Hiroshima and Nagasaki

10 Key excerpts on "Hiroshima and Nagasaki"

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  Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War

  • N.A.J. Taylor, Robert Jacobs(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction On Hiroshima becoming history N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs A great deal has been written about Hiroshima. 1 One only needs to mention the city’s name—Hiroshima—and people of all generations tend to recall the two nuclear attacks that America inflicted on Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945. Over time, however, there is also the growing tendency for the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the awareness of nuclear weapons and war in general, to fade from contemporary consciousness. Simply put, Hiroshima is becoming history. Nevertheless, for those who have retained a sense of the nuclear imaginary, Hiroshima has come to stand-in for a world historical event—and a crime against humanity—that called into question the very meaning of harm, as well as of life, death, and politics. 2 For the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just that: attacks. Attacks not only on the human body, but also on the biosphere on which all life depends. In this way, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki introduced a form of harm that was fundamentally different-in-kind from all others that had gone before it. In 1999, prominent journalists in the United States were asked to vote on the top 25 news stories of the twentieth century. 3 When the results came in, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Japan topped the poll. For many it was an important story because it was said to have “ended World War Two.” For others, it was because of the threat of the Cold War. Either way, the significance of the weapon was linked to its role in either an actual or potential nuclear war. 4 Throughout the last half of the twentieth century many people fixated on the threat of a global thermonuclear war during the Cold War, and when that threat was largely averted with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the place of nuclear weapons in our imagined future became murky at best

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  Nuclear Past, Nuclear Present

  Hiroshima, Nagasaki, And Contemporary Strategy

  • Ian Clark(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 The Hiroshima Axioms

  The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were the two most momentous individual acts of war in recorded military history. As such they deserve, and have received, close scrutiny. We need to know all that we possibly can about how the decision to drop the bombs was made; which factors were deemed to justify these actions; how the missions were actually conducted; and how our understanding of these events has insinuated itself into our own subsequent behaviour.

  The bombings represent terrible yet fascinating historical events in their own right. They constitute a watershed between the old world and the new, between the final stage of the second world war and the opening phase in an age of world politics overshadowed by nuclear weaponry. Likewise, the bombings hold our fixed attention for a variety of reasons: as an aspect of wartime alliance diplomacy; in connection with the Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan; in relation to the timetable of the Japanese surrender; as a dimension of the emerging cold war relationship between the United States and the USSR; as a great human drama in which an array of U.S. political, military and scientific élites played prominent roles; and as a tale of awesome destruction and suffering.

  But there is also another set of reasons why the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings must never be forgotten: each new nuclear generation must learn their lessons afresh. In that sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki become the touchstones of our own nuclear sensibilities. Through a reappraisal of these distant events we can come to know ourselves and, if the experience is vicarious, it is no less instructive for being so.

  This book presents a general appraisal of the origins and development of nuclear strategy based upon the lessons learned from that 1945 experience. It takes as its point of departure the judgment that in the history of post-1945 nuclear strategy there has been misguided and misleading thinking. To that extent, the book is critical of official policies. It is, however, important at the outset to establish the terms of reference. While critical of what the author sees as errors of both commission and omission on the part of nuclear strategists, the book remains silent on such specific policy issues as non-nuclear defence, unilateralism, freezes and the objectives of arms control: it seeks to trace from their source some of the shortcomings that have afflicted nuclear strategy rather than to prescribe particular remedial policies. Put concisely, the argument is that there is something worse than having a nuclear strategy and that is having a misconceived nuclear strategy.

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  Toward Nuclear Disarmament And Global Security

  A Search For Alternatives

  • Burns H Weston(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part OneOne Confronting the Nuclear Crisis Passage contains an image

  Chapter 1Facing up to Nuclear Extinction

  On August 6, 1945, a 12.5-kt atomic weapon was detonated at low altitude over Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion killed 70,000 to 100,000 inhabitants and completely destroyed 13 square kilometers of the city. Three days later, at Nagasaki, a second nuclear attack caused some 40,000 civilian deaths and destroyed approximately 7 square kilometers completely. Thereafter, in the vicinity of both cities, for literally months after the bombings, tens of thousands succumbed to radiation poisoning.

  The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki thus wrought a profound and terrible transformation in the conduct and meaning of war. The unending search for decisive military advantage had yielded a weapon of unprecedented destructiveness, enabling a single aircraft in but a few brief moments to inflict damage on a scale previously achieved only by massive air strikes involving hundreds of conventionally armed heavy bombers.

  Yet compared to modern military nuclear capabilities, the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were primitive. In terms of destructive power, accuracy, and means of delivery, nuclear weapons have undergone radical “improvement.” The Soviet Union and the United States have deployed thousands of nuclear warheads many hundreds—even thousands and millions—of times more powerful than the weapons used against Japan. Warheads with yields comparable to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are no longer directed at strategically significant metropolitan areas; such weapons are now earmarked for tactical use against “mere” battlefield targets. And what was once a maximum capability of attacking a limited number of urban-industrial centers with propeller-driven aircraft has today become a hair-triggered network of weapon systems possessing the speed, precision, and power to shred within minutes the entire socioeconomic fabric of a target state. Should a general nuclear war break out, total casualties are expected to number in the hundreds of millions, accompanied by species-threatening ecological and genetic damage, pestilence, and famine.

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  Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  Restrospect and Prospect

  • Frank Barnaby, Douglas Holdstock(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I The Past Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Bombings and their Aftermath

  Passage contains an image

  The Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  Frank Barnaby

  Frank Barnaby worked as a physicist at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston (1951–57). He was on the senior scientific staff, Medical Research Council and Lecturer at University College London from 1957 to 1967. He has been Executive Secretary of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (1969–70), Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (1971–81), Guest Professor at the Free University, Amsterdam (1981–85) and Visiting Professor, Stassen Chair at the University of Minnesota (1985). He is currently a defence analyst and writer on military technology.

  His many books include: The Invisible Bomb, The Gaia Peace Atlas, The Automated Battlefield, Star Wars, Future Warfare, Verification Technologies, Man and the Atom, Nuclear Energy, and Prospect for Peace. He has published numerous articles on military technology and defence and disarmament issues in scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines.

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315036366-1

  8:15 am – atomic bomb released – 43 seconds later, a flash – shock wave, craft careens – huge atomic cloud 9:00 am – cloud in sight – altitude more than 12,000 metres

  This is an extract from the log-book of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber which dropped the atomic bomb which obliterated Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. At 11.02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 a second atomic bomb destroyed the city of Nagasaki.

  The Two Atomic Bombs

  The atomic bomb exploded about 600 metres above the centre of the city with an explosive power equivalent to that of 12,000 tonnes of TNT. This huge explosion, more than a thousand times more powerful than the largest conventional bomb (called the earthquake bomb!), was obtained by the nuclear fission of a mere 700 grams of uranium-235, out of the 60 kilograms or so of uranium-235 in the atomic bomb, which was called ‘Little Boy’, an early example of the way names are used to make nuclear weapons sound less horrific and more acceptable. Little Boy was, by today’s standards, a crude device, nearly 3 metres in length and weighing about 4 tonnes.

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  Resurrecting Nagasaki

  Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives

  • Chad R. Diehl(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  In other words, just as city officials had done in 1947, the international past was being used to overwrite—or at least dilute—the memory of the bombing, but this time by celebrating a false history. 56 By 1948, Nagasaki and Hiroshima had settled into their individual paths of reconstruction, each professing the greater significance of their city’s atomic destruction and peace work. The first ever Peace Declaration (heiwa sengen) in 1948, which would become a staple of the anniversary ceremony of Nagasaki (as in Hiroshima), made no mention of Hiroshima. “Peace Starts from Nagasaki” and “No More Nagasakis” became the phrases that defined Nagasaki’s perception of itself and its role in establishing everlasting peace by virtue of its “world status.” 57 Furthermore, officials in each city considered their own tragedy as the cornerstone of world peace, but the term held different meaning for each. Hiroshima officials viewed their city as different from and, in terms of the emergence of the nuclear age, more significant than Nagasaki, because it was the first city in history to experience the destruction of an atomic bomb. Nagasaki officials, however, considered their atomic bombing as more significant precisely because it was the second and last atomic bombing, which meant that their atomic tragedy had ended the war. But the approach of Nagasaki officials and city planners to rebuild the city as a center of international trade, tourism, and culture made them appear less eager than Hiroshima to stress the horror of an atomic bomb and the necessity to work for world peace. FIGURE 1.3. Colonel Delnore with municipal and prefectural officials, including Mayor Ōhashi and Governor Sugiyama, at a cocktail party in the afternoon on December 30, 1948. Source: Victor E. Delnore Photograph Album, 1949, Victor E. Delnore Papers, Gordon W

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  Atomic Age America

  • Martin V. Melosi(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

   

  Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Aftermath

  From Total War to Cold War      

  INTRODUCTION: FROM THE LAB TO THE FIELD

  The atomic bomb ceased to be an idea and became a reality in 1945. It was conceived as a practical application of relentless probing into the inner workings of the atom, and forged by a collaboration of science and the state. The race to beat the Germans to the bomb united those in North America, Great Britain, and elsewhere in a singular cause. The use of the new weapon was another issue entirely. US officials made a decision in the heat of battle to up the ante in destructiveness and to quickly end the conflict that engulfed the world. Such a choice had impacts well beyond the fatal days in August when the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first casualties of a new kind of total war. The bombings and their aftermath clearly redefined the execution of war itself and the definitions of vulnerability and security for all nations.

  TRINITY: THE GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE

  Robert Oppenheimer was not sure, but he vaguely recalled some years later why he gave the first explosion of a nuclear device the code name Trinity. It was likely a line from a John Donne poem: “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” Yet, given his regard for Hinduism, the moniker could have signified the trinity of Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Shiva, the Destroyer. Others suggested that Trinity referred to three bombs being constructed at the time, or that someone else other than Oppenheimer came up with the name.1 Whatever the reason, there was a sort of otherworldliness about this giant step in atomic history.

  Almost everything about the test of the plutonium (or implosion) bomb was imbued with portent. The desert location where the detonation took place was more than 200 miles south of Los Alamos on the Alamogordo Bombing Range. This ninety-mile site in the valley between the Rio Grande River and the Sierra Oscura mountains was called Jornada del Muerto—Journey of Death or Dead Man’s Way. The effort to ready the bomb for testing was an exhausting journey itself for the Los Alamos team. To relieve the tension of the work the scientists organized a betting pool on how big the blast might be, but its size and intensity caught everyone by surprise. General Groves in particular constantly worried about sabotage of the bomb and beefed up security before zero hour. He also feared that the very limited amounts of plutonium would be destroyed if the test failed, seriously delaying the mission of the Manhattan Project. To say the least, Washington, now in the throes of the Pacific War, anxiously awaited the results of the test.2

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  Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering

  Japan in the Modern World

  • John W. Dower(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The New Press

    (Publisher)

  The delayed timing of these first intense Japanese encounters with the human tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had unanticipated consequences. For example, censorship began to be lifted at approximately the same time that the Tokyo war-crimes trials ended (December 1948). The culminating moments of the protracted Allied juridical campaign to impress Japanese with the enormity of their wartime transgressions thus coincided with the moment that many Japanese had their first encounters with detailed personal descriptions of the nuclear devastation that the Americans had visited upon them. While former Japanese leaders were being convicted of war crimes, sentenced to death, and hanged, the Japanese public simultaneously was beginning to learn the details of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time. For many Japanese, there seemed an immoral equivalence here.

  Of even greater political consequence, the Japanese really confronted the horrors of nuclear war three years or more after Americans and other unoccupied peoples did—at a time when China was being won by the Communists, the Soviet Union was detonating its first bomb, hysteria in the United States had given rise to rhetoric about preventive war and preemptive strikes, runways all over occupied Japan and Okinawa were being lengthened to accommodate America’s biggest bombers, and, in short time, war came to Korea. In effect, the Japanese confronted the bombs and the most intense and threatening moments of the Cold War simultaneously. They did so, moreover, at a level of intimate concern with the human consequences of nuclear weapons that ran deeper than the generally superficial American impressions of a large mushroom cloud, ruined cityscapes, and vague numbers of abstract “casualties.”

  The impact of John Hersey’s classic text Hiroshima in the United States and Japan can be taken as a small example of the ramifications of this aberrant collapse of time. Hersey’s terse portraits of six victims of the Hiroshima bomb stunned American readers when first published in 1946. His account originally was written for the urbane New Yorker magazine, however, and reached a rather narrow upper-level stratum of the American public. By 1949, moreover, when anti-Communist hysteria had take possession of the American media, the initial impact of the book had eroded. By this time, Hersey’s masterwork had no conspicuous hold on the American mind. A Japanese translation of Hiroshima

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  Imperial Japan's World War Two

  1931-1945

  • Werner Gruhl(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Early in the war Americans recoiled at the Japanese bombing of cities like Shanghai in 1931. But the U.S. found there was no alternative but to strike back at Japanese cities to defeat aggression in the shortest time and at the lowest cost in Allied lives. From the beginning all sides used incendiary bombs along with other types. From 1939 to 1941, for example, the Japanese continuously firebombed the Chinese wartime capital of Chungking because of the combustible nature of the city, killing many thousands. In 1945 low altitude firebombs were believed to be the only effective way to reach the war industries dispersed throughout major Japanese cities. Pinpoint bombing of war industries was impossible with the bad weather, heavy cloud cover, extremely strong winds over Japan, and the technology of the day.

  When the United States acted to terminate the war as soon as possible, it acted on behalf of its Western and Eastern Allies, including all those populations (some 700 million) in the immediate region of the war. Thus, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, and the second on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Both cities were contributing to the Japanese war effort. The destruction caused by the two bombs was without question a catastrophe for the people of the two cities. The worst of atomic destruction and death took place in minutes from the blasts and within a few hours from fires. Radiation and conventional aftereffects took more lives. By the end of 1945, about 150,000, including an unknown number of Korean forced laborers, lost their lives in the two cities. About 75 percent of the deaths were from blast and burns, much like death from conventional bombing, and about 25 percent were from radiation. Most, including those who died from radiation, succumbed by November 1945.9

  It is necessary to place the death and destruction in the context of those terrible times. Atomic destruction was quicker, but despite its reputation in retrospect, no more appalling or horrible than conventional bombing and fighting by both Axis and Allied forces. The populations in the regions of cities such as Shanghai, Soochow, Nanking, Hsuchow, Chungking, Changsha, Myitkyina (Burma), Manila (Philippines), Dilly (Timor), London, Warsaw, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo experienced similar outcomes through attacks by bombs and ground fighting. In smaller cities and villages throughout Asia and the Pacific as we have seen, millions were killed, often massacred by the invading army, with conventional weapons.

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  Atomic Bomb Cinema

  The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film

  • Jerome F. Shapiro(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Second World War did not begin with the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor, nor did it end with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many in Japan, and in other nations as well, World War II is the result of Western imperialism and colonialism. The American use of military strength to forcibly open Japan in the late nineteenth century to trade and outside influences was a defining moment in world history that has bred hatred and distrust. (It is also an ambiguous moment, for internal political factions also took advantage of the Americans’ presence to seize power.) The destructive enmity that characterized World War II did not dissipate with either the war’s end or the end of the cold war. Consider two mid-1990s events: the acrimonious responses, from both Americans and Japanese, to the Smithsonian Institution’s scrapped plans for exhibiting the Enola Gay; and, the predictably bitter exchanges following President Clinton’s refusal to apologize for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this we might add the frequent scandals caused by Japanese officialdom’s unwillingness to apologize for, take responsibility for, or even acknowledge, Japan’s actions during the war; also, Japan’s frequent flirtations with anti-Semitism, anti-African-American sentiments, and general foreigner bashing (some of which I experience in my university and daily life). At the very least, many who were personally touched by the war still have not resolved their feelings about who is responsible for what. An unusual mutual misunderstanding and enmity consequently continues between these two closely tied “friendly” countries. The conspicuous absence of Japan and the Japanese from American films about the bomb, therefore, demands more than just a cursory dismissal of Hollywood.

  The first film to contain actual images of a nuclear explosion is First Tank into Tokyo (Gordon Douglas, 1945). It is the story of one soldier’s suicide mission to rescue an American held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war (POW) camp. Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the POW is an important physicist. Beyond this reference and the nuclear explosions in the final scenes, the film concerns itself with the racist propaganda that dominated both sides in the Pacific theater of war. In fact, the narrative of the film seems to be more influenced by the film Casablanca

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  From Hiroshima to the Iceman

  The Development and Applications of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry

  • Harry E Gove(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Enola Gay, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbet, a 29-year-old ‘veteran’ flyer. By the end of 1945 the death toll at Hiroshima due to this cataclysmic event was estimated at 140 000. Three days later a second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki from another B-29 US Air Force bomber. It exploded at a height of 1650 feet (503 metres) with an estimated force of 22 000 tons of TNT. By the end of 1945 70 000 citizens of that city were dead. Most of these relatively quick deaths in the two cities were a result of blast and heat from the explosion. On 15 August 1945 the Emperor of Japan announced the unconditional surrender of his country. For the Allies the successful end of World War II, presaged by Japan’s infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, had come at last.

  Wrenching descriptions of the bombing of Hiroshima by survivors of the event can be found in the books Hiroshima by John Hersey [1 ] and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes [2 ]. Hersey’s account first appeared as an article in a single issue of the New Yorker magazine on 31 August 1946 and later as a book published by Alfred A Knopf, New York. It is the story of six people who survived the explosion. Rhodes’ book, published by Simon and Schuster, is one of the recent great pieces of scientific writing. It is a history of the genesis and development of nuclear physics leading to the manufacture and use of the atomic bomb. In the penultimate chapter, ‘Tongues of Fire’, Rhodes quotes many of the survivors of Hiroshima who describe their experiences. They speak of the unspeakable. Almost half a century has passed. A third atomic bomb has yet to reign terror on any human population. Those who believe in the efficacy of prayer, should pray that it never will.

  I have often wondered, through the many years that have elapsed since these momentous events, what Tibbet felt as he gave the order to release his hellish cargo on the helpless people of Hiroshima who were mainly civilians. Did he really comprehend the awesome power of the weapon in the bomb bay of the Enola Gay? He certainly knew of the bomb test at Alamogordo but had not been there to view it. He and the crew of the Enola Gay

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