In a world of infamous places, there is one instantly recognizable name that inspires more dread and horror than any other, Hiroshima. On the 6th of August 1945, the US B-29 dubbed The Enola Gay flew over the Japanese City and at 8:15 AM Northern Time dropped a Nuclear Bomb called “Little Boy”. The plane was piloted by 509th Composite Group Commander Colonel Paul Tibbets and was launched from an airbase in the West Pacific, six hours flight time from Japan.
The bomb, a gun type fission weapon with 60 kilograms of Uranium-235exploded about 600 meters above the city killing at least 80,000 people out right and completely destroying nearly 70% of the cities infrastructure. An estimated 60,000 further deaths occurred in the following months and thousands have also died since then of illnesses cause by the bomb such as radiation poisoning.
The city of Hiroshima was targeted for several reasons, it was large with a population of approximately 255,000, it was surrounded by hills, which focused the bombs destructive power, and it housed the important army bases including the headquarters of the fifth division and the second general army, which commanded the defense of all of Southern Japan. It had not been targeted by American bombing during the war making it possible to accurate measure the atomic bomb’s effects. And there are also no prisoner of war camps. This reasons combined resulted in Washington making it their primary target. The research and development project that resulted in the design and construction of the world’s first atomic bombs was named The Manhattan Project.
It was originally instigated by European refugee scientists, afraid that Nazi Germany was developing a similar program at a cost of nearly US$2 billion it was one of the largest and most expensive RND programs ever. Following the first atomic bomb test detonation in New Mexico in July, the “Little Boy” bomb was dropped on Hiroshima by armed forces of the United States of America and of President Harry S. Truman as well as “Fat Man”, the second bomb detonated over Nagasaki three days later killing an estimated 74,000 people.
In both cities, most of those killed and wounded were civilians. The US made the momentous decision to use nuclear weapons in a bid to force Japan’s surrender and end the six-year-old Second World War. Japan did indeed surrender on the 15th of August but the role of the bombings in that decision has been the subject of debate ever since. The US government’s position was that the bombing would hasten the end of the war and result in far fewer deaths on both sides of the conflict then if the planned invasion of Japan had gone ahead. In Japan the viewers of the attacks were unjustified and the magnitude of the devastation made the actions inherently immoral.
Many people around the world agreed including such luminaries as Albert Camus and a number of the scientists involved with The Manhattan Project such as Dr. James Frank, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard. The future President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, wrote of his grave misgivings in his memoir, The Whitehouse Years, citing his belief that Japan was already defeated and that America should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
The director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington, Peter Kusnick, wrote these damning words about President Truman “He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species. It was just not a war crime, it was a crime against humanity”. Kusnick was also one of several commentators who believe that America’s ultimate motive in detonating the atomic bomb was to show the Russians the horrifying capabilities of its new weapon of mass destruction and cement its place as the global superpower in the post-World War II landscape.
Following the horrific events in Hiroshima, the city was rebuilt. The closest surviving building to where the bomb was detonated was renamed Genbaku Dome or the Atomic Dome. And it gained part of the Russian peace, every year on the 6th of August, also known as A-bomb Day, the city holds a peace memorial ceremony in the memorial park in honor of the victims and to pray for world peace. And surprisingly to this day the cities government is a strong advocate of the evolution of war and nuclear weapons.
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