Preface

Summary

At 8:15 local time on the sunny morning of August 6, 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Code-named “Little Boy,” the bomb slowly descended on a parachute towards its target until it went off at the height of 580 meters above sea level, its blast wiping out 90 percent of the city and killing 80,000 people. Three days later, on August 9, another B-29, flown by Major Charles W. Sweeney, dropped an atomic weapon on Nagasaki. It was 11:02 a.m. Nagasaki time when “Fat Man” (the bomb’s code name) detonated, completely razing to the ground 63 percent of the city, destroying 90 percent of its buildings and constructions, and causing the instant death of approximately 45,000 men and women. By November 1945, the combined death toll of those killed outright by the bombs and those who died days, weeks, or months after the blasts as a result of their wounds or the radiation delivered by the atomic weapons surpassed the figure of 200,000. Although scholars have recently argued that the Japanese did not capitulate because of the atomic attacks on their homeland (the Japanese government decided to surrender to the Americans only after learning about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria), the truth is that dropping two atomic weapons on civilian targets put a murderous closure to a war that was, and still is, the deadliest one on record.