The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80, people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40, people.
Even before the outbreak of war in , a group of American scientists—many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe—became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. In , the U. The U. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb.
Early on the morning of July 16, , the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device —a plutonium bomb—at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications as early as that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April when President Harry Truman took office and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat.
In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided—over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists—to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some , people located about miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. After arriving at the U. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10, pounds and was built to produce a kiloton blast.
It Kick-Started the Cold War. The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U. Two rivers divided by a mountain spur form the two main valleys in which the city lies. This mountain spur and the irregular lay-out of the city tremendously reduced the area of destruction, so that at first glance Nagasaki appeared to have been less devastated than Hiroshima.
The heavily build-up area of the city is confined by the terrain to less than 4 square miles out of a total of about 35 square miles in the city as a whole. The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.
The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries. In contrast to many modern aspects of Nagasaki, the residences almost without exception were of flimsy, typical Japanese construction, consisting of wood or wood-frame buildings, with wood walls with or without plaster, and tile roofs. Many of the smaller industries and business establishments were also housed in wooden buildings or flimsily built masonry buildings.
Nagasaki had been permitted to grow for many years without conforming to any definite city zoning plan and therefore residences were constructed adjacent to factory buildings and to each other almost as close as it was possible to build them throughout the entire industrial valley.
Nagasaki Nagasaki lies at the head of a long bay which forms the best natural harbor on the southern Japanese home island of Kyushu.
Page 8 of Within the Japanese Constitution you will find Article 9, the international peace clause. For the past 72 years, we have not maimed or been maimed by a single human being in the context of war. We have flourished as a peaceful nation. Japan is the only nation that has experienced a nuclear attack.
We must assert, with far more urgency, that nuclear weapons cannot coexist with mankind. At the ripe age of 78, I have taken it upon myself to speak out against nuclear proliferation.
Now is not the time to stand idly by. Average citizens are the primary victims of war, always. Dear young people who have never experienced the horrors of war — I fear that some of you may be taking this hard-earned peace for granted. I pray for world peace. Furthermore, I pray that not a single Japanese citizen falls victim to the clutches of war, ever again.
I pray, with all of my heart. Air raid alarms went off regularly back then. On August 9, however, there were no air raid alarms. It was an unusually quiet summer morning, with clear blue skies as far as the eye can see.
It was on this peculiar day that my mother insisted that my older sister skip school. My sister begrudgingly stayed home, while my mother and I, aged 6, went grocery shopping. Every- one was out on their verandas, enjoying the absence of piercing warning signals. My mother and I escaped into a nearby shop. As the ground began to rumble, she quickly tore off the tatami flooring, tucked me under it and hovered over me on all fours. Everything turned white. We were too stunned to move, for about 10 minutes.
When we finally crawled out from under the tatami mat, there was glass everywhere, and tiny bits of dust and debris floating in the air.
The once clear blue sky had turned into an inky shade of purple and grey. We rushed home and found my sister — she was shell-shocked, but fine. Every person at her school died. My mother singlehandedly saved both me and my sister that day.
We had been hiding out in the local bomb shelter for several days, but one by one, people started to head home. My siblings and I played in front of the bomb shelter entrance, waiting to be picked up by our grandfather. Then, at am, the sky turned bright white.
My siblings and I were knocked off our feet and violently slammed back into the bomb shelter. We had no idea what had happened. As we sat there shell-shocked and confused, heavily injured burn victims came stumbling into the bomb shelter en masse.
Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. Many of the victims collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat were unbearable. Finally, my grandfather found us and we made our way back to our home.
I will never forget the hellscape that awaited us. Half burnt bodies lay stiff on the ground, eye balls gleaming from their sockets. Cattle lay dead along the side of the road, their abdomens grotesquely large and swollen. Thousands of bodies bopped up and down the river, bloated and purplish from soak- ing up the water.
I was terrified of being left behind. Indeed, the nuclear blast has three components — heat, pressure wave, and radiation — and was unprecedented in its ability to kill en masse. The bomb, which detonated m above ground level, created a bolide m in diameter and implicated tens of thousands of homes and families underneath. The radiation continues to affect survivors to this day, who struggle with cancer and other debilitating diseases. I was 11 years old when the bomb was dropped, 2km from where I lived.
In recent years, I have been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and have undergone surgery in and The atomic bomb has also implicated our children and grandchildren. One can understand the horrors of nuclear warfare by visiting the atomic bomb museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, listening to first-hand accounts of hi- bakusha survivors, and reading archival documents from that period. Nuclear weapons should, under no circumstances, be used against humans.
However, nuclear powers such as the US and Russia own stockpiles of well over 15, nuclear weapons. Not only that, technological advances have given way to a new kind of bomb that can deliver a blast over 1, times that of the Hiroshima bombing. Weapons of this capacity must be abolished from the earth. However, in our current political climate we struggle to come to a consensus, and have yet to implement a ban on nuclear weapons.
This is largely because nuclear powers are boycotting the agreement. I have resigned to the fact that nuclear weapons will not be abolished during the lifetime of us first generation hibakusha survivors.
I pray that younger generations will come together to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. My brothers and I gently laid his blackened, swollen body atop a burnt beam in front of the factory where we found him dead and set him alight. His ankles jutted out awkwardly as the rest of his body was engulfed in flames. When we returned the next morning to collect his ashes, we discovered that his body had been partially cremated. Only his wrists, ankles, and part of his gut were burnt properly.
The rest of his body lay raw and decomposed. I could not bear to see my father like this. Finally, my oldest brother gave in, suggesting that we take a piece of his skull — based on a common practice in Japanese funerals in which family members pass around a tiny piece of the skull with chopsticks after cremation — and leave him be.
As soon as our chopsticks touched the surface, however, the skull cracked open like plaster and his half cremated brain spilled out. My brothers and I screamed and ran away, leaving our father behind. We abandoned him, in the worst state possible. Many children are victimized by poverty, malnutrition, and discrimination to this day. I once encountered an infant who died of hypothermia. In its mouth was a small pebble.
I believe that grownups are responsible for war. Thousands of children were orphaned on August 6, Without parents, these young children had to fend for themselves. They stole to get by. They were taken in by the wrong adults. They were later bought and sold by said adults. Orphans who grew up in Hiroshima harbor a special hatred for grownups. I was eight when the bomb dropped. My older sister was She left early that morning to work on a tatemono sokai building demolition site and never came home.
My parents searched for her for months and months. They never found her remains. My parents refused to send an obituary notice until the day that they died, in hopes that she was healthy and alive somewhere, somehow. I too was affected by the radiation and vomited profusely after the bomb attack. My hair fell out, my gums bled, and I was too ill to attend school.
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