The Manchester Guardian’s initial report of the Hiroshima bomb explained that it was the result, as its headline related, of “Immense Co-Operative Effort by Ourselves and US”. Beyond a tiny elite, the weapon that would “radically alter the military and diplomatic power of the USA” and define the strategic politics of the post-war world, was unheard of and unimagined. The Manhattan Project, whose team of American, British and Canadian scientists had designed and assembled atomic bombs at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, was an intensely guarded secret.
