On the 6th and 9th of August 1945, the US forces destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, which resulted from the Robert Oppenheimer-led Manhattan Project. This was done to:
- Efficiently destroy two of the four remaining industrial cities (of a pre-war total of more than sixty) which climatic conditions had made difficult to raze with firebombing, as had been accomplished upon all other cities and most large towns.
- Show that Imperial Japan's conventional defense of the Home Islands against a possible Allied land invasion in October 1945 (''Operation Downfall") was untenable given the power and number of the Western Allies' nuclear weapons. This point was particularly important given that the Japanese Army and Navy were aware that President Truman and the US military had reservations about the monetary and human costs of a ground invasion. All parties knew that this reservation was strengthened by the possibility that an invasion might be unnecessary, as domestic rebellion or even revolution might topple the Japanese regime after widespread famine began in earnest (sometime in autumn 1945).
- In addition, some (particularly critics of the bombings) believe that the bombings were done as a show of force by the Americans to intimidate the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War. While some in the American administration no doubt hoped it would have this effect, it was not the primary reason.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the inevitable endpoint of the decision by the Japanese military, made as early as 1930, to launch wars of aggression in the Asia-Pacific - first against China, then against the US, Britain, France and the Netherlands via their Asian possessions. Japan's wars of aggression in China (1931-45) took approximately twelve million lives; The Pacific War (1941-45) took about another 10 million. Japan had already suffered 3 million dead before Hiroshima. Supporters of the bombings say that the moral point is clear: countries that launch wars of aggression are responsible for all that follows, including deaths of their own population.
- It might be argued that Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not responsible for the crimes of their rulers. In a sense that is true, although there wasn't much opposition in the 1920s and '30s to the increasing military dominance of Japan's government, and Japan's early successes in the war were widely popular. But it ignores the reality of modern war, which is fought not between professional armies but between fully mobilized nations. Japan and Germany had to be defeated by destroying their industrial and logistical capacity through air attacks, as well as defeating their armed forces in the field. (And it's worth noting that Japan, unlike Germany, was never decisively defeated in the field - it was the destruction of Japan's cities that persuaded it to surrender.)
Well into the 21st century, the event holds the title, for better or worse, of the only time nuclear weapons have been deployed against targets in wartime, though it was not the first nuclear detonation, which goes to the Trinity Test of July 1945.
In August 1945 the war in Europe was over. Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8th 1945. However, Imperial Japan was still standing, despite most of Japan's cities being smoking ruins — the result of a sustained campaign of firebombing by the American air force. The half-million men of the China Expeditionary Force had been largely cut off from supplies and were forced to scour the countryside for food and grain, even as Generalissimo Chiang's Guomindang moved to crush them one by one. Okinawa, part of the Ryuku Islands, had just fallen to the Americans just two months before. Despite all this, the Japanese government remained outwardly defiant. As the Allied forces in the Pacific finally drew near, it seemed an invasion would be necessary to force Japan to surrender.
The Allied plan was Operation Downfall. It was to consist of two parts, codenamed Operations Olympic and Coronet. The first part, Olympic, entailed the capture of the southern-third or even the entirety of Kyushu, Japan's southernmost major island. Once this was secure, it would be used as a staging area to support an invasion of Honshu, Coronet, with Allied forces sailing straight towards Tokyo Bay and landing forces on the Kanto Plain. The scale of the operation was enormous. Had it gone ahead, it would have been the largest amphibious assault in military history. The current record holder for that title is the Normandy Landings in Europe, involving 150,000 Allied troops from bases 100 miles away. Downfall called for seven times that number, with almost a million personnel, and supply lines stretching thousands of miles across the Pacific. The largest and most powerful battle-fleet ever assembled would support them. At the heart of this fleet would be 42 aircraft carriers, with over ten thousand carrier-based aircraft.
The United States was not enthusiastic about the prospects for Operation Downfall. Everything the United States had seen up to this point in the war pointed to a fanatical, even suicidal, hostile population that would continue to resist at almost any cost. Thus far only small islands had been taken. The Home Islands were projected to be even more difficult. Casualty estimates, both historical and contemporary, vary wildly but almost all reckon on hundreds of thousands of American lives and possibly up to 10 million Japanese.
With hindsight it is easy to forget, but nobody at the time knew the war was about to end. By the best estimates, the war against Japan was expected to continue 18 months after the German surrender, with Operation Downfall scheduled to not even begin until November 1945, with fighting expected to continue until 1947. Therefore the Allies made their decisions not in an atmosphere of imminent victory, but rather in the face of what promised to be an escalation of the Pacific War unlike anything yet seen, and mass casualties were expected. note The American public was becoming restless at the cost of the war already. It would have been inconceivable, when tens of millions of Europeans and Asians had already died, as well as hundreds of thousands of Americans, to refuse to use a bomb that could end the war for fear of "killing too many people."
The Japanese counterplan to Downfall was Operation Ketsugō. Because of the home islands' naturally mountainous geography, there are only a handful of beaches in the archipelago that would have been suitable for any Normandy-Scale amphibious invasion, not to mention said large-scale invasion would need to be located at the shortest possible distance from the staging base on Okinawa to resupply effectively. As such, it wasn't hard to guess where the invasion would take place, and Japan began moving more and more troops to southern Kyushu. While the Japanese knew they had no hope of winning the war, they hoped that they could make invasion of the Home Islands too costly for the Allies to attempt. Even at this late stage, Japan retained around 10,000 aircraft. Most would be used as Kamikazes, what the Japanese military then called "Special Attacks" — if for no other reason than their inexperienced pilots weren't good for much else. The vast majority of Japan's aces had already been killed. Attempting to dog-fight with the Americans, who had greater experience, flew far more capable aircraft, and vastly outnumbered the Japanese, was useless. During the Battle of Okinawa, the Japanese Navy had launched 1500 Special Attacks, achieving a hit-rate of around 11% and wounding or killing more than 10,000 U.S. Navy personnel. At Kyushu, due to more favorable terrain, the Japanese hoped for a hit rate of 17%. Furthermore, they would target troop carriers as they ferried men to the beaches, rather than the heavy navy ships, increasing casualties even further. Some Japanese planners optimistically hoped that the Kamikaze forces alone could destroy 1/3 or more of the invasion force en route to the beaches. note
In addition to this, the Japanese had built over 1000 suicide submarines of various types, and thousands of suicide boats (simply motorboats filled with explosives). The Navy further hoped to employ thousands of "human mines" — men in diving gear who would swim out from shore and detonate bombs as the American transports passed over. On land, the Japanese had roughly a million soldiers to oppose an invasion (of varying quality). Japanese civilians were also trained to fight to the death, using centuries-old muskets, longbows, bamboo spears — whatever they had. One Japanese schoolgirl related how she was handed a simple metal spike and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. Aim for the abdomen." Another schoolboy related how he was trained to dive under an American tank with a satchel of explosives and set it off.
Unofficially, this policy of arming civilians was called ichioku gyokusai (一億玉砕) literally meaning "100 million shattered jewels," referring to the total population of Japan sacrificing themselves in the coming battle. This policy was a reference to the Tang Dynasty history records of Western Wei, where the original quote was 大丈夫寧為玉碎，不為瓦全. A "shattered jewel" conveyed the desire to sacrifice or kill oneself, rather than live in shame. Japanese War Minister, General Anami, expressed during a meeting, "Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed, like a beautiful flower?"
Though they never made the deliberate decision to stake everything on the outcome of the defense of Kyushu, their allocation of resources was such that there would be little in reserve for defending the rest of the Home Islands if the defense of Kyushu failed. The Army hoped, however, that they wouldn't have to.
Knowing very well how close they were to total defeat, the Cabinet was split between those who wanted to surrender and those who wanted to fight to the death. The latter were a smaller group, but the former faction was evenly split between those who wanted to surrender now and those who wanted to "negotiate an end to the war." In any case, peace negotiations were ongoing throughout 1945, but they followed a familiar pattern, with the Japanese insisting on totally unrealistic conditions while the Americans continually refused anything less than unconditional surrender. The Japanese insisted upon the retention of the Emperor as Supreme Head of State and the retention of his political power, that there would be no occupation, that Japan would retain integral territory (this meant territory such as Korea and Taiwan), that Japanese disarmament would not be controlled by the Allies, and that it would try its own war criminals. The Japanese government was deeply divided, but a decision to surrender could only be made by Emperor Hirohito, and he was still under the dominant influence of the military. Most of the military leadership was determined to fight on and defend the home islands against invasion. Japan still occupied most of China and large parts of South-East Asia and had 2 million men under arms. In any case, Truman had no way of knowing what Japan's leaders were thinking. Japan chose to ignore the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, which warned of "prompt and utter destruction" if it did not surrender. The Americans saw no reason to give Japan any leeway. Germany had already surrendered unconditionally— so must Japan. This particular insistence was partly the result of the ending of WWI - when the Central Powers negotiated an end to the war and escaped occupation. This resulted in the development of the "stab-in-the-back" myth in Germany: that the Army was undefeated in the field, and would have won the war had the country not been "sold out" by socialists and Jews. This served as fuel for the Nazi's rise to power. This time, the Allies wanted no ambiguity. Both powers must admit defeat, surrender without conditions, and accept occupation.
In the Potsdam Declaration, the Americans did attempt to provide one last way out for the Japanese. The official wording of the text called for the unconditional surrender of the armed forces, rather than of Japan as a whole.note This was intended to suggest that America would be open to allowing the Emperor to maintain his place as head of state if they surrendered now. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect. The Japanese viewed the softening of the surrender demand as a sign that America had grown weary of the fighting and were beginning to bend. If they simply held firm, then America would acquiesce to all of their demands. American military intelligence had long broken Japan's diplomatic codes and so was able to read cables from Tokyo to their embassies in neutral countries, while Japan maintained "silent contempt" in their contact with America. Based on this, no surrender was imminent or apparent.
Japan and the Soviet Union had shared an uneasy peace throughout the majority of the war. The Japanese had attacked Soviet forces in Mongolia in 1939 at the Battle of Nomonhan/Khalkhyn Gol, in which the Japanese army was defeated. This led to the signing of a Neutrality Pact between them and the termination of Soviet funding and arms-deliveries to the Guomindang. This suited both sides, as it left the Soviets free to concentrate on their own armament and Japan free to concentrate on destroying the Guomindang. Later, engaged against Germany and the USA, neither side could truly afford to fight a full-scale war and despite constant skirmishes to test one another's strength there was a conscious effort to prevent them from escalating.
Because of Japanese-Soviet neutrality, the Japanese government hoped that perhaps the Soviet Union could act as a neutral party and mediate an end to the war between Japan and the United States, though these hopes were misplaced and ultimately came to nothing. Towards the end of the war in Europe, the Americans convinced the Soviets to enter the war against Japan with the promise of continued Lend-Lease deliveries — specifically, they promised to deliver some of the rations and trucks that the invasion force would need directly to Vladivostok, to reduce the numbers which would have to be driven there or transported by rail from western Europe (more than 10,000km). At the Yalta Conference, Stalin finally agreed to join the war against Japan three months after the capitulation of Germany.
At the same time, the United States was aware that this would mean increased Soviet influence in the Pacific theater, possibly even involving joint occupation of the Japanese home islands if the Americans tarried too long. In light of this, the Americans knew the best possible outcome was the Japanese surrendering as soon as possible, which would allow them to march in and disarm the remaining Japanese where they could (the British, for instance, dispatching a task force from Sydney at full speed to accept the surrender of Hong Kong before Guomindang troops could get there).
In the 1930s, chemists and physicists in America and Europe made spectacular leaps in the study of atoms, creating an entirely new field of science. In 1938, Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, and Otto Robert Frisch achieved nuclear fission, in which an atom is split apart and this causes the release of a massive amount of energy. Scientists already began to imagine the application of this new breakthrough on a much larger scale.
The Manhattan Project had its origins in a 1939 letter penned to President Roosevelt. Albert Einstein, who signed his name to the letter but didn't actually write it, warned of the possibility of the Nazis creating a terrible weapon through nuclear fission. As the early war years featured the Nazis devastating entire cities through air raids, it was clear they would not hesitate to use an atomic bomb if given the chance.
To ensure the Allies would gain a bomb first, America pooled the most brilliant scientists in the free world to work together. Robert Oppenheimer was chosen to lead the project. In order to maintain secrecy, the scientists were housed in a community called Los Alamos, built entirely from scratch, in the New Mexico desert. The project included such brilliant minds as Edward Teller, Klaus Fuchs, Enrico Fermi, and Richard Feynman. Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark at great risk as well.
While the fears of a nuclear weapon being used by the Nazis were certainly not unjustified, ironically, they never came close to completing one thanks to their own self-defeating nature. Due to their antisemitic laws, the Nazis forced out many of Europe's top physicists who were Jewish or had married Jews or simply felt solidarity for the Jews. This brain drain greatly hampered the Nazi nuclear program while at the same time helping the Manhattan Project. Not only that, but the Nazis largely dismissed Nuclear Physics as a whole because they considered it “Jewish Science” and they refused to use the (correct) ideas and discoveries simply because they were discovered by scientists who were Jews, including Einstein; thus, whatever meager nuclear programs the Nazis did support were forced to rely on the “aryan sciences”, which were completely incorrect & tainted by their ideology. Werner von Heisenberg, one of Germany's leading physicists, ultimately came to the conclusion that building a bomb was impossible, and Hitler eventually lost interest which meant a lack of funding and resources. British commando raids on German heavy water facilities in Occupied Norway also set their project further back.
Four years of work and two billion dollars of investment finally culminated on July 16, 1945. At 5:29am local time, Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists detonated "the Gadget" in a test code-named Trinity. A brilliant flash lit up the early morning and blew over the observers standing six miles away. Within moments, a bright orange fireball appeared, transforming into a mushroom cloud. As he watched the destructive power of what he had created, Oppenheimer remarked "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
There were proposals among the scientists for a public non-military demonstration of their new weapon, to show the Japanese what the Allies were now capable of without the need for civilian deaths. However, due to a number of reasons, such as concerns the bomb wouldn't work at all (they were very expensive and already used one in a test, which confirmed it could work) and also squandering the element of surprise which was seen as vital in getting them to surrender, not to mention that the Japanese leadership and their own scientific community might consider it to be a trick of some sort, this was dismissed. Two atomic bombs were quickly readied at Los Alamos and sent to the Pacific for immediate use. It was now simply a matter of where they would fall.
The choosing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as the targets was almost a chance event, as there were four potential cities that could be targeted. In particular, Kokura was the intended target for the second bomb (and had been the backup target for the first), but Nagasaki was attacked instead because of poor visibility over Kokura. This has resulted in Kokura being known as a lucky city. As for Hiroshima, many officials had actually been in support of bombing Kyoto, due to its industrial significance, but the city was removed from the target list due to its historical, religious and cultural importance to the Japanese people.note Thus, Hiroshima was chosen as the first atomic bombing target.
Still, Hiroshima was a city of significant military importance. It happened to have been selected as the headquarters for Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, who was to command the defense of the entirety of Southern Japan for the Allied invasion. It was also a hub for transportation, logistics, and communications, as well as having some of the last remaining war production factories in the country. At the time of the bombing, roughly 350,000 people were still in Hiroshima despite the American warning flyers promising an imminent destruction of the city, believing that perhaps their relatives in America had successfully petitioned the government to spare the city.
On August 6th, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. on an already hot summer morning, four B-29 Superfortresses of the 509th Composite Group (a secret and highly-specialized unit trained to fly B-29s modified to carry atomic ordnance as part of Project Silverplate) appeared in the skies high above Hiroshima. One of them, 44-86292 Enola Gay, held Little Boy in her bomb bay. Air raid sirens initially went off, but seeing the small flight of American planes (initially a single weather reconnaissance plane, Captain Claude Eatherly's Straight Flush, followed by the strike package consisting of the Enola Gay and two additional B-29s carrying cameras and airborne instrumentation) and taking it for a scouting mission, the all clear was sounded. Just as people were emerging from their air raid shelters, Enola Gay Bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee placed the bombsight's crosshairs over the Aioi Bridge, a unique T-shaped bridge that was essentially right in the middle of the city, and released "Little Boy" into the slipstream. A small chute deployed from the tail of Little Boy, slowing it down and allowing Enola Gay and her accompanying aircraft time to leave the area, and the bomb's arming system went active, sending out radar signals from antennae on the outer casing, measuring and counting down the altitude to a preset height of detonation.
44.4 seconds later, the radar signals indicated that the designated altitude had been reached. In a blinding flash of light, "Little Boy" detonated.
In an instant, the bomb killed 70–80,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese military personnel and 20,000 Koreans, and destroyed nearly 48,000 buildings (including the headquarters of the 2nd General Army and Fifth Division, Hiroshima Castle, which had been built in the late 1500s and stood for nearly 350 years). Contrary to popular imagination, "Little Boy" did not strike the ground and then detonate like a conventional bomb. It exploded midair (at about 1850 feet above the ground), and thus the force of the explosion radiated in all directions — including down, directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic.note Only reinforced concrete structures could withstand the force of the blast and only a few such buildings had been built during the war years. Many individuals out in the streets were vaporized by the light and heat of the blast, and countless more who were "lucky" enough not to be vaporized were simply pulverized into oblivion by the shockwave that came an instant later. Others became covered by third degree burns on their exposed flesh— not from its heat, but from the light of the explosion. Those wearing clothing had the patterns of their clothes seared into their skin. Anyone unfortunate enough to be looking in the general direction of the blast was either temporarily or permanently blinded by its light. 90% of the doctors and nurses in the city were killed by the blast— the others needed to come together to try and save the people injured by this revolutionary new weapon. (Dr. Kaoru Shima, owner and head of the Clinic which unintentionally became Ground Zero, only survived because he was in the countryside examining a farmer's pregnant wife.) Another of the survivor of the bomb was Doctor Terufumi Sasaki. A young man at the time, he quickly took stock of the horrific state of the survivors and began to not just treat them, but more importantly, document their condition and the effectiveness of the treatments that the Hiroshima medical teams provided. Much of what we know today about Acute Radiation Syndrome
comes from Dr. Sasaki's notes. The majority of people within 2,000m (~1 mile) of the blast and not shielded behind concrete walls would succumb to Acute Radiation Syndrome and die within a month.
Despite the absolute destruction wrought in Hiroshima, it was not immediately apparent to the rest of the country what exactly had happened. Soon after, Japan's main broadcasting corporation's radio control operator noticed that the signal to the Hiroshima station was as dead as, well, something that has had an atomic bomb dropped on it. At military headquarters, many thought it the result of some technical error or meteorological phenomenon, despite the total loss of contact with all stations in and around Hiroshima. It wasn't until August the 8th that Radio Tokyo reported that "Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death" and people realized it was neither an error, a natural phenomenon, nor just another run-of-the-mill strategic bombing— there had been no smoke on the horizon, no flames in the night sky indicative of the infamous firebombing raids, no massive formations of bombers filling the air with their ominous buzz; whatever the Americans had deployed against Hiroshima, it had wiped out the city in a single, brutal moment and left almost nothing and no one behind.
Later in the afternoon of the 8th, in Moscow, Japanese Ambassador Naotake Sato was summoned to a meeting with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotovnote and told in no uncertain terms that as of midnight, the Soviet Union and Japan would be at war. Sato, one of the realists in the Japanese government, had continually written to his superiors imploring them to seek a diplomatic end to the war, but his warnings were universally ignored. Now, with the Soviets in the east looking on Tokyo with hungry eyes, and the Americans in the west with a new weapon of unprecedented power, Japan is quickly running out of options—and out of time.
On the 9th of August, the Soviet Red Army launched its Far Eastern Strategic Offensive Operation, with Soviet formations smashing through Japanese army positions in Manchuria, ending Japan's hopes that the Soviet Union might mediate a peace treaty with the United States. That same day, the 509th made their next combat mission: another Silverplate B-29, 44-27297 Bockscar released another atomic bomb ("Fat Man"). It detonated over Nagasaki at 11:01 a.m. While the earlier Little Boy had been a "uranium gun-type" fission device, Fat Man was a more advanced plutonium-implosion device with a higher explosive yield. However, Nagasaki was a rather hilly city, and the bomb fell into a valley, meaning most of the city was merely demolished rather than vaporized, resulting in fewer casualties. An estimated 35k–40k people were killed including 150 Japanese military personnel, 27,778 Japanese munitions workers, and around 2,000 Korean slaves. Total death toll from these two, individual bombs: roughly 120,000 souls.
Though the true figures weren't published until much later, the suddenness and scale of the destruction still shocked the American public. A Vocal Minority was pleased, advocating simply wiping out the Japanese in an atomic genocide. However many Americans were still against killing civilians for killing's sake. Despite hundreds of thousands of Japanese already killed by conventional strategic bombing, many Americans could still pretend that they were conducting a "precision" campaign targeting Japanese industry. The Atomic Bombs were something different.
Plans were made to use atomic bombs to destroy Japanese defenses and command-and-control centers during the invasion of Kyushu. However later studies showed that their usefulness in this regard would have been limited. While extremely destructive when used against densely packed cities, the much more spread out nature of the battlefield meant that atomic bombs were too heavy to be delivered to targets of opportunity in a timely manner and yet too weak to obliterate an entire battlefield as later thermonuclear weapons could. If they had been used in this manner, lack of knowledge in those days about radiation would have likely lead to widespread radiation poisoning on both sides.
The bombing of Hiroshima did not immediately change the Japanese position. It was still unknown whether America had more bombs in reserve. If they had not, then the Army's defense of the Home Islands would still be semi-tenable and they still had some bargaining power. If they had, then the Army's defense of the Home Islands was pointless and Japan would have to surrender. In fact, during a cabinet meeting General Anami was right in the middle of suggesting America had only one atomic bomb when news reached them of the bombing of Nagasaki.note
When Nagasaki was hit, it became clear that Japan had no bargaining power. For the peace faction in the government, the bombings were a dark sort of blessing. It was easier to justify surrender in the face of atomic annihilation, rather than simply military defeat.note The Japanese government dropped all conditions to surrender save one — the retention of the Emperor's powers. When the Americans rejected even this final offer, the Japanese realized they had no choice. They would surrender — unconditionally. The Emperor composed a surrender message, to be broadcast the next day.
Even this did not stop the faction of hardliners in the Japanese government. That night, a cadre of senior Japanese officers attempted to launch a coup d'etat, storming the Imperial palace in an attempt to secure (i.e. arrest) the Emperor and destroy the surrender message. At the same time, General Anami, one of the hard-liners that the conspirators had attempted to enlist in support, committed suicide. Without his support and the support of the Japanese army, the coup quickly collapsed, with all the conspirators committing suicide the morning of the 15th of August. The surrender message was broadcast the same day as planned.
The address is remarkable for several reasons. It was the first public speech ever made by the Emperor, and the first time a majority of his subjects had heard his voice. In extraordinary understatement, he states, "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage." The word "surrender" does not appear once in the Emperor's address. Rather, he states that he has directed his government to "accept the provisions of the Joint Declaration." The address is further full of self-justifications, claiming that Japan never infringed on the sovereignty of other nations, and that Japan was striving to free East Asia from European imperialism. He also specifically mentions the Atomic Bomb as a reason to accept the Allied provisions, claiming that the loss of innocent life would be incalculable otherwise.
Apart from the text of the address, the Emperor gave his speech in a formal register of Japanese difficult to understand by the common people. It was furthermore played on a phonograph record and broadcast over loud-speakers, limiting comprehension further. By the end of the speech, many people were confused what it all actually meant. An NHK announcer had to come on afterwards and confirm that Japan was actually surrendering.
The Allies accepted, and so a truce was concluded on the 15th of August until the representatives of both countries' governments could meet (on September 2nd) to sign the peace treaty on the quarterdeck of the battleship USS Missouri. The surrender even allowed the Allies to give large quantities of food aid to Japan, preventing a massive famine from occurring in the autumn of 1945. In the meantime, the Japanese began destroying all records they could of everything even remotely related to war crimes before the Americans arrived two weeks later. To this day, many details of the crimes of the Japanese Empire remain unknown.
As it stands, and as one can imagine, the bombings left an extremely deep mark on Japan as a whole, to the point that the mere mention of it has become its own form of taboo in polite company. For more on that, however, see Nuclear Weapons Taboo.
Nagai was a friend of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who had built a mission in Nagasaki during the 1930s. After hearing which side of the mountain had the best Feng Shui for the mission, Kolbe promptly ordered the mission to be built on the opposite side of the mountain, and though he was mocked at the time (the Taoist practice of Feng Shui is unsurprisingly not normally accounted for in Catholic churches), the mission survived the atomic bomb unscathed and was used as a shelter for the survivors.
Nagai ultimately recovered from his radiation poisoning, and his leukemia went into remission. The Catholic Church attributes Nagai's survival to a miracle due to the intercession of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who had died in Auschwitz four years earlier. Nagai, in turn, attributed the bomb landing on Umagami to divine Providence, telling the predominately Catholic Umagami residents to regard their dead as a burnt offering to God for the sake of peace.
Nagai would live another 4 1/2 years before a relapse of leukemia finally claimed him on 1 May 1951, aged 43.
Depictions in fiction:
- Godzilla (1954) centers its entire plot around this and it is a re-enactment of the atomic bombings of both cities in the guise of a giant monster movie. The atomic bombings still happened and the devastation of Tokyo by Godzilla's wrath clearly invokes the imagery of a nuclear bomb dropped and gives a moral lesson that is most unsubtle.
- The debate around the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki underpine Alan Moore's Watchmen. The fan-favourite Sociopathic Hero Rorschach completely glorifies Harry Truman's decisiveness in ending the war by destroying two cities. Later, Ozymandias, for very similar reasons, drops an alien entity in the middle of New York, killing millions under the exact same justification, so as to end the increasingly tense American-Russian Nuke standoff. On confronting this reality face to face, Rorschach takes the completely opposite track and denounces this action, willing to die for his refusal to enable this lie (although this isn't exactly hypocrisy; Ozymandias actions were in fact a genuine lie, while the atomic bombings of Japan were rooted in years of war).
- Barefoot Gen: A semiautobiographical account of the author's own experiences surviving Hiroshima. Everyone in Gen's family but Gen himself and his mother Kimie kick it either during the bombing or few afterwards.
- Both 1989 films titled Black Rain. The Japanese film is an account of the bombing of Hiroshima, while the American film, directed by Ridley Scott, uses Hiroshima as Sugai's motivation. Both films take their title from the kuroi ame, or black rain, a rain that was heavy with soot, ash and nuclear fallout, that fell on Hiroshima for days after the bombing.
- There is a two-part special episode of the Tama & Friends anime adaptation Do You Know my Tama? in which a curse is put upon the people of the third district regarding a little girl and her dog Shiro, who tragically ended up being two of the 129,000-226,000 casualties of the bombings. Tama's owner Takeshi has nightmares about her in the A Christmas Carol-type first part. The girl's ghost even holds Tama hostage and threatens to kill him.
- In the episode's second part, Pochi is possessed by a haunted collar, which belonged to Shiro before he and his owner were killed by one of the atomic bombs. Shiro is revealed to be a really terrifying-looking Inugami (dog demon) once the collar is taken off of Pochi by Takeshi — essentially exhausting the former and causing him not to be able to see it. Thankfully, his ghost owner changes him back to the kind of loving dog he was when he was alive and apologizes for all the trouble they caused.
- Although this take on one of the events that ended the second world war was much tamer compared to Barefoot Gen — especially being a kids' anime, you can see why 4Kids Entertainment decided to skip the episode when they acquired the series due to it being inspired by such a nightmarish true event. And fittingly enough, the creators of the Tama & Friends franchise, Sony, helped rebuild Japan when they were founded after both the war and the bombings.
- In The Twilight Zone episode "No Time Like The Past", a man goes back in time to Hiroshima right before the bomb drops to warn the military, but they don't listen to him, thinking he's crazy.
- In Obasan by Joy Kogawa, Naomi's mother dies in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, although she doesn't find out until years later.
- The bombing of Nagasaki is featured at the start of The Wolverine. Wolverine is shown as a POW held in a camp across the bay, and both he and a Japanese soldier survive but everyone else in the camp kicks it, including some military leaders who choose seppuku over dying in the explosion. Said soldier is Ichirō Yashida, Mariko's grandfather.
- The song Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Sung to a rather upbeat, poppy, almost cute New Wave-like tune.
- The song Enola Gay by Sugizo is a lament of nuclear war.
- The song Black Rain by Astral Doors, featuring some pretty nightmarish lyrics about the effects of the bombing.
- On Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, a recorded speech from a nuclear warfare game theory symposium (and the closest the audience gets to a Motive Rant from the Big Bad) mentions him having gone to the cities and him noticing that they have become major monuments against nuclear warfare after their reconstruction, incredibly peaceful and pretty… and then mentions that if everything was destroyed by nuclear warfare, the survivors would build similar monuments everywhere else, to showcase their desire for lasting peace.
- Nuclear Attack by Swedish Power Metal band Sabaton.
- The 1986 Infocom Interactive Fiction game Trinity was a Magical Realism exploration of the history of nuclear weapons; the player character is sent to Nagasaki at one point shortly before the Fat Man exploded, to complete a Stable Time Loop by giving a little girl an umbrella.
- In And Shine Heaven Now it's implied that the only reason Nagasaki got bombed was to take out a government research facility studying vampires. And the one who made it happen was Oliver Warbucks.
- Hiroshima Mon Amour is a love story between a Japanese man and a French actress who is shooting a film about peace in the eponymous city. The after-effects of the bombing, as well as those of World War II in general, are a central theme.
- In the backstory of Arachnid, the atomic bombings were a secret agreement between Japan and the United States. A literal Depopulation Bomb was more preferable than letting Japan get overrun and divided between the Allied Forces.
- Alluded to in the Mickey Mouse Comic Universe story "The Delta Dimension", where professor Einmug, whose own nuclear technology gave him a floating island (among other things) in 1936, uses the bombings as evidence he had been right to drop from the radar without sharing his inventions at the end of his first appearance.
- As Transformers: Go! has a character named Hiroshima Prime, the TFWiki.net page for the character has a Preemptive "Shut Up" greeting editors when editing the page about making jokes related to this.
- In Heroes Reborn, a controversial Captain America story called "Ice", and as part of Original Sin, the Marvel Universe version of the events are touched upon.
- In Heroes Reborn, an LMD of Nick Fury controlled by the Sons of the Serpents spun a series of lies to Steve and Bill Clinton that involved Steve having objected to this and Truman decided to put Steve in suspended animation, with the government reviving him briefly and brainwashing him to serve in The Korean War and The Vietnam War (and the real Fury to later say that this was bull). In "Ice", it attempted to retcon the same thing was actually the case for Steve's mainline backstory: that the government put Steve on ice and falsified the memories of the encounter with Heinrich Zemo because he objected to the use of the atomic bombs. "Ice" was so reviled, it's since been subjected to Canon Discontinuity.
- In the Original Sin tie-in for All-New Invaders, it was revealed that the original Invaders refused to create a tsunami to take out Japan's navy, hence why the government decided to use the bombs without the team knowing.
- The Oregon Files book Typhoon Fury has a mention of the bombings, implying Hiroshima was chosen in order to destroy a secret Japanese research facility that was trying to reverse-engineer a stolen American super soldier serum for mass production in preparation for Operation Ketsugō.
- In This Corner of the World takes place in Hiroshima prefecture during the tail end of World War II. Main character Suzu is from the town of Eba, which is very near the city of Hiroshima, though she moves to Kure when she gets engaged. Throughout the story, the war makes the characters' lives increasingly more difficult, which culminates in Little Boy being dropped on Hiroshima. By the end of the story, Suzu's father is dead from radiation, her mother is missing and is presumed dead as well, and her sister is alive but sick with radiation poisoning.
- Oppenheimer is centered around the creation of the atomic bomb. While the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not shown on screen, Oppenheimer himself vividly thinks about their effects, at one point imagining his colleagues as charred corpses.
