The tower said, "Dimples 8-2, North Tower of Tinian, free to taxi, runway able. That's A for able, you're taking off westbound this morning, there'll be no delay." Finishing the pre-takeoff checks as they taxied down to the end of that big long runway, the longest one in existence at that day, that big aircraft, gross weight was 50,000 pounds, with 7,000 pounds of gasoline aboard, and a big 5,000 pound bomb in the bomb bay looked just about like any other B-29 taking off in those days from Iwo Jima, from Tinian, on their nightly raids, it was daytime by the time they got to Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, Yokohama, some of the other main cities of the four main islands of Japan, of Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Hokkaido.

Well, Dimples 8-2 got to the end of the runway, they were cleared for takeoff, the two of them checked all the gauges, the RPM, the mixtures were full forward, they shoved those throttles forward and those white cyclones began to rev up to full power and the airplane began to move very, very slowly. That airplane took off weighing 65,000 pounds. It used almost every foot of that runway, and when they said rotate and Colonel Tibbets pulled back on the yoke, the airplane barely mushed and staggered into the air.

As they saw that landing strip of the lights rushing under them at 206 feet per second, and the end of the runway coming inexorably closer, they began to think, we're not going to make it. In revetments at each side of that runway on Tinian, there were specially trained anti-radiation crews, specialists who didn't even know really very much about radiation, and also as mute testimony to what had happened on that morning before and several other times in the last few days over the carcasses and hulls of burnt-out B-29s, which had crashed on takeoff and they took off only at max gross. 65,000 pounds of aircraft lumbered into the air with a crew of 12 and a single bomb aboard, a huge cylindrical bomb that was called ‘Little Boy.’

That morning, over a quarter of a million people awakened to their daily chores after a very restive night's sleep in Hiroshima, Japan, a beautiful city ringed by mountains. They didn't know that boring toward them, just seeing the faint hues of the same dawn to which they awakened, was a B-29 that had staggered along at 9,000 feet altitude for over two hours to burn off some of that fuel, and then had begun its climb to 33,000 feet. There were two other aircraft which were escorting it, which were only backup for surveillance, pictures, observation, and the like, and standing by on Iwo Jima was another airplane with another big bomb ready, and it was called ‘Fat Boy.’

‘Fat Boy’ didn't have to be placed in the bomb bay of that extra B-29 on this night because Enola Gay was on her way at 33,000 feet with ‘Little Boy’ in the bomb bay. After they were well along, about halfway toward Hiroshima, Dick Parsons began his duty of checking the many systems inside that bomb, including opening up the forward compartments and inserting eight separate rings which contained 42 percent of the fissionable material of uranium in rings in the nose of that bomb. There was a tremendous series of mechanisms, of fuses and switches, that he had to go through arming.

As a matter of fact, they had even been monitoring Japanese radio broadcasts for several months and had checked with Washington and the OSS of that day, predecessor of CIA, to find out, was there some band of frequencies the Japanese radio was not using because it was going to take a certain series of five separate radio frequencies to begin to arm that bomb, and they didn't want any chance broadcast from somewhere else to begin to arm that bomb while it was still in that airplane. As they neared their target, they finally realized they were going to Hiroshima because they got the weather report, and almost miraculously, though cloud cover was everywhere, Hiroshima was perfectly clear. The bombing run was taken over by the bombardier, who by then had total control of the aircraft.

It was a short bombing run, one of the best they'd ever made. They had the Norden bomb site. They could do precision bombing within 250 yards of target at 2,000 feet altitude and expect that bomb to be right on target, and right on target it was.

The bomb run was made with precision, just like the hundreds of practice runs that had gotten them all of that garbage and slang and that horrible persecution from all their buddies who said the 509th are a bunch of characters that are trying to sit out the war making dummy runs and dumping big bombs into the ocean, and all they do is practice sharp turns and come back. They never go to war. Well, "Bomb away," he said.

After that bomb had plummeted five seconds and they were busily diving to make that steep 150-degree turn, the final arming mechanism was triggered by a radio signal from the Enola Gay. From then on the bomb was on its own, and it had a radar device in the nose of it which would bounce a radar signal off the surface of the land and would release that explosive charge which would drive that cylindrical wedge of uranium into those rings of uranium. Then that little device, called a labner, would excite the whole thing by a neutron field and it would become critical.

Suddenly there was a blinding flash brighter than several suns. One of the men had forgot to put on his glasses, but fortunately he was looking down inside the airplane, but he said everything lit up like it was the brightest thing he had ever seen. In one instant of time, over the middle of downtown Hiroshima in Japan, 100 million degrees centigrade had been released in a searing flash.

Instantly, within a half mile of ground zero, everything, people, horses, carts, houses, the tiles of buildings, yes, even stone, in many cases evaporated. They simply disintegrated. People who were caught walking on a bridge or on the pavement were left indelibly immortalized by their shadow.

The brightness of that flash so fused the very elements of stone itself that it changed the color of stone. In gravestones in Hiroshima, some of the mica, the stones as they were quarried, ran like glass and is still there to this day. The shadows of people as they were walking was burnt right into solid stone.

People by the tens of thousands who did survive it don't recall ever having heard an explosion. They just remember seeing a blinding flash. Up to two miles away, women wearing kimonos, if they were wearing dark or red, were horribly burned wherever the dark colors were, and if there was white, they had interesting floral patterns where the white was on their bodies.

The skin was peeling off in huge, giant strips from the rest of them. Over three miles from ground zero, there was a group of 14 anti-aircraft men who were in an emplacement, and they had seen the parachutes dropped out of the Enola Gay just before that single bomb plummeted down, which they never saw. So they were looking up.

They cheered because they thought the airplane was having trouble, and maybe some of the men had been forced to bail out. It looked so tiny, so high in the sky. They were still watching up into the heavens when that flash went off.

They were found wandering around with the skin seared off their bodies, their clothes burnt from their flesh, and their eye sockets empty, with just the liquid dribbling over their cheeks. Mrs. Takao Kobayashi will never forget the pink horse. She was walking out of the city seeing people coming toward the city because they wondered what had happened.

The rumor was the Americans had spread gasoline over the city and just ignited it. Nobody really knew what had happened, but she'll never forget the pink horse. The horse stood with its head down as moaning victims were dipping up the rotten water of this slimy little river which had already become polluted with blood.

And the horse stood with its head down and rolled its eyes, and she realized as it tried to move and then fell why it was pink. It had no hide. It was just meat.

In that instant, 100,000 human beings died. That's what they discovered later. 13,937 people were missing, still are.

And 37,425 died later of wounds, were horribly disfigured, and in some cases the survivors with their funny-looking cherry-like bulbous growths on their bodies continued to die years later. Many were instantly rendered sterile. About half of those people were killed by flying glass.

They were cut in two or they were just butchered by flying glass from the explosion as it went out from that one central fantastic thermonuclear explosion. An equivalent of more than 20,000 tons of TNT had been unleashed in that one instant. In that one instant, the heat, which didn't build like normal heat, it just flared and was gone, started fires that were witnessed by the men in the retreating Enola Gay as looking like a series of little winking things in the midst of a flowing mass of molasses.

They saw the shockwave. They saw it going out and coming toward them. And the secondary echo shockwave they saw, too.

And they felt it. And every one of them said later he felt someone or something had hit the airplane right under where he sat. That shockwave disintegrated buildings for miles and started fires, and those fires created smoke.

In less than seconds there was a giant mushrooming cloud that soared clear above their flight level of 33,000 feet. Captain Lewis, the co-pilot, looked at that with those goggles on and he saw that cloud going clear above their altitude and he said, "My God, what have we done?" He didn't mean we in the airplane. He meant we human beings.

What on this earth have we done? Major Bong had just been killed in trying out a new jet airplane out in Alameda, California. It was called the Shooting Star. Americans were going to baseball games on that day and they learned later by banner headlines an atomic bomb, what's that, had been dropped.

It was a super bomb. It was bigger than several blockbusters all put together, we learned. I learned of it that same day at a little town called Depot Bay in Oregon.

Maybe some of you remember where you were on the day you got the news that we had entered the atomic era. And from that time to this, mankind has never been quite the same. Now America had proved that even America could wage total war against total populations, including civilian populations, for total stakes.

Now we knew that what the Bible speaks of as Armageddon was of very grave potentiality. And then when the Japanese would not capitulate, we heard of Nagasaki, but not in the horrifying details that we were to learn with regard to Hiroshima later. People just didn't believe it even then.

We were callous to it. We hadn't heard of the firestorms that happened afterward that created tornadic winds. Literally, it happened.

Winds then rushing in to feed those fires in Hiroshima roared at more than 200 miles an hour. And flimsy houses that had escaped the explosion that were miles from ground zero now disappeared and were flung into the atmosphere from the flames. And it went up and created such a cloud, it created its own rainstorm and literally a tornado.

And that tornado carried bodies and debris and houses and wound its way out to sea and became a water spout and disappeared. It happened. It's fact.

It's not my doctrine. Now we go about our daily ways of living. When out here in the Gulf and off the Atlantic coast and out in the Pacific are Russian submarines.

And inside those submarines are intermediate range ballistic missiles capable of being launched from beneath the sea. And in those warheads that are armed with intricate mechanisms that are clicking away with computers feeding data as the course, the direction, the depth of that undersea boat continually shifts its position as it plows through the under seas in its assigned areas. Those big missiles are programmed to land on New Orleans, on Houston, on Dallas, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, all but some of the inland cities of the United States.

It's a real world we live in, not a comic book world, not a world you read about, one you live in. And yet we know that it's just better reporting. Because you see, people have always thought they were living in the time of the end.

Crazy people. They used to have signs and say, flee from the wrath to come. They used to stand up.

I remember an old fellow down in Los Angeles. He thought he was Noah, and every time my father would say something he agreed with, he'd get out a big trumpet and toot on it. Thought he was gathering people for the ark.

Had his animals outside, I guess. Crazy people. They thought they were living in the time of the end.

But back during the days of Tertullian, they thought they were. He said, "The only thing keeping the world from coming to an end was the might of the Roman Empire." But the Roman Empire fell, and the world didn't come to an end.

Even the writers of the Bible themselves thought that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was going to come back during their lifetimes. The Apostle Paul said, "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them." He said, "We, me, all of us."

He thought he would still be there to see it. But Paul died. He was martyred, and Christ didn't come.

The Antichrist was Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century. The last great war was World War I in 1919. And surely World War II, with Palestine right between the Axis powers and the Japanese about to invade India and coming over the roof of the world toward the Middle East, and German forces inside North Africa under Rommel, the desert fox, advancing like a knife through the underbelly of Europe and across into North Africa toward Alexandria and the Suez Canal.

Surely that was the time of the end, because didn't the Bible say something about armies surrounding Jerusalem? And didn't the Bible say something about Jerusalem being the focal point of a final, climactic battle of some sort? Surely that was the time of the end, and Jesus was going to come. But World War II has come and gone, and Jesus has not yet come. And we aren't living in the time of the end, are we? No, we've got decades.

My kids, let's see, Mark is in college. He's a sophomore. I've got two other boys coming up.

A lot of young people would like to get married and plan a home, and I don't blame them for that. We've got lots of time. We have peace now.

Vietnam's over. Russians are going to be smiling and happy. It won't be any problem.

Well, we devalue the dollar, but why worry about that? It's peace, peace everywhere, when there is no real peace. Have we got all that amount of time? You can't gamble on how much time you've got left. I say that Martin Luther didn't know it, that the people back during the Black Death or the bubonic plague didn't know, that even William Miller didn't know, and I'm not setting any dates, but I am going to let Jesus Christ of Nazareth tell you what he's got to say about it.

His disciples asked him, "What would be the sign of his coming and the time of the end." I'm not talking about the blow-up of the world, but it's interesting, isn't it? Well, no, it's macabre, it's bizarre, it's ugly, it's chaotic, and it's ghastly. That scripture over in Zechariah, I think I'll turn to and read briefly, because hearing that description of what happened calls to mind the scripture in Zechariah 14, verse 12.

"And this shall be the plague, wherewith the Eternal will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem." What is God? What does He use? What did God make? What did He build into this universe of ours, but compact with his own hands nuclear energy? What is matter? What was Einstein's theory? What are the laws of thermodynamics? This thing right here is moving energy, so is your body. Those people walking across the bridges and in the main streets of Hiroshima were themselves vaporized.

A body became energy. Pure energy. Light and heat and explosion and part of a huge vapor cloud.

Energy and matter, motion, heat, light, space, what is it? It's God's creation. What is God going to use when he takes a hand to intervene in this world here below? Will he use some creeping green fog like they have in the movie called the Ten Commandments? It says here in Zechariah 14, verse 12, "This shall be the plague, wherewith the Eternal will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem. Their flesh shall consume away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will consume away in their holes, and their tongue will consume away in their mouth."

Your Bible says over in the book of Hebrews, "It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

‘Little boy,’ they called that bomb. That was man-made. That just unlocked, because of man's science, a little tiny bit of the energy that God Almighty has compacted into this earth of ours and in that giant sun and all those bodies up there in the heavens. How much power does God have to intervene in the course of this world down here below that he has very dear and very close and very precious to his heart? That includes you, it includes everybody walking around the hill country of Thailand, it includes everybody down at Tierra del Fuego in the tip of South America and people in Germany and people all over this good green earth. Every single human being, whether tortured, twisted people in hospitals and wheelchairs or people who have had horrible disfigurement because of something their parents did or an accident or a burn, God loves them just as much as he ever loved anybody, and their potential for the future is just as great.

Jesus said, "Don't let anybody kid you. Don't let anybody deceive you. There are going to be all kinds of people come and say that they are the Christ or that I am the Christ." They'll say, "I am the Christ and they will deceive many and you will hear of wars and rumors of wars."

Now the rumors are out today. Where do you think the next one is going to strike? What are the chances? Will it be Korea? Will Vietnam heat up again? They're still bombing in Cambodia and Laos.

Anyhow, the war hasn't really stopped. They shot down an American helicopter after it happened. Americans were still dying and the Vietnamese are still killing one another and they'll still have all the agonizing problems over there.

The trouble is America has had a belly full and I don't blame her. She's just not going to get involved in that kind of thing again if she can help it. But what if she can't help it? What if the Middle East heats up? What if it's somewhere in Central or South America? What if the Panamanians grab the canal? What's going to happen then? We don't know, do we? We look around and wonder where is the next war going to come from?

Do we live in the time of which Jesus spoke? We're in a kind of an uneasy resting place between World War II and World War III. And man has never made a weapon he doesn't use that he won't use. Do you think we have not already illustrated the fact that we will, if forced to it, use nuclear weapons? Jesus said, "You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars, see that you be not troubled because all these things must come to pass but the end is not yet."

We're living in that time.

"Nations shall rise against kingdoms or nation and kingdoms against kingdoms and there shall be famines."

What's that? Doctrine? When the monsoon comes late in India, when famines strike China or Central or South America and food shortages hit this country and our vulnerable society with our lack of reserves and our horrible plagues that attack us in terms of upset, untoward, record-breaking weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts. We devalue the dollar along with that which makes Mr. and Mrs. America hurt all the more in their budget.

What do we think that is? Doctrine? What's that? My biblical belief? Is that my belief? I believe there are going to be famines. Do I make that come to pass? Do I? Because there's a scripture in the Bible where Jesus Christ said, "There shall be famines." You can say, Oh, but there have always been famines.

Of course there have. There have always been droughts. Sure there have.

We've always had hydrogen and atomic bombs. No, I speak facetiously. Don't kid yourself.

Whatever else you think about me, whatever else you think about the program, whatever else you think about doctrine, you'd better believe with all your being that you in your own private life, whatever you think, whatever you label yourself, to whatever church or organization or concept or thought or belief or government or race or creed you think you belong, you'd better cuddle up to and get used to the idea in the back of your own mind that you are living in the time of the end, that you are living at the time of the close of an age and the dawn, the beginning of a new and a different and a better age. What is this? Some kind of a new doctrine? Jesus Christ is alive. He will be in his kingdom.

He's going to come back and rule the earth. It's the only promise he ever gave to Christians. It says, "He that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I overcame, I am set down with my Father in his throne."

That's Revelation 3.21, if you want to look it up. "To him that overcometh will I give power over the nations," do washerwomen and maids and foreigners, do they get power over nations? He likened himself to a young noble man who went away into a far country to get for himself a kingdom and to come back and to proportion out, to apportion out power, rulership, authority. He said, "You take five cities, you take ten, you be the mayor, you be the governor, you be the ruler, you be the president."

He said, "Here's your authority," here's your charter, your commission. Go out and clean up that wretched mess and make it right and wholesome and decent for human beings to live in. Jesus portrayed himself that way.

He said "He was going to return in power," not to come on and ‘Meet the Press’ and be asked a lot of endless questions about how many angels can sit in the head of a pen or whether Adam had a navel. He's coming back in power to clean up the wretched mess.

No, I don't believe in going to heaven because Jesus didn't. Why should people live a life in the wretchedness and all the beer bottles and trash and cans and garbage and filth and everything else of this world and go off to Christian retirement and compare wings? Here on earth is where the problems are. Here's where God needs to clean them up. Nobody needs to sweep out heaven.

Heaven's in real great shape. And that's not just an argument. You can prove that to yourself by reading the Holy Scriptures on the subject.

Jesus is going to come back. He said, "I'm coming back." The very first message that ever came to this earth after Jesus was on his way to heaven was, "You men of Galilee, why do you stand there gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus shall so come like as he was taken up from you."

That man, that great God who was man and became God is on a countdown from heaven. The world's going to be invaded from space. A conqueror is going to come. His name is Jesus Christ of Nazareth and he's going to rule in love and for our good. And he is going to conquer this world and anybody that won't get on his knees and say, "My Savior, my Lord, and my God." He's going to break those knees.

And then He's going to heal them and pick that man up and say, "I love you too, my son." Jesus Christ of Nazareth is alive. He's not dead.

He hasn't gone through all the other side of the universe. He's going to come back. He's going to straighten out this world and he wants that message taken all the way around this earth and taken with power and conviction.

And that's what you're hearing right now. And that's what this message and this work is a part of.

You know in your heart you live in the end time. And you know, as sure as you know, you're alive right now. You'd better believe these scientists that if Jesus Christ of Nazareth is not going to come again, and you know He is, the world won't even be here for your grandchildren to enjoy. You'd better be thankful.

God's word means exactly what it says.

Good night everybody.

*******************************

Editorial Note: This message was transcribed from a Garner Ted Armstrong evangelistic campaign in New Orleans in 1974 titled "America Listen." His message is more important today than back then.

Jesus described a critical juncture in history when except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved. He called it the end time.

Check out this Bible prophecy booklet: "Are We Living in the Time of the End?" Copy this link and paste it in your internet browser: https:// www.ucg.org/learn/bible-study-tools/bible-study-aids/are-we-living-time-end