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Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the man whose mission ushered the world into the era of nuclear warfare, died yesterday morning in Columbus at his East Side home. He was 92.

Tibbets was both revered and reviled for dropping the first atomic bomb 62 years ago on Hiroshima, Japan.

He was hobbled in his final years by falls, small strokes and heart failure. His hallmark feistiness and stoicism cracked occasionally as the end approached and he spoke of the absent friends among the crews who served under him during World War II.

"He was one of a kind, and for many reasons," Tibbets' French-born wife, Andrea, said not long before her husband's death. "The military psychiatrists who talked to him before he was picked for the mission knew that he could take it. There were two or three they could have chosen, but they knew Paul would have no regrets."

He said as much to successive waves of reporters who seemed ever obliged to ask him about qualms or remorse.

"We've lost a person of great historic significance," said Tibbets' longtime friend and former business manager, Gerry Newhouse, of Columbus.

"About 10 years ago, he and I were having a drink when he said, 'You know, all my enemies are dead and here I am sitting here enjoying a glass of wine.' "

Tibbets was born in Quincy, Ill., on Feb. 23, 1915. He was yet a boy when his father moved the family to Miami because of business interests in Florida.

At 12, Tibbets' enchantment with flight and the siren call of adventure led him to volunteer as a backseat assistant to a biplane pilot. The Curtiss Candy Co. had hired the flier to promote its confections at fairs, carnivals and other public gatherings. Scrunched in the back cockpit as the plane circled the racetrack at Hialeah, Tibbets tossed Baby Ruth candy bars -- affixed with small paper parachutes -- on the railbirds below as they watched the horses.

Tibbets' adolescent curiosity unsettled his father, who dreamed that his son would become a doctor or businessman. At 13, the boy was dispatched to Western Military Academy, in Alton, Ill., where he spent five years in a uniform of West Point gray.

Andrea Tibbets divulged recently that neither of Paul's parents attended his graduation from military school.

"The only person there to see him graduate was an undertaker," she said, "an old black man who had befriended Paul and gave him a tie clasp for graduation that he always kept."

Tibbets enrolled at the University of Florida, but his performance was barely mediocre. His worried father sent him to live with a Cincinnati doctor whose son was a medical student, perhaps hoping something might rub off.

Tibbets' brush with the healing arts ended when he got close enough to medicine to administer injections to syphilitics at the doctor's venereal-disease clinic. It soured his interest in medical school while solidifying his determination to fly. He applied to the Army Air Corps and was immediately accepted, earning his wings in 1938. His father told him he was crazy.

After the U.S. entered World War II, Tibbets first patrolled the Atlantic coast for submarines and later piloted some of the first daylight missions of B-17s over Germany.

In the autumn of 1944, he was told he was to be part of a secret project code-named "Silverplate." He was ordered to prepare two B-29 crews for simultaneous drops of a powerful new weapon on Japan and Germany. The fall of the Third Reich the following spring, Tibbets said, probably spared Berlin the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Tibbets had christened for his mother, rolled down the runway on Tinian Island for a six-hour flight to Japan. At the controls, Tibbets, a 30-year-old colonel, carried his favorite smoking pipe, a navigator's pocket watch to time the mission and a small cardboard container holding a dozen cyanide capsules in case the crew was forced to bail out over Japan.

The day's assignment was code-named "Special Bombing Mission No. 13."

The instant the bomb called "Little Boy" tumbled out of the belly of the Enola Gay, Tibbets banked the B-29 sharply away from Hiroshima to avoid the shock waves rippling outward from the blast.

"If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified," Tibbets said later. "The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire."

Estimates of the dead range from 80,000 to 127,000. If the average of the two figures is reliable, the dead in Hiroshima outnumber the U.S. dead from the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the 9/11 attack and the war in Iraq combined.

Many a soldier, sailor and Marine preparing for the invasion of the Japanese home island scheduled for the fall of 1945 held his breath as the news of the bomb spread.

Paul Fussell, a 21-year-old second lieutenant who had fought his way through Germany, spoke for hundreds of thousands in uniform when he wrote, "When the bombs dropped and the news began to circulate that the invasion of Japan would not, after all, take place, that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades, we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all."

Tibbets remained in the military until 1966, retiring as a brigadier general. He later was president of a Columbus-based, international air-taxi service called Executive Jet Aviation.

In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the mission of the Enola Gay, a 90-year-old Tibbets said of his notoriety, "It's kind of getting old, but then so am I. The guys who appreciated that I saved their asses are mostly dead now."

He seemed comfortable with the thought he could soon be joining their ranks.

"I don't fear a goddamn thing," he said. "I'm not afraid of dying. As soon as the death certificate is signed, I want to be cremated. I don't want a funeral. I don't want to be eulogized. I don't want any monuments or plaques.

"I want my ashes scattered over water where I loved to fly."

Tibbets' granddaughter, Kia Tibbets, grew up in his home. "He always told me that he loved me," she recalled. "It's not a side of him that other people saw, because there was always this strong presence about him."

Her grandfather's longtime bomber buddy, Tony Mazzolini of Cleveland, said of Tibbets: "The current generation doesn't know, can't conceive of what the country was going through when Paul flew that mission. We had been at war for so long. The sacrifices had been huge. You have to understand the mind-set of the Japanese. Their military was calling the shots. It was a different culture. Sure, life was important to them, but they were willing to lose it -- hundreds of thousands of them -- in a last stand to defend their homeland.

"We didn't have a choice, but that gets lost when people today look back on the bomb from the vantage point of the 21st century. It's easy to look at that old picture of a mushroom cloud in a history book and say, 'My God, how could we have done that to those people?' But, some of the people saying that today wouldn't be here if their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had been part of an offensive on Japan designed along the lines of the D-Day landing at Normandy."

In addition to his wife, Andrea, Tibbets is survived by three sons -- Paul III, of North Carolina; Gene, of Alabama; and James, of Columbus.

In accordance with his wishes, his body is being cremated and his family is not planning a service.

Details about the final disposition of his ashes are not yet firm. However, one of the candidates for the job of flying them to the English Channel is his grandson Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets IV, an Air Force B-2 mission command pilot.

His nickname is "Nuke."

mharden@dispatch.com