Apocalypse Over Hiroshima...

Hiroshima Watch stopped at the moment of the atomic bomb blast

66 years ago, on the 6th. August 1945 at 8:15 AM, America exploded the first Atomic bomb, the first recorded use of a weapon of mass destruction, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Those nearest the blast vanished instantly, vaporized or turned to carbon. The estimated death toll from the original blast was 70,000 men women and children, 30% of the cities population. Hiroshima city itself was mostly annihilated. Turned to dust, disappeared. The only buildings that survived were those that had been reinforced against earthquake.

Those further away from the epicenter of the blast reported a noiseless flash off pure white  light. The flash was so intense, the pattern of women's summer dresses where burned onto their skin, macabre tattoos. The burns sustained were horrifying beyond belief, skin burned black and sloughed off. People reported seeing dead butterflies floating to earth in flames and the outlines of bodies scorched onto paving stones.

After the initial blast a second wave of destruction spread from the epicenter destroying almost everything in it's path, this was followed by a devastating fire storm. Black rain fell from the sky, composed of ash and smoke sucked up into the huge mushroom cloud. People, desperate for water drank this radioactive rain. Days later many died as a direct result of drinking this poison rain.

Soon after the initial bombing, people started to display symptoms of radiation sickness; hair loss, vomiting, massive internal hemorrhaging, necrosis, profuse bleeding from wounds, that could not be abated and eventually death.

The American's chose Hiroshima for a reason. It had been left intact, unlike 67 other Japanese cities that had been fire bombed into ashes, and so would serve as a living laboratory, a chance to study the effects of the Atom bomb on buildings  and people. The people of Hiroshima would serve as the guinea pigs in this experiment in mass destruction. Even the American scientists were not prepared for the utter devastation not only of the blast itself but of the radiation sickness that followed. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists that worked on the A - Bomb project was quoted as saying later, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds". He would go on to campaign against the use of Atomic weapons and against the post war escalation of nuclear weapons.

The reasons given for the use of the Atomic bomb were said to avoid an inevitable invasion of the Japanese mainland by the allied forces. True, the Japanese leaders seemed hell bent on self sacrifice rather than surrender, expecting every man woman and child to die defending the honour of the Japanese nation. But would this really have happened? Japan was a nation on the brink of starvation, some reported not having had white rive in over a year. It's people were tired and and broken by an un-winnable war. Germany, Japan's main ally had already surrendered, Russia had declared war on Japan and were preparing for an invasion. It's impossible to say what the outcome of an invasion of the Japanese would have wrought, but the estimate at the time of millions of allied troops being killed in hindsight sounds like an over exaggeration, and so the debate continues on the reason for the use of the A-Bomb. After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese high command refused to the terms of surrender proposed by the allies, and on August the 9th. a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Although the devastation was nothing like that off the Hiroshima bombing, 50,000 people still lost their lives.

The final death total is estimated in the region of a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians. For this alone, the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a reminder of the real cost of war. Memorials remind us of the suffering and inevitable futility of war in all it's guises, for in war there are no victors.

For further reading, go to John Hersey's book "Hiroshima"