What was Hiroshima all about?

Question

just wanna learn something new

Answer 1

At 2:45 in the morning of August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber flew north from Tinian Island in the Marianas toward Japan. Three and a half hours later, over the city of Hiroshima, the Enola Gay dropped an 8,900-pound atomic weapon from its specially modified bomb bay. Two thousand feet above the ground, the bomb, dubbed "Little Boy" by its makers, detonated, leveling almost 90% of the city.


On August 9, another B-29, Bockscar, set out for the Kokura Arsenal on the southwest Japanese island of Kyushu. Foul weather, however, persuaded the pilot to proceed instead toward Nagasaki, the home of a Mitsubishi torpedo factory. Over this secondary target Bockscar dropped a larger device, code-named "Fat Man." Local geography spared Nagasaki from the near total devastation suffered by Hiroshima; only one third of the city was destroyed.


"In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

–J. Robert Oppenheimer


Fat Man and Little Boy


Fat Man and Little Boy, both weapons of unparalleled destructive power, were actually quite different. Little Boy, fueled by highly enriched uranium-235, was triggered by a simple "gun" mechanism; a small, slug-shaped piece of uranium was fired down a barrel into a larger, cup-shaped piece. This elementary design generated a destructive force of about 15 kilotons—the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.

A much more complex implosion-type device triggered Fat Man. It consisted of a plutonium core surrounded by high explosives wired to explode simultaneously. The shock waves from these conventional explosions triggered the fission of the plutonium, which yielded a 22 kiloton explosion.

The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a devastating psychological impact on the already weakened Japanese. Emperor Hirohito accepted the U.S.' terms of surrender on August 14. On September 2, Japan signed an official declaration of surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri.

Answer 2

The Manhatten Project was put in place to create an atom bomb, because the US feared that German scientists were working towards one, and we needed to keep up. Then Germany was defeated before a bomb was ready. The civilian head of the project felt that the Manhatten Project should be stopped, since the threat was gone. The military decided to use the bomb anyway.

Japanese soldiers sometimes did not surrender, and fought to the death in many Pacific islands. The US military planners expected to loose huge numbers of soldiers trying to take the mainland, and put forward the bomb as an alternative.

At Hiroshima a quarter million people died from a single bomb. Earlier in the war, 900,000 died in Tokyo when the US carpet bombed it with incendiaries. But it was the bomb which got the Japanese Emperor to speak publically for the first time, and surrender.

Answer 3

A small atomic bomb was dropped by the US Army Air Force on Hiroshima, Japan on Aug 6, 1945. Over 100,000 people were killed and many more injured. Many later died from radiation sickness and cancer.

The purpose of the bombing was to destroy the Japanese Army Headquarters in Hiroshima and the railyards. It was to demonstrate to their government that further resistance was futile and to surrender unconditionally to the Allied Powers. Japan refused, and a second bomb was dropped a few days later on Nagasaki, resulting in Japan's surrender.

Answer 4

Frosty has most of it right -- except that the Nagasaki plane was named 'Bock's Car,' not 'Bockscar.' The name was a play on words --- a car owned by Bock as opposed to a railroad "Boxcar," which was the primary freight container of the day.

But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about something else -- it was estimated by military planners that an invasion of the Japanese home islands (codenamed "Operation Olympic") would have resulted in over one million casualties on both sides. So at the time, despite the horrific nature of the bomb, it was seen in part as a life saving measure, not just a life destroying one.

Answer 5

It was about war. It demonstrates that mankind is capable of unleashing savagery amongst ourselves. It was about victory over an unplacable foe. It was about crushing an unforgiving enemy who started the war with us and allowed us to get revenge against that enemy for the treachery in which they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. It was about sparing our soldiers any more casualties in ferocious ground battles yet to come.

It was about politics and leadership of a post World War II era where the U.S. was preeminent. It was about showing a rising Soviet Union that the United States was the most powerful nation on earth.

It was about technology where we could show the world the superiority of our technical and industrial prowess. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared incendiary bombing by B-29 raids just so we could save them for nuclear annihilation. They were test cases.

No weapon ever made by man remains unused for very long. Always remember that war is savagery unleashed and that while it may temporarily solve one set of problems, it always opens up a set of unknown problems for those who wage it. Regards.

Answer 6

If you want to learn something new, a good, short book on the subject is "Hiroshima" by John Hersey.

Answer 7

funny you should ask about hitler and hiroshima, since hiroshima was our holocaust. the devil is relative, you might think.

note that the kind of information it was so hard for me to find about hitler is the only kind of information you find about hiroshima. why does one episode of racial imprisonment never rise above a superficial level of monstrosity, and another is so full of complexity and explanation? also note the language used to talk about one and the other. they are both charged, but one seems to wear a cape, the other a pitchfork.

don't forget who writes history.

try wikipedia for more info on both.

Answer 8

the US dropped an atom bomb on hiroshima and Nagasaki(spelling ?) as a retaliation from Pearl Harbor and to try to stop WWII, if you want more info try wikipedia..