On This Day: 78 years since US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan
The bombing was the first-ever use of nuclear weapons in war and was followed three days later by a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki.
August 6, 2023, marks 78 years since the US Army dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War II.
The nuclear weapon itself was dubbed the "Little Boy" and was the culmination of the scientific research of the Manhattan Project, led by Jewish scientist J. Robbert Oppenheimer and featuring other scientific luminaries such as Niles Bohr and Albert Einstein.
Its use marked the first-ever use of nuclear weapons in war and against a civilian population and is credited by many as changing the way war and diplomacy is carried out in the modern era.
Oppenheimer's legacy: What is an atomic bomb and how was it made?
An atomic bomb is, in its simplest form, a bomb that utilizes the process of nuclear fission, the splitting of then nucleus of an atom into two other nuclei, for the purpose of creating a massive and powerful explosion.
Despite the relatively small size of the bomb, it is capable of creating massive explosions, greater than any bomb ever made until that point.
Several scientists around the world had been working towards this goal, with the first to succeed being Oppenheimer, Einstein, and the rest of the Manhattan Project team.
Developed under the administration of then-US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the project was finished and the bombing was carried out under the administration of then-president Harry S. Truman as a means of ending the war.
The first nuclear weapon was tested on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico in what became known as the Trinity nuclear test. Less than a month later, the first atomic bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima.
The Trinity test prompted Oppenheimer to recall a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita, a portion of the Hindu epic poem the Mahabharata, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Ultimately, the bomb was dropped by the Boeing B-29 bomber Enola Gay on the city, striking the city with an unprecedentedly powerful 15 kilotons of TNT. The destruction was widespread in the city with tens of thousands of people dead as a result.
Before and after the Hiroshima bomb dropHowever, archive footage shows pre-bomb Hiroshima as a bustling, thriving city of trilby-topped gentlemen boarding trams, ladies dressed in elegant kimonos, and uniformed schoolchildren walking beneath cherry blossoms overhanging shopping streets.
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