Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima…. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

Harry S. Truman delivered this line in his public announcement of the first use of the atomic bomb, issued from the White House on August 6, 1945, hours after Hiroshima was attacked. The statement was crafted to inform Americans and the world that a new weapon had been used and to frame it as a decisive step toward ending the Pacific War. It also served to justify the action by linking it to Japan’s initiation of hostilities in Asia and the Pacific, while signaling U.S. scientific and industrial power and warning of further attacks if Japan did not surrender.

The quotation combines reportage (“Sixteen hours ago…”) with awe-struck scientific rhetoric (“the force from which the sun draws its power”), presenting the bomb as both technological triumph and overwhelming inevitability. Truman’s phrasing seeks moral and political legitimation by casting the attack as retribution against those who “brought war to the Far East,” shifting attention from civilian devastation to wartime causality and responsibility. The line also functions as strategic messaging: it dramatizes the unprecedented scale of destruction to pressure Japan toward surrender and to shape postwar perceptions of American authority in the emerging nuclear age.

1) “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base.”
2) “That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.”
3) “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”