Few buldings withstood the fury of the atomic bomb.
It was President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop the Atomic Bomb. Shortly thereafter he addressed the American public on the radio. Download the speech Aiff format (545k) AU format (558k)
A film was discovered depicting the devastation after the delivery of the Atomic Bomb: Download the movie. Quicktime (1200k)
Another picture detailing the devastation. |
The day the earth shook. On July 16, 1945, Harry S. Truman received news that the nuclear bomb test, which had been tested in the New Mexico desert was a success. He received the news in Potsdam, near Berlin, attending a summit with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. They were discussing Soviet intervention against Japan. On July 30, 1945, Truman gave the okay to drop the bomb on Japan. This decision came after Japan had refused to recognize the Potsdam Declaration which warned Japan to surrender or experience prompt and utter destruction. August 6, 1945 is a day the Japanese will never forget. This is the day the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb fell from an airplane named the "Enola Gay" at 8:15 a.m. and exploded 43 seconds later, at 1,900 ft. above the city. The results were devastating. The intense heat generated from the bomb ranged from 7200 to 1000 degrees fahrenheit. Thousands were instantly killed, vaporized from the searing heat. Others were terribly disfigured with limbs melted from their bodies and skin peeling off in large strips. The intense heat melted the eyeballs of some who had stared in wonder at the blast. "Big black flies appeared and tried to lay eggs on human flesh. The injured were so weak that they could not brush away the flies that nestled in their hands and necks." (Doomsday) said survivor Michiko Watanabe. Throughout the city, parents and children were discovering one another wounded or dead. "A mother, driven half-mad while looking for her child, was calling his name. At last she found him. His head looked like a boiled octapus. His eyes were half-closed, and his mouth was white, pursed, and swollen." (Schell) The blast was equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT. By present standards, the bomb was a small one, and in today's arsenals it would be classed among the merely tactical weapons. However, it was still large enough to transform a city of some 340,000 thousand people into hell in a matter of seconds. Only 6,000 buildings of the 76,000 were left undamaged; 48,000 were completely leveled. By the end of the day there were 100,000 dead. The figure would rise to 140,000 by the end of the year, due to radiation sickness and other complications. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima has changed war as people know it. After this event, the race to build other atomic bombs was on. By the 1970's, enough warheads were in place around the world to destroy every city on the globe several times over. In a single hour, all human history could be stopped in its tracks and become nothing but smoldering ruins. The exact number of nuclear warheads in the world today is probably not known by any single person nor institution. The largest weapon ever tested released an energy approximately 4,000 times that of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, and there is no limit to the explosive power that may be attained. The total strength of the present nuclear weapons may be equivalent to about 1 million Hiroshima bombs, that is about 13,000 million tons of TNT. The Soviet Union, Britain, France and China are all major players in the nuclear arms race. The front runners are the United States and Russia. The world has never had a technology so powerful and so efficient. We hope to prevent nuclear war by threatening to use our nuclear weapons in retaliation for another nation's using theirs. Lets hope that this enough to maintain peace. Let us also hope that we will never forget the awful destruction that these nuclear weapons caused. |
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