The world will always remember the day, 6th August 1945, when the United States of America dropped the first-ever atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
It became the first and only nation to use the weapon during a war. The direct effect of the blast killed 80,000 (or more) people at once. By the end of 1945, the bomb had killed 60,000 more from radiation poisoning and wounds.
By then, the focus of the second World War had shifted to Japan because Germany had already surrendered. The US had been looking at ending Japan’s resistance and feared that an invasion would lead to heavy casualties on their end.
It would go on to drop another atomic bomb on Nagasaki on 8th August 1945, three days after the first one. Japan surrendered days after the second bomb.
Both bombs had killed 100,000 people at once from direct impact. Many more would die later in the year and years to come. It was due to the deadly effect of this sort of weaponry that led to the formation of the Russel-Einstein manifesto.
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Why is the atomic bomb so deadly? This is simply because it is made from the destructive force of nuclear reactions. They are capable of destruction of over 20,000 times the power of conventional explosives that are the same size as them.
Many have argued that the cold war between the Soviet Union and the US was due to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Seeing America’s weapon might, the Soviet Union also put more effort into making its own nuclear weapons.
This led to suspicion on both sides of the divide. The attention moved on from World War 2 to the weapon tension between the two countries. Fortunately, neither has reached the conclusion of using their weapons against one another.
However, this is likely because of something called mutually assured destruction (MAD). This is a situation where two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.
It is now 75 years after the Japanese atomic bombings; the world is still yet to recover from the shock of what humans can mete out on themselves. Survivors of the attack and activists are calling for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
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