The bomb and a new scientific and technical landscape

From a technical standpoint, the atomic age was entered with the Trinity test, which took place in July. But almost nobody knew about it. For the world, the atomic age began on August 6, the date that the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On that day, President Harry Truman released a remarkable statement that announced its use.

The statement isn't so much remarkable for what it says about Hiroshima or the wider war. Instead, it's amazingly sweeping in the ways that it recognizes how the atomic bomb has completely changed the very nature of scientific and technical endeavors.

Truman calls the device by its current name and attempts to actually give people a sense of how it operates: "It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the Universe. The force from which the Sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East." In light of what we now know about the differences between fission and fusion, this seems a bit overly simplified. But it does successfully capture how this new bomb was fundamentally different and relied on fundamental properties of physics.