Shell Shock

As part of my research I am currently browsing the 1945 and 1946 editions of the London Daily Herald (long transmogrified into Yer Supersoaraway Sun). As such I was a little taken aback to see an article on May 31, 1945 about an atomic bomb – this would be about seven weeks before Trinity Test and the Potsdam Conference, where Truman fretted about how most opportunely to reveal the Manhattan Project secret to Stalin. True, as you can see below, the reference is brief and dismissive – which makes me wonder if it was a deliberate plant to persuade Japan (or for that matter the USSR) that rumors of the bomb’s existence were unfounded. But are there similar references to atomic weapons in US papers in the spring of 1945?

HRS Phillpott: Globe-Busting Bomb – It Was Coming.

"The ‘Atomic Bomb’. You have never heard it, and you never will, because, according to Lord Darnley, if it ever drops it will destroy not only humanity but the globe itself.

"Lord Darnley was speaking in the House of Lords last night, and declared that this ‘Atomic Bomb’ was ‘three-quarters in preparation’ at the end of the [European] war.

"“If what we are told about the atom is true”, he said, “every atom in the world might be disintegrated and the world would disappear."

(This would be Esme Ivo Bligh, ninth earl, and the son incidentally of Ivo Francis Walter Bligh, former president of the MCC and Kent County Cricket Club and the first English captain of an ‘Ashes’ match with Australia.)