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Achtung, welcome to We have ways of making you talk with me, Al Murray, James Holland,

and with our special guest, Ian McGregor, for part two of special bombing mission number 13, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

And in the last episode, you took us through the physics of the thing, through the establishment of the Manhattan Project via tube alloys, the development of the B-29, which is as critical to this story as any other part of it. Because otherwise, what are you going to do? Stick it into Lancaster. Well, they had that discussion. Paul Tibitz, Jr. has formed the 509th composite group. He's got them ready. And they've arrived on Tinian, haven't they? They're there. Yeah, they're there.

They're ready to go.

The targets have been selected.

The principal primary target, secondary target and the tertiary target.

So there's lots of contingency built into this.

And I think the thing was really striking at the end of the last episode was the fact that these are tests still.

Neil Armstrong referred to the Apollo 11

moon landing as a test flight. They were seeing if they could do it or not. This is sort of peculiarly

kind of in the same spirit, isn't it? This is right on the edge of what they think they can do.

Will it work? This is why these cities have been selected because they've not been bombed

before. So you could, you know, it's a blank sheet of paper in that regard for the new weapon.

So what are their orders for this bombing mission? You said they've been on Tinian Air Base

for a couple of months. And we should just say for those who don't know, Tinian is an island in the

Marianas. We have talked about its capture in 1944 in an earlier episode. There's roughly about

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