Adam Brown

My landlord has a big library and I just started reading, you know, during deep lockdown, some books in the library and there was just some sort of... So where do you stay?

You're a landlord.

I live in a house that used to belong to the chair of the English department at Stanford.

And then it's never by grandson who rents it to me.

And it was...

He has a very extensive library.

It's very interesting.

And I was going through it during first lockdown and came across this super enigmatic statement in some book about the history of Japan.

And...

was like super fascinated by it and started, for reasons that I'll explain in a moment, then just became obsessed for a few months on reading absolutely everything I could about the bombing of Nagasaki, which is the most recent nuclear weapon ever to be set off during wartime.

And was reasonably controversial because people questioned whether we should have done it or not.

And...

And that wasn't the question I was looking at, actually.

The question I was looking at wasn't should they have ordered it to be done, but were the people who did it even following orders?

And it's a pretty wild story that I didn't know, certainly, before any of this happened, which is…

It was never meant to be a mission to Nagasaki.

It was meant to be a mission to bomb Kokura, a different Japanese city.

But they got there and it was clouded over and they had like very strict instructions.

Do not bomb unless you can see the target.

And that was the order.