When The Valdosta Daily Times hit doorsteps 70 years ago today, a banner headline running two lines deep ushered in a new age.

“ATOMIC BOMB, EQUALING MORE THAN 20,000 TONS OF TNT, USED ON JAPAN”

It was followed by a second headline: “2,000 TIMES AS POWERFUL AS ANY PREVIOUS BOMB; BASIC UNIVERSE POWER”

For those of us who grew up in the nuclear age, who have always known of “The Bomb,” it’s hard to fathom the impact, the mystery, the power of the headlines announcing the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Aug. 6, 1945 marked the general public’s first knowledge that an atomic bomb existed. John Q. Public didn’t even know such a thing was being developed. People working the various components of the atomic bomb didn’t know what they were working on. The military hadn’t been certain the $2 billion sunk into the project would even produce results.

Having lived through the horrors and violence of two world wars, the American public of 1945 was more attuned to the deadly destruction of bombs and battles than subsequent generations.

Yet, it’s unlikely even they could immediately grasp the atomic bomb’s capacity for dealing destruction and death.

Not on the day of that initial announcement anyway.

It would be quite a while later before most Americans learned an estimated 40,000-70,000 people died instantly when the bomb fell on Hiroshima with 100,000 more to die in subsequent months from radiation poisoning and burns.

For a comparative example, it’s hard to imagine, even for the generations who have lived in the nuclear age, a bomb that could wipe out the entire population of modern Valdosta and the surrounding area, let alone how it would have decimated the smaller population of our region many times over 70 years ago.

Americans of 1945 didn’t realize either to what extent the atomic bomb would change the face of the world in the coming decades.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the news meant one thing — the possible surrender of Japan minus countless thousands of additional American soldiers losing their lives by invading the nation island by island.

To most Americans, The Bomb was a hero, a savior.

President Harry S. Truman announced that the bomb harnessed the “basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

He could have said, “Superman is real, and he is an American,” and it would have been no more powerful or stranger news.

Today, criticism comes from many U.S. citizens who believe dropping the bomb on Hiroshima followed by Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, unnecessary.

Most of this criticism, however, comes from Americans born after World War II, those who didn’t fight its battles or lose loved ones or even collect materials for the war effort on the home front.

An invasion of Japan would have been cataclysmic to U.S. forces, according to many historians.

With American policy seeking the unconditional surrender of Japan, some military sources believed the U.S. invasion force would face fierce and desperate resistance from Japanese soldiers and citizens. Many Japanese leaders believed “fighting to their last man” preferable to surrender.

U.S. estimates of how many American soldiers would die in an invasion of Japan varied. One U.S. source, however, using the 35 percent American casualty rate of Okinawa as a guide, noted that of an invasion force of approximately 766,000 U.S. soldiers as many as 268,000 would die.

As atomic bomb testing proved successful in 1945, some of the project’s scientists believed the results should be made public.

These scientists hoped the Japanese would surrender if they knew America had such a destructive weapon, making it unnecessary to actually drop it on Japan. Most military experts did not take this advice seriously. They did not believe a simple demonstration would urge Japan to surrender.

Why?

For five months in 1945, American bombers dropped conventional bombs on 66 Japanese cities which left 8 million people homeless, 1.3 million injured, and approximately 900,000 people dead, according to historian David M. Kennedy, and these firestorm bombings still did not compel Japan to surrender.

Given these horrific losses, American military leaders felt nothing short of a demonstration of an atomic bomb on a Japanese city would possibly urge Japan’s unconditional surrender and potentially avoid a full-scale invasion.

With the Potsdam Proclamation, the Allies served notice without defining an ultimatum. The proclamation basically ordered Japan to surrender or else. Japan ignored the proclamation.

President Truman and other Allied leaders had no qualms about the atomic bomb’s purpose or use.

“I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used,” Truman noted.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later said, “The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a lone B-29 bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima.

The Enola Gay dropped its payload of one bomb.

Even with the full force of the atomic bomb devastating Hiroshima, Japan did not immediately surrender.

Unconditional surrender did not come until Aug. 10, following Russia’s Aug. 8 declaration of war on Japan, and the deaths of another 70,000 people with the Aug. 9 dropping of a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

Though never used since on a population, The Bomb and nuclear weapons dominated geo-politics for the next several decades.

By the late 1940s, Russia had atomic weapons, spawning a Cold War stalemate that lasted 50 years between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Threat of nuclear annihilation permeated our lives and cultures during the Cold War era.

A generation of children was led to believe that a wooden school desk could protect them from an atomic or nuclear blast if they crouched under it just right. Signs indicating the location of fallout shelters in buildings were familiar sights.

The Bomb was an underlying fear, a shadow looming over the day-to-day life of America, and these fears were heightened by boiling points — such as the space race, the Cuban missile crisis, wars, etc. — in U.S.-Soviet relations.

These apprehensions and fears ran deep in American culture from James Bond to “Fail Safe” to Slim Pickens rodeo-riding a falling bomb in “Dr. Stangelove,” which was appropriately subtitled, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb.” There weren’t too many choices. You could worry all you wanted but The Bomb was still out there.

Since the end of the Cold War, fear of nuclear destruction has decreased, though the number of nations with nuclear arsenals has increased. Fear of The Bomb has been replaced by fear of terrorism.

In September 1945, U.S. War Department consultant William E. Laurence wrote of watching the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

Of the growing mushroom cloud, he wrote, “It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being born before our incredulous eyes.”

For 70 years now, we have been living with that being and it has been living with us.