Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission to Hiroshima, made what is believed to be a so-far undisclosed episode on the of U.S. atomic bomb strategy in an interview with the Guardian newspaper.

Speaking from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, the 87-year-old retired brigadier told the newspaper that he was told of the secret U.S. atomic bomb targeting plan by Gen. Uzal Ent, commander of the second air force, when he was given the orders to prepare for the bombing mission.

Ent said ''it was up to me ..to put together an organization and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific -- Tokyo,'' Tibbets was quoted as saying.

Tibbets's claim has drawn doubts from some Japanese experts on the U.S. atomic bomb policy.

''It is impossible,'' said Mitsuo Okamoto, a professor at Hiroshima Shudo University, noting that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided during a meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in September 1944 to use nuclear weapons against Japan.

Hideki Kan, a professor of international politics at Kyushu University, said he believed that the U.S. had made no decision in September 1994 where to use its atomic weapons which he was still in the stage of development.

Kan noted that Germany had not yet surrendered in September 1944 and Roosevelt could have ''from a military point of view'' considered dropping atomic bombs on Europe.

Tibbets told the Guardian that the instructions he received to prepare for simultaneous missions to drop atomic weapons in Japan and Europe ''was as clear as could be.''

''My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem. You couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other,'' he said.

Germany surrendered in May 1945, and the U.S. eventually dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945 and a second one on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered Aug. 15, 1945.