...
and no lessons have been learned
At 8:15am on 6 August 1945, a nuclear bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Enola Gay, flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets.
- The blast and subsequent fire devastated an area of five square miles (13 square kilometres).
- More than 60% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed.
- An estimated 80,000 people died immediately, but injuries and radiation took the final death toll to around 140,000 from Hiroshima's population of 350,000.
Below,
thousands of people were instantly carbonised in a blast that was
thousands of times hotter than the sun's surface; further from the
epicentre, birds ignited in mid-flight, eyeballs popped and internal
organs were sucked from bodies of victims.
By the end
of the day an estimated 160,000 were dead or injured and the bomb's
"ghosts" walked the city - thousands of initial survivors
who would die within days, often with the word mizu -water - on their
lips. Many more subsequently died - and are still dying - from
various cancers.
J Robert
Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientist who oversaw the building of the
bomb, was more ambiguous about his creation. He famously said after
the first test detonation: "Now I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds."
Truman's
successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, also had reservations. In a
1963 interview with Newsweek magazine, he said: "The
Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them
with that awful thing."
Joe Stiborik
remembered the crew sitting in stunned silence on the return flight.
The only words he recollected hearing were Lewis's "My
God, what have we done." He explained, "I was
dumbfounded. Remember, nobody had ever seen what an A-bomb could do
before. Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one
minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered
with fires and smoke. [...] There was almost no talk I can remember
on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in
words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the
foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to
bring an end to the war and we tried to look at it that way."
In 2005, Van
Kirk came as close as he ever got to regret. “I pray no man will
have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss
of life. We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will
never be another. I pray that we have learned a lesson for
all time. But I'm not sure that we have.”
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