Story of a Survivor

Tomiko Morimoto was only a 13-year-old school girl at the time of the explosion of "Little Boy". Her city, Hiroshima, had never been bombed before and when she heard the lone B-29 droning overhead, she didn't pay much attention to it, until she saw the explosion. Next came the loud sound which was deafening, and finally she became aware of the destruction around her. Buildings were uprooted and windows broke, it was chaos.

Morimoto's instinct was to run then and there, and as she raced as far as she could from that fireball behind her, she saw black rain falling down, and she thought it was oil that the Americans were using to burn her to death...

(Hiroshima Survivor Recalls Day Bomb Was Dropped http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-08/2005-08-05-voa38.cfm)

That was what happened to many citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when hell was introduced to their city, some of the unfortunate ones never made out alive as their burning skin finally killed them. Yet, they have never fought in the war and probably never killed something larger than an ant. These people certainly didn't deserve the atomic bomb, but that is history and fortunately for us, people learn from history. We should never forget what these innocent people have been through or have become when the atomic bomb hit their city. We are very lucky today that no other nuclear bomb has ever been used on civilians again.

Remember the Innocent

Over 200 000 lives were lost in that two days, more than 90% being civilians. Was it necessary? People even today debate this issue. Some say that the bombings were necessary while others say that they were immoral. Nevertheless, those 200 000 people died to save Japan from ultimate destruction. The military leaders of Japan were not willing to give up even after 2 bombs hit, only Emperor Hirohito saved Japan from all-out annihilation. So, if the bombs were not dropped, Japan would be another Germany, when the Allies had to fight right to the capital to win and that will take thousands of lives more.



Did he or any of the casualties of the atomic bomb deserve what they got?

It was never the fault of the people that caused the war, but their leaders. However, in the end, it is the people that is targeted to win the war. The 200 000 people killed that day, fortunately, marks an end to Western military strategy of targeting civilians to end war, and encouraged the development of precision bombs. These people might not be the last innocent people to die due to a Western bomb, but will certainly be the last people to be killed intentionally. Their sacrifice has brought into light the cruelty of terror bombing and has saved millions of other innocent civilians from death.

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What if This Bomb Was Unleashed Against Civilians

Footage of the Bombs

The Two Bombs

Maybe the only similarity of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" is that they are both nuclear fission bombs. Almost nothing else in appearances and internally is the same, although both bombs had almost the same results.

The first bomb to be dropped was "Little Boy", which was smaller than "Fat Man" and also had less power. "Little Boy" was a gun-type nuclear weapon that involves the high speed collision of two heavy pieces of uranium-235 that would create a nuclear chain reaction, thus transforming the uranium to energy. This was accomplished by firing one piece of uranium to another by means of chemical explosives. "Little Boy"-type nuclear bombs were never fully tested prior to Hiroshima, mainly because of the simplicity of the design and that uranium was in scarce quantity back then. As a side note, Canada supplied a lot of the uranium used by the Americans and still do today.

The second bomb, "Fat Man", was a much more complicated and destructive bomb. The only reason why it killed less people was because some of the population have been evacuated to rural areas due to previous conventional bombings. The bomb was an implosion-type nuclear device using plutonium instead of uranium to create nuclear fission. It had a plutonium core that was surrounded by a sphere of explosives. In "Fat Man", there were 32 pairs of detonators that were located on the surface of the explosives. They were fired simultaneously to create a huge inward force to the plutonium core, which compressed rapidly until nuclear fission.Unlike "Little Boy", a full-scale test of an implosion-type nuclear weapon happened before the type being used on Japan. The Trinity test, as it was called, took place in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16th, 1945, in the middle of the desert.

The Trinity Test

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Bomb Impact

Hiroshima...

When the bomb detonated, the air around was superheated to 3000 °C, instantly vaporising anyone near the vicinity. They were the lucky ones. For some Hiroshima residents, their outlines of their bodies caught on walls or pavement was the only thing that was left. Birds dropped from the sky in flames, incinerated by temperatures equivalent to half the surface of the sun. The explosion was equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT with the blast radius of the bomb 1.6 km. Anybody who survived in anywhere within that area would either be seriously injured, deaf, blind, or all of the above. The shockwave from the bomb was so strong that glass shattered in suburbs 12 miles away. However, this was not the end. Moments after the explosion, air that was blown away from the bomb immediately rushed back to the center of the initial blast, creating hurricane force winds as well as a firestorm, killing even more people. When finally the fires died down and a calm returned to the land where once a city stood, an eerie rain of black ash and radioactive dust fell. The first nuclear bomb ever used against civilians has exploded, but it will not be the last.

Back on the Enola Gay, what could be seen was a huge mushroom cloud and a burning, devastated landscape that once stood a city.

Looking down at the destruction moments after the explosion, Navigator Theodore Van Klirk noted that the city "looked like a pot of boiling, black oil" (True Stories of The Second World War, Paul Dowswell, pg 150).

Nagasaki...

3 days later, Bockscar dropped the Nagasaki bomb, with almost the same effects. "Fat Man" was 6 kilotons stronger than "Little Boy".

The mushroom cloud of "Fat Man".

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What Happened in Nagasaki?

Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, Nagasaki was bombed too, solely because the Japanese military leaders safe and comfortable in their palace refused to surrender even though there was NO hope at all of winning the war.

Anyway...

In the morning of August 9th, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress "Bockscar" of the United States Air Force flew over the city of Nagasaki releasing da"Fat Man", which was an atomic bomb. It pretty much did everything "Little Boy" did except kill 60 000 people less, mostly because of prior evacuations of school children to rural areas due to previous conventional bombings. Again, most of the casualties were civilians.

What was even worse was that unknown survivors of Hiroshima made it to Nagasaki, only to be bombed again. Such is the cruelty of war ("'I saw both of the bombs and lived'").

Not A City Anymore...

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