User:Hiroshima bros

6th of August, 1945, 8:15
The first atomic bomb in the world was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, killing over 140, 000 people by the end of 1945.

On land moments before the explosion it was a calm and sunny Monday morning. An air raid alert from earlier that morning had been called off after only a solitary aircraft was seen (the weather plane), and by 8:15 the city was alive with activity -- soldiers doing their morning calisthenics, commuters on foot or on bicycles, groups of women and children working outside to clear firebreaks. Those closest to the explosion died instantly, their bodies turned to black char.

The Aircraft was nick named Enola Gay after the captain’s mother’s maiden name. The bomb was a secret, only a few new about it. The Americans believed that dropping the bomb would end the war between Japan and America that had been going on for 3 and 1/2 years. The Americans used the bomb to shorten agony of war to save lives of thousands of young Americans. The Americans said after the bomb 'I am so glad now I can go home and not get shot.'

The Bomb
The bomb - Little Boy - was only 3 metres from top to bottom, it was equal to 20,000 TNT. The flight from America to Japan was over 2,400 kilometres; they drank coffee and ate ham sandwitches. At six thirty AM the bomb was primed, forty five minutes later the captain announce that the conditions were good in Hiroshima to drop the bomb. It was said that there were 320,000 people wondering Hiroshima as the bomb was dropped. The captain said to put on polaroid goggles as the bomb was as bright as a 1000 suns.

The Damages
The heat and light of the bomb killed people in a split second, but many were blinded and their skin burned off. The radiation killed most in 20 to 30 days. If you were closer than 10 km you were gone without a trace. People's skin was peeling of there bodies from the burn and heat.

Futaba Kitayama was a woman living in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. She said that

"It was a shattering flash filled the sky. I was thrown to the ground and the world collapsed around me... I couldn’t see anything. It was completely dark...when I finally struggled free there was a terrible smell and I rubbed my mouth with a towel I carried around my waist. All the skin came off my face, and then all the skin on my arms and hands fell off. The sky was black as night, and I ran homewards towards the Tsurumi river bridge. People by the hundreds were flailing in the river….”

A survivor who was only five years old at the time later remembered the same horror:

“People came fleeing from the nearby streets… they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off some of them and was hanging from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were…”

What the Survivors Said
One of the survivors said "Some people even jumped into the river to escape being burned to badly, but they ended up drowning"

"I saw men literally like rags; their skin from their shoulders was hanging down from their finger tips." - Junko Fujimoto (age 15 when A-bombed)

"We can't console dead souls by keeping anger or hatred in our minds nor can we bring about world peace in hatred" - Keiko Hatta (age 14 when A-bombed)

The Letter from Albert Einstein
Hitler’s persecution of Jewish people in Europe formed an ironic side effect. It forced many scientists to flee out of the country – and supplied the Allies with teams of brilliant minds to develop Hahn’s research. Among them was a Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard showed that a chain reaction – where the splitting of one atom causes the splitting of others – could release enough energy to create a huge explosion

The most well-known German refuge of all was Albert Einstein who had emigrated to the USA in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. In 1905, Einstein had logic that atoms were held together by forces containing massive amount of energy. He helped Szilard to warn the American Government of what could be achieved by releasing this energy. On 2 August 1993 Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevolt. In it, Einstein explained the possibility of creating an atomic bomb, and urged the USA to build one before the Nazis did.

Sir: Some recent work by E.Fermi and L.Sziland, which had been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and improved source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believed therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations: In course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America. That it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in large masses…..