Hiroshima: Sixty-two Years Later

"Now is the time to exterminate the Yellow Peril for all time… Let the rats squeal."
—Congressman Charles A. Plumley, August 1945




We should never forget...

On August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 70,000 people. Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed. In the following months, an estimated 60,000 more people died from injuries, and hundreds more from radiation.

Next to Vietnam, no topic in U.S. foreign policy generates as much historical controversy as the continuing debate over the use of atomic bombs to end the Second World War. Aside from the obvious point that two cities were largely destroyed, instantly killing over a hundred thousand Japanese (95% of them civilians), why does the use of atomic bombs against Japan still provoke controversy? After all, the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 killed nearly 100,000 Japanese in just two days, and B-29s dropped hundreds of tons of firebombs on other major Japanese cities. One important distinction is that a single bomb (a uranium device nicknamed "Little Boy") was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by a second one (a plutonium bomb nicknamed "Fat Man") dropped three days later on Nagasaki. Beyond the unprecedented explosive power (12.5 kilotons for the first bomb and 22 kilotons for the second one), the delayed effects of radiation were another important distinction. Whereas the fire-bombing of Tokyo produced a death rate of about 100,000 fatalities among one million casualties (10%), the two atomic bombs produced a death rate of over 50% with the inclusion of deaths due to radiation. By 1950 nearly 350,000 Japanese had died from the effects of Little Boy and Fat Man.