Artifacts from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima show the efforts the U.S. made to make peace

Tuesday evening on "Glenn," Glenn Beck, Jeremy Boyd, Tim Barton and Beck's son Rafe stepped into the Vault to examine photographs and artifacts related to the "Enola Gay," the Boeing B–29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima in the first use of an atomic bomb in warfare in history.

The guys point out that the U.S. military and federal government went to great lengths to warn Japanese citizens and government officials of the impending use of a new breed of highly destructive bombs on the Japanese mainland if the Asian nation did not agree to the peace terms laid out in the Potsdam Declaration. Though the U.S. did not explicitly mention that they intended to use the newly-developed atomic weapons against Japan, as their mere existence was still a closely guarded secret, the Declaration promised "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland" if its demands were not met.

The U.S. also had pilots drop millions of leaflets over Japan in the months preceding the attacks, warning Japanese citizens of the cities that were soon to be attacked. While many Japanese civilians took heed of the warnings and fled to other areas, the military sought to quash any public support of surrender, ordering those caught in possession of the leaflets to be arrested.

However, after Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō explicitly refused to respond to the new terms due to their similarity to the earlier demands of the 1943 Cairo Declaration, President Harry Truman ordered the atomic attacks to proceed, leading to Japan's eventual surrender.

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