramble their fighter jets. They let them pass.

The people of Hiroshima were used to this. After months of air raids, they had become numb to the sound of engines. Most people didn’t panic. They didn’t run to the shelters. They looked up, shielded their eyes from the sun, and went about their day.

Dad wrote about the children. Thousands of school children, around 13 years old, were out in the streets that morning. They had been mobilized to help with construction activities, clearing firebreaks in the city center.

Thousands of kids. In the open. Under the blue sky.

(11:32) No one knew that, in just a few minutes…

No one knew that the sunlight was about to change. No one knew that the sky was about to turn into a “rain of lights”.

The Enola Gay leveled off. The bombardier looked through his sights. The Aioi Bridge—the distinctive T-shaped bridge in the center of the city—came into the crosshairs.

It was 8:15 a.m..

The bomb bay doors opened. The “Little Boy” tumbled out. It fell for 43 seconds.

I closed the journal for a moment. My heart was pounding in my chest. I looked at the old photo of my father again. He looked so young, so innocent. But he knew. He knew what was inside that metal shell falling toward the sleeping city.

He knew that in 43 seconds, the world would break. He knew that the “period of October” (a code, or perhaps a typo in his mind for the harvest) was over. They weren’t planting seeds anymore.

“Americans began planning to grow mushrooms on the Japanese mainland,” he had written on the first page .

And now, the first mushroom was about to bloom.

I took a deep breath of the stale attic air and opened the journal again to read the nightmare that followed.

(End of Part 2)

Part 3: The Rain of Light

The silence in the attic was heavy, a physical weight pressing against my chest. I had been sitting there for hours, the light from the small window shifting across the floorboards as the afternoon wore on. I was no longer in Ohio. I was no longer a man in his sixties clearing out his father’s estate. I was adrift in the Pacific, suspended in the terrifying void between a decision and its consequence.

My father’s journal lay open on my lap, the pages crinkled and worn. The ink here was different—darker, pressed harder into the paper, as if the pen itself was trying to carve the words into history. He had written these entries in the days following the event, likely in a state of shock, trying to process the data coming back from the “consultants” and the reconnaissance planes.

I took a sip of the stale water I’d brought up with me, my throat dry, and began to read again. We were at the precipice. The Enola Gay was in the air. The clock was ticking toward 8:15.

The Forty-Three Seconds

Dad’s handwriting became jagged here, almost illegible. He wasn’t on the plane, but he had re-lived this moment a thousand times in his mind, reconstructing it from the pilot’s debriefings and the technical data.

“It is a physics problem, Jack,” he wrote, though he wasn’t writing to me then. He was writing to his own conscience. “It is a matter of time and gravity. When the bay doors opened, the boy fell.”

At exactly 8:15 a.m., the bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay swung open. The mechanism released the weapon they called Little Boy. It wasn’t just a bomb; it was four and a half tons of armored death, shaped like a grotesque egg.

Dad described the fall. It lasted exactly 43 seconds.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it. Forty-three seconds. That’s enough time to take a deep breath. To tie a shoe. To say a prayer. For the people of Hiroshima, it was the last forty-three seconds of the world as they knew it.

Below, the city was waking up. Dad had noted the details with a sickening precision. It was a beautiful morning. The sun had just risen, casting long shadows over the delta. The air raid sirens had gone silent because the Japanese radar operators, seeing only three planes, assumed it was a reconnaissance mission and wanted to save fuel. They didn’t scramble the fighters. They didn’t send the people to the shelters.

Thousands of children, middle school students around 13 years old, were in the city center. They were mobilized for “construction activities,” clearing firebreaks to protect the city from conventional firebombing. They were outside. They were looking up.

And then, the timer hit zero.

The Second Sun

“We didn’t just drop a bomb,” Dad wrote. “We ignited a star.”

At an altitude of about 550 meters (1,800 feet) above the ground, the internal radar of Little Boy triggered the firing mechanism. Inside the bomb, a cordite charge fired a uranium projectile into a uranium target. Critical mass was achieved.

The result was an energy release equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT.

But numbers are cold. Dad tried to describe the reality. “Bright light flashed,” he wrote. “Within just a few seconds… terrible heat radiated with heat equivalent to the temperature of the sun”.

The first thing wasn’t the sound. It was the light. A light so intense it bleached the colors out of the world. It turned the morning sunlight into a “rain of lights”.

Then came the heat. The air itself was heated by the nuclear reaction to thousands of degrees. On the ground, directly below the hypocenter, the temperature spiked to 4,000 degrees Celsius.

I stopped reading. 4,000 degrees. Iron melts at 1,500. Steel melts at 1,300. At 4,000 degrees, human beings don’t burn; they evaporate.

Dad wrote about the “shadows.” It was a detail that seemed to haunt him more than anything else. “There are people who even turn into dust just to get shadows on the walls,” he scrawled.

The flash was so intense and so fast that if a person was standing in front of a wall, their body blocked the thermal radiation, leaving a dark, unburned shadow on the concrete while the rest of the wall was bleached white. A permanent silhouette of a final moment. A person pulling a cart. A child jumping rope. An old man holding a cane. Vaporized in a microsecond, leaving only their shadow as a testament that they ever existed.

The Mushroom and the Silence

“The pilots saw it,” Dad wrote. “Even they were horrified.”.

From the cockpit of the Enola Gay, Colonel Tibbets and his crew felt the shockwave hit the plane. They looked back. Hiroshima was gone. In its place was a “giant mushroom cloud”. A column of boiling smoke, dust, and debris rising miles into the atmosphere.

Below that cloud, the city was suffering “flat floors”. The blast wave flattened everything in a 1.6-kilometer radius. 90% of the houses in the city were instantly destroyed.

Dad’s notes contained the early casualty estimates, numbers that would rise and rise as the years went on. “70,000 people died immediately,” he wrote.

Seventy thousand. In the blink of an eye. One moment, they were there; the next, they were part of the dust cloud rising into the stratosphere.

Those who survived the initial flash faced a “cyber firestorm”. The heat was so intense it ignited the air. The wooden houses of Hiroshima turned into kindling. A massive firestorm swept through the ruins, sucking in oxygen and suffocating those trapped in the rubble.

And the watches. Dad mentioned a report from a recovery team. “All the watches found died at 8:15,” he wrote. It was as if time itself had decided to stop out of respect, or perhaps out of horror.

The Response from the Sea

I turned the page. The narrative shifted from the horror on the ground to the cold, hard steel of a battleship.

Two hours after the bombing, while Hiroshima was still burning, the news reached the world. President Harry Truman was aboard the cruiser USS Augusta, returning from the Potsdam Conference.

Dad had pasted a clipping of the transcript into the journal. Truman’s voice, broadcast over the radio to millions of American families, was firm.

“We have successfully harnessed the fundamental power of the universe,” Truman declared.

He warned the Japanese leadership. He told them that they were now being “reimbursed” for Pearl Harbor, but “many times over”.

“If they do not immediately accept the terms of surrender,” Truman said, “they will again be subjected to rains of fire from the air, things that have never been seen on earth”.

“Rain of ruin,” Dad had written in the margins. “We promised them hell, and we delivered it.”

But in the days that followed, the silence from Tokyo was deafening. The Japanese government was in chaos. The politicians were divided. Some wanted to surrender; others, the hardliners in the military, wanted to fight to the death. They still hoped that the Soviet Union would mediate a peace deal. They didn’t know that Stalin was preparing to invade Manchuria. They viewed the bomb as a “new type” of weapon, but they didn’t fully grasp that America had more than one.

They thought maybe we only had one.

Dad knew better. He knew about Fat Man.

The Three Days of Waiting

The days between August 6 and August 9 were a blur of activity in Dad’s journal. The scientists at Tinian were working around the clock.

“They haven’t surrendered,” Dad wrote on August 8. “We have to do it again. God help us, we have to do it again.”

The US military began a psychological warfare campaign. Radio stations on the island of Saipan broadcast warnings to Japan. American planes dropped 6 million leaflets on 47 major Japanese cities.

The leaflets warned the civilians. They told them that their government was leading them to destruction. But the Japanese people were trapped. The “Kempeitai” (military police) controlled information. And the Japanese spirit of martyrdom was strong.

Dad noted the intelligence reports: “Japan still has 5 million troops and 10,000 aircraft,” he wrote. “More than half are Kamikaze. They have fuel for 7 months”.

The invasion—Operation Downfall—was still the alternative. And the alternative meant a million American dead. So, the second bomb was prepped.

This one was different. Fat Man.

Dad described it with a technician’s eye. “It is a beast,” he wrote. “Round, ugly, and deadly.”

Unlike Little Boy, which was long and slender, Fat Man was bulbous. It was 3.3 meters long and 1.5 meters in diameter. It weighed 4,700 kilograms.

But the real difference was inside. Little Boy used uranium. Fat Man used a core of plutonium-239. It was an “implosion” type bomb. Dad explained the mechanism: high explosives surrounded the plutonium core. When detonated, they would crush the plutonium inward until it reached “subcritical mass” and exploded.

It was more complex, more powerful, and more dangerous than the Hiroshima bomb.

The mission was scheduled for August 11. But the weather gods were fickle. A storm was approaching. The forecast was bad.

“We are pushing it forward,” Dad wrote. “Three days early. We go on August 9.”.

The Flight of the Boxcar

The second mission was cursed from the start. Dad’s entries reflected the anxiety at the base. Everything that went smooth with the Enola Gay seemed to go wrong with this one.

The bomb was loaded onto a B-29 named Bockscar (Dad spelled it “Boxcar” in his notes). The commander was Major Charles Sweeney, a young man, only 25 years old.

Think about that. A 25-year-old kid with the power to destroy a city at his fingertips.

The plane took off in the middle of the night. There were technical issues. A fuel pump for the reserve tank wasn’t working. They were burning fuel faster than they should.

And the target wasn’t Nagasaki. Not initially.

The Target was Kokura.

Dad wrote about Kokura with a strange sense of irony. Kokura was the city of arsenals. It was where the Japanese army built their weapons. It was the primary target.

When Bockscar arrived over Kokura, the city was waiting. But not with guns. With smoke.

Two nights earlier, American B-29s had firebombed a nearby city, Yawata, specifically targeting a steel factory. The fires were still burning. Thick, black smoke drifted over Kokura, mixing with the morning clouds.

“The city hid itself,” Dad wrote. “Clouds and smoke covered 70% of the area”.

Major Sweeney tried. He made three passes over the city. Three times, the bombardier looked for the aiming point. Three times, he saw only whiteness.

They spent 50 minutes circling. The Japanese anti-aircraft fire was getting closer. The “Yawata wire defense system” was tracking them. And the fuel gauge was dropping.

They had to make a choice. Dump the bomb in the ocean, or go to the secondary target.

“Nagasaki,” Dad wrote. “The replacement card.”.

The Valley of Urakami

Nagasaki was different. It wasn’t a flat delta like Hiroshima. It was a city of hills and valleys, located at the end of a long river. It was a major military port and a shipbuilding center. It was home to the Mitsubishi factories that produced the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.

At 7:50 a.m., the air raid sirens had sounded in Nagasaki, but then the “all clear” was given at 8:30 a.m.. Like in Hiroshima, they thought the two B-29s were just surveillance planes. They didn’t send fighters. They didn’t hide.

The Bockscar arrived over Nagasaki just before 11:00 a.m.

But here, too, the weather was fighting them. Clouds covered the city. The pilot was running on fumes. They had enough fuel for one pass. Just one. If they couldn’t see the target, they would have to drop the bomb using radar—which was inaccurate and against orders—or dump it in the sea.

Then, a hole opened in the sky.

Dad described it as “lucky for us, unlucky for them.” The bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, saw a gap in the clouds. He saw the Urakami Valley below.

At exactly 11:01 a.m., Fat Man was released.

The Implosion

The bomb fell for 43 seconds, just like its brother. But when it detonated, it was different.

“It exploded at nearly 500 meters,” Dad wrote.

The explosion was more powerful than Hiroshima. Fat Man released an energy equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT.

The mushroom cloud that rose over Nagasaki was even bigger. It punched through the clouds, boiling and collapsing, reaching a height of 18.2 kilometers.

But there was a mistake. A small, miraculous mistake. The bomb missed the city center. It detonated about 3.2 kilometers off target. It exploded over the Urakami Valley.

The hills of Nagasaki shielded parts of the city. They contained the blast. But for the Urakami Valley, there was no shield.

“The valley disappeared,” Dad wrote simply.

The Mitsubishi Munition factory was there. 7,500 people were working inside. 6,200 of them were killed instantly.

The destruction was absolute. The blast wind tore through the valley at 1,000 kilometers per hour. It flattened factories, schools, and homes. It buried the river.

40,000 people died instantly.

Dad’s journal described the scene on the ground, pieced together from later reports. It was a hellscape.

“The survivor walked unharmed through the rubble,” he wrote, “but the injuries they saw were more painful than death.”.

He described victims with their skin “stuck to their arms and legs like the ocean current”. Faces swollen beyond recognition. Bodies scorched black.

And still, they didn’t know what it was.

The Invisible Killer

The days following the bombings were filled with confusion. The Japanese doctors were baffled.

“They think it is dysentery,” Dad wrote, his handwriting shaky. “They see diarrhea. They see vomiting. They don’t know it’s the invisible fire.”.

Radiation.

In 1945, the average person didn’t understand radiation sickness. The survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the Hibakusha—wandered through the ruins searching for their families. They drank the black rain that fell from the mushroom clouds. They breathed the dust.

They didn’t know they were inhaling death.

Dad listed the symptoms that started appearing days later: “Hair loss. Blood flows from the nose, mouth, and ears.”.

People who seemed fine, who had no external injuries, would suddenly collapse and die. Their white blood cells were destroyed. Their bodies were rotting from the inside out.

Dad’s guilt began to seep into the pages here. He realized that the “Gadget” wasn’t just an explosive. It was a poison. A poison that would linger for years.

“We killed them twice,” he wrote. “Once with fire, and once with the invisible light.”

By early 1946, the death toll in Nagasaki would rise to 80,000. Five years later, it would be 140,000. Most would die of leukemia and cancer, dying in “pain”.

Combined with Hiroshima, the total number of deaths would eventually be estimated at over 400,000 people.

The End of the War

On August 15, 1945, six days after Nagasaki, it ended.

The Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, took to the radio. It was the first time the Japanese people had ever heard his voice. He announced the unconditional surrender to the allies.

“In the face of terrifying destructive power,” he said.

World War II was officially over.

In the United States, there was jubilation. Dad described the parties. The kissing in Times Square. The relief. The boys were coming home. No invasion. No one million dead Americans.

But in Los Alamos, the mood was different. Dad wrote about a quiet drink he had with a colleague. They didn’t toast. They just sat there, looking at the desert stars.

“We won,” Dad wrote on the final page of that section. “But I wonder if we have lost our souls.”

He mentioned the controversy that was already starting to brew. Some people were already calling it a “crime against humanity”. Others said it was necessary, that it saved lives.

Dad was torn. He knew the logic. He knew about Pearl Harbor. He knew about the brutality of the Pacific War. But he also knew about the shadows on the walls. He knew about the children in the Urakami Valley.

“We pushed the world into a new arms race,” he predicted. “A nuclear race.”.

I closed the journal. The sun had set outside the attic window. The room was dark, save for the streetlight filtering in. I felt a profound sense of sorrow, not just for the victims, but for my father. He had carried this secret for eighty years. He had lived his life, raised a family, fixed cars, and watched baseball, all while the ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki whispered in his ear.

I thought about the paper cranes. I had seen them mentioned in a later entry, a scribble about a girl named Sadako. I knew I had to find that entry. I had to know how he made peace with it.

I reached into the box again. Underneath the journals, there was a small, colorful square of paper. And another. And another.

My hand brushed against something sharp. I pulled it out.

It was a paper crane. Folded with precision. Folded by hands that had helped build the sun.

[End of Part 3]

Part 4: The Paper Cranes

The attic had grown cold. The sun had long since dipped below the horizon, leaving me in the twilight of the Ohio evening. The single bulb hanging from the rafters cast long, swaying shadows against the insulation and the stacks of cardboard boxes. I was shivering, but not from the temperature. I was shivering from the ghost story I was living.

I had read through the fire. I had read through the blinding light of the Trinity test. I had read through the “rain of ruin” that fell on Hiroshima and the “implosion” that swallowed the Urakami Valley in Nagasaki. I had read the statistics: 140,000 dead in one city, 70,000 in another, the numbers rising like a fever that wouldn’t break.

But the journal didn’t end in August 1945. There were more pages. Many more pages.

My father, the engineer, the quiet man who fixed toasters and watched Sunday football, didn’t leave the war in the desert. He brought it home. He folded it up and tucked it into the corners of his mind, just like he tucked these journals into this rusted box.

I turned the page to the section marked “Post-War.”

The Great Silence (1945–1955)

The handwriting in this section was different again. In the desert, it had been jagged, fueled by adrenaline and the manic energy of discovery. During the bombings, it had been heavy, pressed hard into the paper with the weight of guilt. But here, in the years after the war, the script was small, tight, and controlled. It was the handwriting of a man trying to keep himself from falling apart.

“We are heroes,” he wrote in September 1945. “That is what they tell us. The neighbors bring casseroles. The newspapers call us the architects of victory. They say we saved a million American lives. They say we brought the boys home.”

He described the parades. The ticker tape in New York. The sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. The sheer, unadulterated relief of a nation that had been holding its breath for four years.

“But when I walk down the street,” Dad wrote, “I don’t see the confetti. I see the shadows. I look at the brick wall of the bakery, and I wonder if the silhouette of the baker would be burned into it if the sun came down right now.”

This was the secret life of the Manhattan Project veterans. They were reintegrated into society, sworn to secrecy about the specifics of their work, yet burdened with the knowledge of what that work had actually done. Dad went back to school. He got his degree. He met my mother. He bought this house in Ohio. He built a life that looked, from the outside, like the perfect American Dream.

But the journal told a different story.

“I dream of the light,” an entry from 1948 read. “I wake up sweating, thinking the sun has risen in the middle of the night. Martha [my mother] thinks it’s just the war nerves. She thinks I was in logistics. I let her believe it. How can I tell her that I helped build the oven?”

He described the onset of the Cold War with a terrifying clarity. While the rest of the country was building backyard bomb shelters and teaching kids to “duck and cover,” Dad knew the truth. He knew that a wooden desk wouldn’t save you from a sun. He knew that the “civil defense” was a comforting lie.

“We have let the genie out of the bottle,” he wrote in 1950, when the news broke that the Soviets had their own bomb. “And now the genie is arming everyone. We thought we were ending the war. We were just starting the long goodbye.”

For ten years, he lived in this silent purgatory. He went to work. He raised me. I was born in 1952. He wrote about my birth with a heartbreaking tenderness mixed with fear.

“Jack was born today. Ten fingers, ten toes. Perfect. I held him and checked him for… I don’t know what. I checked him for the invisible fire. I checked him to make sure he wasn’t made of ash. He is beautiful. I must protect him. I must make sure he never sees the flash.”

I wiped a tear from my cheek. I remembered him hovering over me when I was a kid, always so protective, always checking the windows during storms. I thought he was just a worrier. I didn’t know he was guarding me against the apocalypse.

The Girl with the Cranes (1955)

The journal entries became sparse in the early 50s, mostly mundane details about work and bills. But then, in 1955, the writing exploded again. It was frantic, emotional, smeared with ink blots.

He had found a story. A news clipping was taped onto the page, yellow and brittle, from a magazine.

“The Girl Who Wanted to Live.”

It was the story of Sadako Sasaki.

I read the clipping, and then I read Dad’s reaction.

“She was two years old,” Dad wrote. “Two years old when we dropped the Little Boy. She was at home, about a mile from ground zero. The blast blew her out of the window. She survived. She grew up. She was a fast runner. She had a future.”

The article detailed how Sadako, at age 11, suddenly collapsed while running. The diagnosis was leukemia. The “A-bomb disease.” The radiation had been sleeping in her bone marrow for a decade, waiting.

Dad’s reaction to this was visceral.

“It didn’t stop in 1945,” he wrote, the pen nearly tearing the paper. “We are still killing them. We are killing children who were in diapers when we pushed the button. It’s a bullet that keeps traveling through time.”

The story of Sadako became an obsession for him. He tracked every piece of news about her. He wrote about the Japanese legend she clung to: The Senbazuru. The legend that if you fold 1,000 origami paper cranes, the gods will grant you a wish.

Sadako’s wish was simple: “I want to live.”

Dad chronicled her struggle in his journal as if she were his own daughter. He wrote about her using medicine wrappers, scraps of gift wrap, anything she could find to fold the cranes. He wrote about her pain, the swelling in her legs, the blood spots that appeared on her skin—the purple marks of the “atomic curse.”

“She reached 644,” Dad wrote. “Some reports say she finished the 1,000. Others say she died before she could. But she kept folding. Even when her fingers were swollen and she could barely move, she folded.”

October 25, 1955. The entry was just three words.

“She is dead.”

Sadako Sasaki died at the age of 12. The exact age of the thousands of students who were clearing firebreaks in Hiroshima on that August morning. The exact age I was when Dad taught me how to throw a baseball.

Underneath those three words, Dad had written something that chilled me to the bone.

“I killed her. I didn’t fly the plane. I didn’t give the order. But I did the math. I tightened the bolts. I made the fire that burned her blood ten years later. Her death is on my hands.”

The Penance

I set the journal down. The attic felt suffocating. I needed to see. I needed to understand what he did with this guilt.

I looked back into the rusted metal box. Beneath the journals, there was a layer of old newspapers. I lifted them up.

My breath hitched in my throat.

Under the newspapers, the box was filled—packed tight—with color.

Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.

Paper cranes.

They were everywhere. Tiny ones, no bigger than a fingernail. Large ones made from stiff construction paper. Cranes made from lined notebook paper, from receipts, from candy wrappers. They were strung together on threads, creating long, colorful garlands that spilled out of the box like a waterfall of memory.

I reached in and pulled out a string. It was heavy. The paper was old, some of it faded almost to white, some of it still vibrant.

Suddenly, a memory unlocked in my brain. A memory from my childhood that I had completely forgotten.

I was maybe seven or eight years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I had walked into the garage looking for my bike pump. Dad was sitting at his workbench. He wasn’t fixing anything. He was sitting there with a small square of paper, his large, calloused engineer’s hands moving with delicate precision.

“What are you making, Dad?” I had asked.

He had jumped, startled, and quickly swept the paper into a drawer.

“Nothing, Jack,” he had said, his voice tight. “Just… keeping my hands busy. Just testing the tensile strength of the paper.”

“It looked like a bird,” I said.

He looked at me then, with eyes that looked a thousand years old. “It’s just a shape, son. Just geometry.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know that every fold was a prayer. I didn’t know that every crease was an apology.

I went back to the journal. The entries after 1955 changed. They became less about the horror and more about the ritual.

“I started today,” he wrote in November 1955. “I cannot bring her back. I cannot bring any of them back. But I can fold. One crane for Sadako. One crane for the boy who vanished. One crane for the shadow on the bridge.”

He did the math, because he was an engineer.

“If I fold one a day, it will take me three years to reach a thousand. That is not enough. There were 400,000 lives. If I fold ten a day, it will take me a hundred years. I will never finish. But I must start.”

And so, he folded. He folded in the garage. He folded in his office during lunch breaks. He folded late at night when my mother and I were asleep. He folded his guilt into the sharp angles of the paper birds.

The Monument (1958)

In 1958, the journal recorded another pivotal moment. The inauguration of the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

Dad had pasted a picture of the statue. It was a girl standing on top of a bomb-shaped dome, holding a golden crane above her head. The girl was modeled after Sadako.

Beneath the photo, Dad had copied the inscription from the base of the statue. He had written it in big, block letters, pressing so hard the pen had gone through the page.

THIS IS OUR CRY. THIS IS OUR PRAYER. PEACE IN THE WORLD.

“This is the only way,” Dad wrote. “We cannot undo the atom. We cannot un-split the nucleus. But we can build monuments. We can remember. The moment we forget is the moment we drop the third one.”

He wrote about the “Paper Crane Club,” the group of Sadako’s classmates who had raised the money for the statue. He marveled at their strength.

“These children,” he wrote, “survived the hell we created, and instead of asking for revenge, they built a statue asking for peace. They are better than us. They are infinitely better than us.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

I kept reading. The years passed in the journal. 1959. 1960. 1961. The pile of cranes in the box must have been growing, hidden away in the dark.

Then came October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis.

The world held its breath. Russian missiles were in Cuba. American ships were blockading the island. Nuclear war seemed inevitable.

Dad’s journal entries during those 13 days were terrifying.

“They are going to do it,” he wrote on October 24, 1962. “They are going to finish what we started. I know the yield of the Soviet warheads. I know the blast radius. If they hit D.C., the fallout will drift over Ohio. I looked at Jack today at breakfast. He is ten years old. The same age as Sadako was before the leukemia took her.”

He described a plan. He had mapped out a route to a cave system in Kentucky. He had stockpiled canned food. He wasn’t relying on the government’s civil defense plan. He knew the physics of the blast too well.

“I will not let my son burn,” he wrote. “I will not let his shadow be left on the wall.”

But the crisis passed. The ships turned back. The world exhaled.

Dad didn’t exhale.

“We got lucky,” he wrote. “We are playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. We clicked on an empty chamber this time. But the gun is still in our hand.”

The Long Twilight

The journal continued for decades, though the entries became more sporadic as he got older. He wrote about the Vietnam War, the Cold War detente, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Through it all, the theme remained the same: the fear of the weapon he helped create.

He wrote about the nuclear arms race—the “MAD” doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction).

“MAD,” he wrote. “Appropriate acronym. We are mad. We have built enough weapons to destroy the earth fifty times over. Why? Is once not enough?”

As I read the entries from the 80s and 90s, I saw a man coming to terms with his mortality. He retired. He became a grandfather when my own daughter, Emily, was born.

There was a sweet, sad entry about Emily.

“Jack brought the baby over today. She is tiny. Soft. I held her, and I saw the cranes. I realized that every crane I folded was a wish for her, too. A wish that she grows up in a world where the sky never turns to fire.”

He never told me. He never told Emily. He kept the wall up until the very end.

The Final Entry

The last entry was dated just three weeks ago. His handwriting was shaky, the tremors of age making the letters waver like smoke.

“I am tired, Jack. The doctor says my heart is failing. It’s funny. I worried about radiation for 80 years, and it’s just my old heart giving out.”

“I am leaving this box for you. I don’t know if you will understand. I don’t know if you will forgive me. I was a young man. I thought I was a patriot. I thought I was saving the world. I didn’t know that to save the world, we would have to break it.”

“I have folded 64,000 cranes. I kept count. One for every survivor who died later. I didn’t reach 140,000. I ran out of time. I ran out of paper.”

“Please, Jack. Don’t throw them away. They are not just paper. They are my soul. They are my apology to the children of the Urakami Valley. They are my prayer for you.”

“Take them to the water. Or burn them and let the smoke go to the sky. Do whatever you must. But know this: I loved you. And I loved the world, even after I helped burn it.”

“This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace.”

The entry ended there. The pen had trailed off the page.

The Legacy

I sat in the attic for a long time, staring at the last words. Peace.

I looked at the box of cranes. 64,000. It was a staggering number. A lifetime of folding. A lifetime of silent atonement.

I reached in and picked up a handful. They rustled softly, like dry leaves. Some were made from the backs of old electric bills. Some were made from wrapping paper from my childhood Christmases. I recognized the pattern of a Santa Claus on one wing. He had taken the remnants of our happy life and folded them into prayers for the dead.

I stood up, my knees cracking. I felt heavy, but also strangely light. The secret was out. The ghost was named.

I knew what I had to do.

I couldn’t burn them. I couldn’t let the smoke disappear. That felt too much like the bomb itself.

I carefully packed the journals back into the box. I took the strings of cranes, careful not to tangle them. I carried them downstairs, out of the attic, into the living room where the American flag still sat folded on the table.

I went to the computer. I looked up the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I looked up the Sadako Legacy organization.

I found an address.

My father couldn’t finish the count. He couldn’t fold enough to save everyone. But he had tried.

I sat down at his desk—the same desk where he had folded these birds for forty years—and I pulled out a fresh sheet of paper.

I am not an engineer. I don’t know how to build a bomb. I don’t know how to split an atom. But I watched him. I watched his hands that day in the garage.

I folded the paper in half. Then in half again. I made the triangle. I folded the wings. I made the neck. I made the head.

It was clumsy. It wasn’t perfect like his. But it was a crane.

Crane number 64,001.

I held it up to the light.

“This is for you, Dad,” I whispered into the quiet house.

I would send the cranes to Hiroshima. I would send his journals, too, if they would take them. His story didn’t belong in an attic in Ohio. It belonged to the world. It belonged with Sadako.

The war was over. The bomb had dropped. The shadows were burned into the walls. We couldn’t change that. We couldn’t bring back the 140,000. We couldn’t undo the “rain of light.”

But we could remember. We could fold. We could keep the prayer alive.

I walked to the window and looked out at the street. The streetlights were on. The world was asleep, unaware of the history buried in its attics.

I placed the paper crane on the windowsill.

This is our cry. This is our prayer.

Peace in the world.

(End of the Story)