Read the Manhattan Project when ya getta chance. The fact that the US had only three bombs was a closely-held secret.

"At 5:29:45 (Mountain War Time) on July 16, 1945, in a white blaze that stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the still-dark skies, "The Gadget" ushered in the Atomic Age. The light of the explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at 360 feet per second, reddening and pulsing as it cooled. The characteristic mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor materialized at 30,000 feet. Beneath the cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade green radioactive glass created by the heat of the reaction.

The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would swear that the sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishing is that a blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away.

Upon witnessing the explosion, its creators had mixed reactions. Isidor Rabi felt that the equilibrium in nature had been upset -- as if humankind had become a threat to the world it inhabited. J. Robert Oppenheimer, though ecstatic about the success of the project, quoted a remembered fragment from the Bhagavad Gita. "I am become Death," he said, "the destroyer of worlds." Ken Bainbridge, the test director, told Oppenheimer, "Now we're all sons of bitches."

from    inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050300a.htm

The awesome power of that bomb was known to the scientifc and military personnel. The petitions from scientists to stop the use of the bomb was NOT heeded.

Today, we use atomic bombs to set off hydrogen bombs. And so it goes. IMO, if there is a second atomic war, I hope to be at ground zero. There, I have read, the blast is so fast the the human nervous system has no time to react. Basically, dead before you know it. I think it was Einstein who said, "If there is an atomic war, the living will envy the dead." I hope to be one of the latter very early on. And I pray that my children are, also.