Unlike Tibbets, Eatherly reported suffering from nightmares about the bombings, and his guilt drove him into a spiral of self sabotage. In the Greek myth, the gods punished Prometheus with eternal torment. With fire, humans were launched on the road to evermore powerful inventions - a cascade of technological advances that would also unleash new forms of death, destruction and exploitation. The discrepancy between the tremendous power of humanity’s inventions and the limited ability of any single person to comprehend, let alone control the moral and practical implications of that power, is what Günther Anders, the postwar German-Jewish philosopher and antinuclear activist, called “the Promethean gap.” Prometheus is a character from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. His role in the bombing would haunt him for the rest of his life. Eatherly, then an outgoing 26-year-old Texan, piloted the advance weather plane tasked with assessing target visibility over Hiroshima, giving the go ahead to drop the bomb that day. Claude Eatherly, came forward to publicly declare that he felt remorse for what he had done.
In the ensuing decades, only one of the 90 servicemen who flew the atomic bombing missions, Maj.
