‘You don’t brag about wiping out 60‑70,000 people’: the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This summer will mark 80 years since the attacks stunned the world. Today, every one of the crew members who carried out the bombings is dead. Here, one of the last writers to interview them reopens his files

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright - very, very bright. You could see the city from 50miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission."

I'm sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore Dutch" Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I'mwriting for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.