Monday
A new bomb, announced in a sentence nobody could measure
The White House statement was released while Truman was at sea. Radio read it out with no pictures, no correspondent on the ground, and no idea of the scale — and it still changed the century inside a day.
Opening the day…
The night of
From 11:00 am ET
The bomb fell at 8:15 in the morning Japanese time. Washington released the President's statement at eleven Eastern; Truman was aboard the USS Augusta returning from Potsdam. The networks read it as written — an atomic bomb, more than twenty thousand tons of TNT, a warning of ruin from the air — with no reporting of their own to add.
Afternoon and evening
Frank Phillips read it for the BBC; the Home Service bulletin of that evening survives. Announcers reached for arithmetic because there was nothing else available — tonnage, aircraft equivalents, the size of the research programme. Nobody on the air that day had seen a photograph. Nagasaki followed on the 9th; the surrender broadcast was eight days away.
Where this comes from
