The devastation was enormous.
The devastation caused by "Little Boy" surpassed everything that American scientists, military personnel and politicians had expected. The nuclear explosion left behind death and destruction within an area of 13 square kilometers, or about five square miles. On August 6, there were about 350,000 people in the city, the country's eighth largest.
By the end of 1945, about 140,000 of those had died -- in horror-inspiring ways. The first victims were essentially vaporized in the epicenter of the fireball, at temperatures of more than a million degrees centigrade, or burned to death in a wave of heat hot enough to scorch trees a dozen kilometers away. Still others were crushed by the debris from buildings collapsing as a result of the massive wave of pressure. Those at a somewhat greater distance from ground zero were killed by direct exposure to radiation. Many were poisoned when they drank the radioactive rain -- turned black by dust and debris -- that began falling about 20 minutes after the explosion. An Australian journalist visiting Hiroshima in September 1945 dubbed the disease he observed -- hair falling out, bodies covered in reddish-purple spots, victims dying of internal bleeding -- the "atomic plague."
Three days later the U.S. dropped another atomic bomb called "Fat Man" on Nagasaki.
The exact number of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never be known. What we do know is that thousands are still dying today from the delayed effects of malicious radiation....Even the children and grandchildren of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will suffer the consequences of their parents' and grandparents' exposure to radiation. In many cases, their genetic material has been so severely damaged that they now suffer from leukemia, breast cancer and neurological disorders.
Here are some other sobering numbers:
More than 775,000 soldiers died in Napoleon's military campaigns between 1805 and 1815. One hundred years later, World War I claimed almost 15 million lives. Finally, Hitler's World War II sent 60 million people to their graves, including the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The bomb was originally built with Germany in mind as the target.
One of the most astonishing finds in recent years is a document containing the minutes of a May 5, 1943 meeting of the high-ranking Military Policy Committee, whose members decided that dropping the atomic bomb over Germany would be too risky. The explosive device could turn out to be a dud, thereby unintentionally providing the Nazis with valuable information to use in developing their own bomb.
Fear of the German bomb has prompted the Americans to build their own. But instead of Germany, they set their sights on Hitler's ally in Asia.
There's also a really interesting interview with atomic weapons historian Richard Rhodes. A snippet:
Rhodes....We killed almost 2 million Japanese civilians with bombing campaigns.
....SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why was the A-bomb dropped at all? What were the strategic goals the US was attempting to achieve?
Rhodes: By the time the atomic bomb was dropped, we had destroyed virtually every Japanese city with a population of over 50,000. The logic went something like this: "If bombing a factory with workers inside it wasn't a war crime, then why would it be a war crime to bomb the area around the factories where the workers live?" After that the bombing campaign was essentially to force the Japanese to surrender so that a land invasion would not be necessary and thus limit the loss of life. The atomic bombs were really just an extension of that. And in the end, it did shorten the war.
On Harry Truman:
Truman has won a rather rosy image over the years. But I think he was a great deal more like George W. Bush than he was like Franklin Roosevelt. He was an intellectually insecure man and he covered up that insecurity with a great deal of bluster and an almost obsessive attitude that "the buck stops here." That was the attitude he used when approaching the atomic bomb. But he also had a visceral and existential response to the mass killings when he got the news of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, he was unwilling under any circumstances to use nuclear weapons.
Back to the present:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: How great is the danger that a nuclear weapon will be used again?
Rhodes: Everybody I talk to in the nuclear community is pretty comfortable that nation states are not going to use nuclear weapons -- even states like North Korea are clearly more concerned with the prestige factor than about actually using it. But everyone I talk to is greatly concerned about the very real possibility of a terrorist nuclear attack. Terrorist groups -- al-Qaida is one example -- would see a great amount of prestige if they were able to build and detonate a nuclear weapon in New York City or in Iraq's US-controlled Green Zone. In fact, everyone I take seriously in this field believes the possibility is 100 percent. The fact is, if you can get a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, it's very easy to make a nuclear weapon that would explode with about the same yield as the Hiroshima bomb. These weapons are so small and so portable and so vastly destructive for their weight and size that there is no effective defense against them except abolition.
Bloggers have taken various positions on whether we should have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Update: The Hiroshima Coverup.
