“I never considered stopping”: US physicist’s personal account of Nagasaki’s atomic blast in WW2

A 1975 BBC interview with US physicist Philip Morrison, who helped assemble the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, offers a rare inside account of the decisions behind the 1945 atomic bombings, according to BBC News.

Morrison, who worked under J Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, said the momentum toward using the bomb became unstoppable after President Franklin D Roosevelt’s death, arguing Roosevelt alone had the authority to halt it.

He estimated the bombing killed roughly 40,000 instantly, with more than 100,000 deaths linked to it over five years. Morrison later campaigned against nuclear proliferation.