On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This act changed the way warfare is waged and heralded the dawning of the nuclear age.
By the summer of 1945, World War II had raged across several continents for six years, beginning when German forces invaded Poland in 1939.
The surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, was good news for a world weary of death and destruction. Japan vowed to fight to the end. Huge U.S. casualties were seen in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. More than 12,000 soldiers from the U.S. military were lost in June 1945, and more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were also killed.
According to The Imperial War Museum, Allied forces drew up plans for a large-scale invasion of Japan. With Allied casualties from an invasion estimated to reach 1 million deaths, and another 10 million Japanese casualties, Allied planners searched for another way to end the war, which they found in the Manhattan Project.
In 1939 the U.S. government began to investigate the possibility of a new type of nuclear weapon being developed by Nazi Germany.
A coalition of American, British and European scientists began collaborating on a vast international project to develop a bomb before any of the Axis powers beat them to it. According to The American Museum of Natural History, Albert Einstein was denied clearance to work on the project.
The Manhattan Project was based in the U.S. Army's Manhattan District, but work was carried out in other parts of the country.
According to the US Department of Energy, the Manhattan Project developed two different bombs that used two different nuclear materials.
The Little Boy bomb was created using 140 pounds of highly enriched uranium-235 and a hollow cylinder of it. According to the Bradbury Science Museum, the bomb weighed about 9,700 pounds.
Fat Man used a core of plutonium-239 to create a nuclear chain reaction that would release the energy of about 21 kilo tons of dynamite.
Project engineers were concerned about the complexity of the plutonium bomb and a test was scheduled for July 16, 1945. The world had never seen an atomic bomb before that day at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
A paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology states that the city of Hiroshima was largely untouched by the war. During the summer of 1945, at least 40,000 military personnel were stationed in the city, which was located on a coastal plain.
The city was chosen as the first target of an atomic bomb attack because of these and other reasons. Enola Gay, the mother of the pilot of the B-29, took off from Tinian in the morning of August 6. The bomb bay at the Enola Gay was named Little Boy.
The Enola Gay's bay doors opened at 8:15 a.m. and Little Boy was dropped over Nagasaki. The bomb exploded over the city. The explosion killed some 140,000 people and destroyed most of the city.
The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside, according to the Enola Gay's tail gunner, Staff Sgt. Robert Caron.
The scene on the ground was more horrible than spectacular. All buildings were crushed or disemboweled, and almost everyone within a 6,500 foot area was killed or seriously injured.
The destruction of Hiroshima did not cause a Japanese surrender. The ancient fortress city of Kokura was at the top of the Allied force's list of potential targets.
The B-29 named Bockscar took off from Tinian at 4 a.m. on August 9, headed for Kokura. The bomb bay of the plane was made of plutonium.
The crew of Bockscar headed toward Nagasaki because of the cloud cover and poor visibility over Kokura. The city was home to several important manufacturers, including the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, which was devoted to shipbuilding, weapons development and other military industries.
It was obscured by clouds, but the crew was able to find a break in the cloud cover, andFat Man exploded over Nagasaki.
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, at least 40,000 people were killed in the blast. The bomb was dropped almost 2 miles from its intended target in Nagasaki because of the hilly terrain.
According to the Columbia K1 Project, 80,000 people died from the bomb over Nagasaki by the end of 1945. The city was reduced to rubble by the blast and subsequent fires.
Six days after Nagasaki was bombed, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced an end to World War II. There was little to celebrate in Japan.
The World Nuclear Organization says at least 103,000 died from radiation sickness or the blast of the bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, survivors of the bombings reported a high number of stillbirths and birth defects. No long-term genetic damage has been reported among the survivor's children, who are subject to ongoing screening.
The people involved in the decision to use atomic weaponry had profound soul-searching after the initial celebrations quieted down. The debate over the use of nuclear weapons is relevant to this day, and the destruction caused by two bombs was unprecedented in human history. The father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, delivered a famous speech in which he qouted the bible.
A New York Times correspondent wrote one day after the Hiroshima bombing that it was a chapter in human history that was weird, strange, and horrible.
The Federation of Atomic Scientists is an organization that continues to work against nuclear proliferation, despite the fact that many of the scientists responsible for the Manhattan Project were alarmed by the use of atomic weaponry.
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The Atomic Foundation has information about the history of nuclear weapons. On the Arms Control Associations site, you can read about what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
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