1. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light (2nd edition Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 5. One of the first such accounts was The Murder of the U.S.A. by Murray Leinster writing as Will F. Jenkins, which describes the destruction of one-third of the nation in only forty minutes.
2. Ken Cooper, ‘The Whiteness of the Bomb’, in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 105.
3. William L. Laurence, ‘My Life in Atomland’, Men and Atoms (London: Scientific Book Club, 1961), p. 98.
4. Laurence, ‘The Atomic Age Begins’, in Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (1946; London: Museum Press, 1947), pp. 9–10. Laurence revised this description extensively for his collection Men and Atoms (1961).
5. David McCullough, Truman (London and New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp. 443, 455, 456. In public Truman was more upbeat announcing that the bomb was a ‘harnessing of the basic power of the universe’ and declaring America’s custodial responsibilities: ‘we must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force — to prevent its misuse’, Truman, p. 455; ‘Atomic Age’, Time (20 August 1945), p. 29.