Author: Student

I found this article a while back, while researching the plutonium processing at the Hanford site in 1945. Apparently, the Japanese released thousands of airborne incendiary bombs in effort to aimlessly wreak havoc on the US mainland. “On May 5, 1945, a pregnant woman, Elsie Winters Mitchell, and five children were killed by a bomb near Gearhart Mountain in southern Oregon, the only known civilian deaths in the continental United States in the war.”(Shurkin). One of these balloons in particular, didn’t explode, but draped itself over a power line and momentarily cut power to the Hanford plant, forcing a coal fired generator to kick on in order to avert a meltdown disaster. The aimless targeting of primitive balloon based weapons, versus the continued onslaught of US military forces on the Japanese mainland and eventual dropping of atomic weapons, sheds light on the escalating fears of prolonged war for both sides. If this truly is a game of ethics, then these balloons show that both sides were willing to do whatever it took to end the war with fear instead of firepower.

Article is here: https://www.insidescience.org/news/japanese-balloon-attack-almost-interrupted-building-first-atomic-bombs