Carolina Peace - Hiroshima Peace Vigil

Hiroshima Peace Vigil

Written by Administrator

Wednesday, 07 July 2004

{IMAGE1}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.

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.

The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the first and last use of atomic weapons in combat—remains one of the most controversial in military history. Altogether, the two bombings killed an estimated 110,000 Japanese citizens and injured another 130,000. By 1950, another 230,000 Japanese had died from injuries or radiation. Though the two cities were nominally military targets, the overwhelming majority of the casualties were civilian.

"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

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."