Hiroshima nagasaki bomb blast year

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows Thursday in front of a memorial to people who were killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images The dawn of the nuclear age began with a blinding, flesh-melting blast directly above the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. It was 8:16 a.m. on a Monday, the start of another workday in a city of nearly 300,000 inhabitants. An estimated two-thirds of that population — nearly all civilians — would soon be dead. The dropping by American warplanes of that first atomic bomb, At the time, the morality and legality of those nuclear attacks were hardly the subject of public debate. "Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war," President Harry Truman, who ordered the attacks, declared in a "... If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." The last surviving member of the crew that flew over Hiroshima that day died in November. Before then, he recalled what he thought while aboard a B-29 named Necessary Evil as the bomb dropped from another warplane, the "We had to go out and kill every one of them," former Army 2nd Lt. In a 2018 "I do not regret what we did that day," he said. "All war is hell. The Japanese started the war. It was our turn to finish it." But another witness to the 900-foot-wide fireball that "We atomic bomb survivors are greatly disturbed by the continued moder...

In 1945, an Allied war correspondent stands in the ruins of Hiroshima, weeks after an atomic bomb leveled the Japanese city. AP Photo When the U.S military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the American government portrayed the weapons as equivalent to large conventional bombs — and dismissed Japanese reports of radiation sickness as propaganda. Military censors restricted access to Hiroshima, but a young journalist named John Hersey managed to get there and write a devastating account of the death, destruction and radiation poisoning he encountered. Author Lesley M.M. Blume tells Hersey's story in her book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World. She writes that when Hersey, who had covered the war in Europe, arrived in Hiroshima to report on the aftereffects of the bomb a year later, the city was "still just a sort of smoldering wreck." "Hersey had seen everything from that point, from combat to concentration camps," Blume says. "But he later said that nothing prepared him for what he saw in Hiroshima." Hersey wrote a The New Yorker, was fundamental in challenging the government's narrative of nuclear bombs as conventional weapons. "It helped create what many experts in the nuclear fields called the 'nuclear taboo,' " Blume says of Hersey's essay. "The world did not know the truth about what nuclear warfare really looks like on the receiving end, or did not really understand the fu...