Cities of the dead

Cities of the dead
On Aug 6, 1945, “Little Boy”, a uranium bomb, devastated Hiroshima. On Aug 9, a plutonium bomb destroyed Nagasaki. On ground zero, thousands of people were vaporised in the blinding flash of heat and thermal radiation.
Khor Eng Lee


AFTER the nuking of Hiroshima, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin also wanted the atomic bomb. In 1945, only the United States had the A-bombs – a handful of them. By the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the US had about 27,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union about 3,000 – each of them many times more powerful than the first generation nukes.

The first two shots of nuclear firepower in WWII unfolded “the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind”, to quote the Japanese study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When “Little Boy” exploded at 8.15:17 on Aug 6, 1945, about 1,800ft over the heart of Hiroshima, the city had more than 280,000 civilians (about 100,000 were evacuated earlier) and about 43,000 soldiers. According to official statistics, 70,000 died in August (most of them on the day of the bombing). A total of 140,000 died by the end of 1945, and the number of the dead rose to 200,000 by the end of the fifth year.

Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima, 70,000 were damaged or destroyed. The official Japanese study reported that “the whole city was ruined instantaneously.”

On the morning of the day after the atomic holocaust, a German Jesuit priest recalled: “The bright day now reveals the frightful pictures which last night’s darkness had partly concealed. Where the city stood, everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of ashes and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned out in the interior remain. The banks of the rivers are covered with the dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses.

“On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked, burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are still alive. A few have crawled under the burned-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse ... ”

Dr Michihiklo Hachiya, director of Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recorded in the diary (published in 1955): “The streets were deserted except for the dead. Some looked as if they had been frozen to death while still in the full action of flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant had flung them to their death from great heights ...

“Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced concrete … For acres and acres the city was like a desert except for scattered piles of bricks and roof tile. I had to revise my meaning of the word destruction or choose some other word to describe what I saw. Devastation may be a better word, but really, I know of no word or words to describe the view.”

According to the history professor interviewed by American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, two decades after the atomic bombing: “I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared … I was shocked by the sight … What I felt then and still feel now I just can’t explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that – but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt … Hiroshima didn’t exist – that was mainly what I saw – Hiroshima just didn’t exist ...”

In Nagasaki, “Fat Man” exploded with an estimated force of 22 kilotons about 1,800ft above the city at 11.02am on Aug 9, 1945. The surrounding steep hills confined and tempered the impact of the atomic explosion, and protected the city from the full force of the blast, radiant heat, and nuclear radiation.

About 40,000 people died within a month of the bombing, and 70,000 by the end of 1945. A total of 140,000 died in the first five years.

A Japanese news agency reported: “Nagasaki is now a dead city, all areas have been razed. Only a few buildings are left, standing conspicuously among the ashes.”

On Aug 10, Strategic Air Force commander Carl Spaatz proposed targeting America’s third atomic bomb on Tokyo (what Truman had ruled out about a month earlier after the Trinity test).

Preparations were being made to deliver and drop another plutonium bomb on Japan by mid-August.

On the morning of Aug 10, Truman received Japan’s acknowledged acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration calling for its surrender. The president then gave orders to halt further atomic bombing, but not the detonation of conventional explosives. Henry Wallace, secretary of commerce, noted in his diary: “… He (Truman) said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids’ …”

On Aug 13, Truman ordered the Air Force to resume area incendiary attacks. Six kilotons of high explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese on the eve of Japan’s unconditional surrender on Aug 15.

Henry Simson, US secretary of war, reflected: “The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly spectre of a clash of great land armies (in an invasion of Japan) ... ”

“In this last great action of the Second World War we were given the final proof that war is death …”
To Winston Churchill, England’s wartime prime minister, it was “a miracle of deliverance” as well as “a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions”.

Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff at the White House, described the A-bomb as “this barbarous weapon” and questioned the morality of its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won (morally) by destroying women and children …”

On the military significance of the A-bomb, Carson Mark, Canadian theoretical physicist with the Los Alamos laboratory (who subsequently led the theoretical work on America’s first full-fledged hydrogen bomb has written: “The toll of death and injury of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – appalling as it was – was not the most meaningful measure of the significance of the new weapon. In the massive fire-bomb raid of Tokyo on March 8 (9 in Japan), 1945, for example the Japanese suffered more fatalities (over 100,000) than at Hiroshima. But the attack on Tokyo engaged a fleet of many hundreds of bombers (334 B-29s dropping over 2,000 tons of incendiaries) for many hours (a six-hour orgy of intensive bombing). The awesome difference was that damage on this scale could be inflicted by a single bomb carried in a single plane.”

Philip Morrison, a nuclear physicist who flew with the “Fat Man” mission to Nagasaki and observed its destructive power from the air, and who subsequently walked through the ruins of Hiroshima wrote in 1946: “The bomb is a weapon; the most deadly and terrible weapon yet devised. Against any city in the world from New York and London to the hundreds of large towns like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb is a threat.

“In any of man’s cities a strike from a single atomic bomb will claim some hundred thousand deaths and some square miles of blackened ruin…”

And, looking ahead (what could possibly transpire with the development of thousands of nuclear weapons one and a half to two decades after Hiroshima), he wrote: “And the bombs, if they come again, will not come in ones or twos, but in hundreds or thousands. Their coming will wreck not cities, but whole nations.”


TOMORROW: “Joe One” sparks nuclear arms race.