On August 6, 1945, the U.S. military plane Enola Gay circled over Hiroshima, and released a single bomb. It plunged toward the Japanese city below and detonated in an enormous fireball as hot as the sun. At Ground Zero almost everything was simply destroyed and every human being died. Even two miles from the blast, human skin was severely burned.
The wind blew at 1,000 miles per hour—shattering the bodies of thousands of people as it hurled them through the air or brought buildings crashing down upon them.
When the firestorm died down, the former city was a scorched plain. A heavy black rain brought radioactive dust back down to earth. Some of the dead had been vaporized, many others lay where they died, in their thousands and thousands.
The U.S. high command felt that the destruction of one city was still not enough. Three days later, also without warning, they dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
Long after the bombing, people kept dying, from a then-mysterious illness — radiation. Five months after the bombing 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the most brutal acts of war in human history. Lest we forget...
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Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb (1 of 5) by Shigeo Hayashi in Japan
"On October 1, 1945, I stood at the hypocenter of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and made a slow revolution. In that instant I had a difficulty grasping that this city had been felled by a single explosion. Nothing in my experience had prepared me to conceive of that magnitude of destructive force.
Working as an army engineer for three years, I had dealt with explosive materials on a daily basis, and I thought I knew their power. Standing there, I simply could not accept at an emotional level that a single bomb had done all this." ~ Japanese photographer, Shigeo Hayashi
(taken from Shigeo Hayashi’s “Approaching Ground Zero” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Atomic Bombings as Seen through Photographs and Artwork, Nihontosho Center.)
See Hiroshima now via Google Maps
Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb (2 of 5) by Shigeo Hayashi in Japan
Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb (3 of 5) by Harbert F Austin Jr in Japan
Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb (4 of 5) b y H J Peterson in Japan
Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb - Ground Zero (5 of 5) by US Army in Czech Republic
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