Bombing of hiroshima

Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II; By Evan Thomas; Random House 336 pp., $28.00 A former Time and Newsweek and author of eleven books, Thomas has chosen three very different individuals to tell the tale of the final days of World War II and the decision to use nuclear weapons for the first time. What emerges is a deeply human story, with men wrestling with decisions upon which potentially millions of lives would be lost — and saved. Two of them were in the unenviable position of having to kill thousands in order, Thomas convincingly argues, to save thousands more. And they were conscious that by using nuclear weapons, they were changing warfare, and indeed the world, forever. Henry Stimson is perhaps the most well-known figure in Thomas’s book. Stimson was well into his 70s when President A slight man with a reserved personality, Stimson was a figure from another era: a man profoundly Victorian in outlook and upbringing who would oversee the program to develop nuclear weapons. Although his age and declining health led him to sometimes be absent or out of the loop, Stimson provided a moral conscience that the U.S. was fortunate to have. The secretary of war, Thomas observes, “embodied and preached a philosophy that would make the United States, for all its flaws, the world’s essential nation: the belief that American foreign policy should be a blend of realism and idealism.” Years later, when a top Stimson aide, John McCloy, was asked...

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski This infographic describes the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, one of the ken (prefecture), near the southwestern end of Honshu island, Japan. It lies at the head of Hiroshima Bay, an embayment of the Inland Sea. On August 6, 1945, at about 8:15 AM, Hiroshima became the first city in the world to be struck by an The bomb The bomb, called Little Boy, was a gun-assembly fission bomb. In a gun-assembly bomb a mass of uranium-235 is fired down a “gun barrel” toward another mass of U-235 to start a chain reaction. It was deployed by a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay. The bomb was airburst at 580 meters (1,900 feet) above the city, and the explosive yield was estimated to be the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. Casualties The population of Hiroshima in June of 1945 was 255,260. Approximately 70,000 people, or 27% of the total population, were killed outright or shortly after the blast. Approximately 140,000 people, or 55% of the total population, were dead by year’s end. Radiation injury symptoms General effects of radiation injury included confusion, convulsions, weakness, and fatigue. Other symptoms included hair loss, inflammation of the throat, central nervous system damage, internal bleeding, bleeding into the skin (petechiae), gastrointestinal symptoms, and skin reddening (erythema). Long-term effects included cataracts and cancer. Deaths and illnesses from radiation injury continued to mount through the succeeding decades. Reb...