USA Killer in Hiroshima Dead

(November, 02, Ohio, Sri Lanka Guardian) Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., the Army Air Forces pilot whose bombing run over Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 introduced nuclear war, died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.

Brig. Gen. Tibbets suffered from a variety of ailments and died of heart failure, said longtime friend Gerry Newhouse.

The pilot never apologized for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and immediately killed at least 80,000 people.

To him and millions of supporters, dropping the atomic bomb was a justifiable means of shortening World War II, preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen that military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.

"I never lost a night's sleep over it," Brig. Gen. Tibbets had said.

But to millions of detractors, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima exemplified man's inhumanity to man, an act that left the world teetering on the brink of self-annihilation.

"I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed a letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made," said pioneering physicist Albert Einstein, one of the first to conceive of such a weapon.

Brig. Gen. Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the Enola Gay, the propeller-driven, four-engine bomber, named for his mother, that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

(Agencies)