Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered...

60 years after the fact 2 cities are still living with the horrendous effects of the first and last unleashing of Atomic Weapons on Humanity.

On August 6th, 1945 an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an 8,900 pound nuclear device dubbed 'little boy' by it's makers on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The 15 kiloton explosion levelled almost 90% of the city and killed an estimated 130,000 civilians.

Then, 3 days later on August 9th, Another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, dropped a larger device, code-named 'fat man' on the city of Nagasaki. The resulting 22 kiloton explosion killed an estimated 75,000 people and destroyed one third of the city.

The destruction was less severe than that of the Hiroshima bomb only because of the natural geographical features of the area.

By 1950, another 230,000 Japanese had died of related injuries, taking the toll close to half a million souls.

The people who made this possible, the scientists, and also those who made the decisions to commit these acts of aggression to force an un-conditional surrender of the Japanese people on August 14th, 1945 are long gone, but their legacy is still being suffered 60 years on in both these cities and surrounding areas.

The bombs used are small by today's standards but the devastation they caused continues still.

Hopefully, the horrifying glimpse they gave into the devastating effects of atomic weapons will serve as a permanent lesson and deterrent from using the like ever again.

I'll close this entry with the words of one of the scientists responsible ... "in some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."–J. Robert Oppenheimer