Atomic Bomb: Development and Deployment

The second atomic bombing was on a smaller Japanese city, Nagasaki. This bombing took place on August 9, 1945. The bomb used here was a more powerful Plutonium-based bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” (after Winston Churchill). The bombing of Nagasaki killed as many as 80,000 people. Some historians have seen this attack as an unnecessary display of power; however, the United States saw it as the proverbial “one-two punch” needed to cause Japan to surrender their war efforts. Many people today view this bombing as overkill due to the fact that the first bombing at Hiroshima displayed tremendous amounts of power which some see would have likely caused Japan to surrender by itself. The United States thought the second bombing was necessary so that Japan would not think the first atomic bomb was a test bomb, and therefore the only one the United States had.

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The bombing of these two Japanese cities have led to new discoveries about how atomic bomb radiation affects the people exposed to it. This new information would discourage countries in the future from waging nuclear war for fear that their own people would be attacked with this horrendous weapon. Those people who did not die initially from the bombing most likely perished from radiation poisoning later.

The aftermath of the bombing was horrible. Two hundred twenty thousand people had died by then end of 1945. The world reacted to the bomb with great fear, surprise, and disillusion. The bombings still have an effect on our world today. In fact, just recently President Barack Obama has called for all nations to begin nuclear disarmament in hopes that the world can be free of nuclear proliferation someday.

Eventually, spies passed on the secrets of the workings of the bomb to Russia. A physicist close to the development of the bomb, Klaus Fuchs, was a communist sympathizer who had had meeting with Russian contact for many years. Klaus passed on vital secrets to the inner workings of the bomb to Russian spies. Russia had built its own atomic bomb by 1948 with use of this knowledge. Russia’s development of the bomb led to the cold war stalemate between the United States and Russia for the next forty-five years.

Overall, the atomic bomb is the greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time. The bomb is the most deadly and destructive weapon ever used against another country and looks to remain as such, hopefully, for a very long time.

Sources:

Day of Trinity by Lansing Lamont (1965, 1985)

The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians by Cynthia C. Kelly (2009)

TIME Magazine, Monday, June 10, 1946, “Atomic Dust Storm”