In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs three days apart on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The bombings combined killed almost 200,000 people. It remains the only time that nuclear weapons were used in warfare. As World War II was entering its sixth year, Nazi Germany had surrendered in May but the Japanese refused to accept the terms of surrender. The United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945. Failure to comply would result in "prompt and utter destruction," according to history.com. A uranium atomic bomb called "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The "Fat Man" plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Thousands were killed instantly. Thousands of others died within months from burns and radiation sickness. On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies. The Evening News, Monday, Aug. 6, 1945: "Atomic Bomb Used First Time" "Truman Reveals Secret of Miracle Explosive Equal to 20,000 Tons of the Deadliest TNT" "The United States has unleashed against Japan the terror of an atomic bomb 2000 times more powerful than the biggest blockbusters ever used in warfare. President Truman revealed this great scientific achievement today and warned the Japanese that they now face 'a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.' The new atomic bomb was used for the first time yesterday. An American plane dropped one on the Japanese army base at Hiroshima." Hiroshima Memorial Day will be observed Aug. 5-6 in Harrisburg by the Harrisburg Peace Promenade and Physicians for Social Responsibility. A service will be held at 7 p.m. Aug. 5 at Market Square Presbyterian Church followed by the "Candles on the Water" in the Susquehanna River at Front and Mulberry streets. A wreath will be laid at the Hiroshima Monument at Front and Woodbine streets at 3 p.m. Aug. 6. Speakers will include artist, activist and pastor Virginia Cohn Parkum and poet laureate Rick Kearns.<doc-sep>Warfare History Network Security, Asia The most controversial decision of the 20th century—probably in all of history—was the one reportedly made by President Harry S. Truman, president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces, in the summer of 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. No other event has affected mankind so dramatically, and no other decision is as controversial. The Atomic Bomb Strike on Hiroshima & Nagasaki: Did Truman Make a Mistake? When news of the Japanese surrender reached the world, Americans automatically and naturally assumed it was due to the detonation of the atomic bombs. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who were making preparations for an invasion believed that the atomic bomb had spared their lives. Because they were not privy to the information available at the highest levels of government, they had no idea that the Japanese had attempted to convey their wishes to surrender several months before the detonation of the bomb. The most controversial decision of the 20th century—probably in all of history—was the one reportedly made by President Harry S. Truman, president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces, in the summer of 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. No other event has affected mankind so dramatically, and no other decision is as controversial. To the young soldiers and Marines who were in training or moving to the Pacific when “the bomb” was dropped there was no question—many of them survived the war because Harry Truman “had the guts to drop it.” This belief was burned into their young minds when they heard the news and most never bothered to question whether it was founded on fact. In recent years their sons have sought to reinforce the belief of their fathers, once again without taking a serious look at the facts surrounding the decision to drop the bomb and the events leading up to it. Yet, in reality, Truman never made an actual decision to use the bomb, and it was the one decision made by Emperor Hirohito of Japan to accept Allied surrender terms and end the war that actually spared their lives. Story continues Even while millions of Americans continue to believe that the atomic bomb ended World War II, many, including some in high positions in government and the military at the time, have long believed it was unnecessary. Previously classified documents released to the National Archives in recent years support their position that the White House knew the end for Japan had already come and that the use of atomic weapons was motivated more by postwar concerns than by preventing an amphibious invasion of Japan. Furthermore, principals such as General Leslie Groves, the officer in charge of the nuclear project, have revealed that there never really was a “decision” as such by President Truman to drop the bomb, but that he simply allowed plans that were already in motion before he was thrust into office to continue. In essence, the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan was made long before Truman even had an inkling of their existence. Building the Bomb American research into the possibility of creating powerful weapons using nuclear fission actually predated the outbreak of World War II by several weeks. In July 1939, three European scientists met with renowned physicist Albert Einstein and persuaded him to write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising that a bomb designed to produce a nuclear explosion might be under development in Germany. Einstein’s letter is dated August 2, 1939, nearly a month before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and World War II officially began. British scientists were already working on such a weapon, and the United States began a similar, although generally unsuccessful, effort in response to the Einstein letter.ƒ In 1941, a group of American scientists visited England, where considerable nuclear research work was being done. Prior to the visit, no American scientist believed that nuclear fission would be of critical importance to the war, but the British work so impressed the visitors that in December they recommended that a full-scale nuclear project commence in the United States. President Roosevelt authorized a research program under the code name Manhattan Engineering Project, and British nuclear experts came to the United States to work with their American counterparts in research toward the development of a nuclear weapon. In September 1942, the War Department assumed control of the project and Colonel Leslie R. Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who had previously been in charge of the construction of the Pentagon, was appointed as the project head. On December 2, 1942, Dr. Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born physicist working at the University of Chicago, achieved fission, the first controlled release of nuclear energy. Fermi’s successful experiment proved that it was indeed possible to develop a nuclear weapon and ushered the world into the nuclear age. The next step was to develop a means of maintaining the nuclear material in an inert state until the desired detonation point. Manhattan Project scientists solved the problem by dividing nuclear material into two masses, then firing one into the other to achieve an explosion. Another method was to place the nuclear material between two masses of conventional explosives. The shock waves of their detonation would cause the plutonium to collapse and then expand again in a powerful explosion. The first method was used for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, while the second was the mechanism for the first nuclear detonation at the Trinity site in New Mexico and in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The nuclear secret was so classified that President Roosevelt did not even inform his vice presidents of it. (Truman was the third of three vice presidents who served with Roosevelt. Truman was not elected until November 1944 and did not take the vice-presidential office until the following January, only a few weeks before FDR’s death.) Finding a Suitable Delivery Vehicle<doc-sep>WARNING: Graphic images ON AUGUST 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima to hasten the end of World War II. American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped its deadly payload, dubbed “Little Boy”, over the city at 8.15am local time. The explosion obliterated nearly everything within 10sq km in the downtown area. Around 140,000 people, or more than half of Hiroshima's population at the time, died. Some died immediately while others succumbed to injuries or radiation-related illnesses weeks, months and years later. Hiroshima — and the Nagasaki bombing that took place three days later — remain the only use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. Following the bombings, Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, to Allied forces, officially ending World War II and bringing down the curtain on the costliest conflict in history. MORE: The teen who warned Japan Hiroshima had been bombed MORE: Nuclear missile 200 times more powerful than Hiroshima MORE: Tourists can’t keep away from Hiroshima<doc-sep>The 500 students at Shiroyama Elementary School gather in the assembly hall on the ninth day of every month to sing a song. This is no ordinary school anthem, however. Dear Children’s Souls deals with the most traumatic chapter in the school’s long history: the moment 1,400 students and 28 staff members died when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the southern Japanese city of Nagasaki in the closing stages of the second world war. Nearly 73 years have passed since the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 – and Hiroshima three days earlier – but the school feels a special responsibility to keep the memories alive. “Shiroyama Elementary School is situated closest to the ground zero of the A-bombing compared to other municipal elementary schools in Nagasaki,” explains the softly spoken principal, Hiroaki Takemura, adding that the hypo-centre was just 500m away. “The feelings for peace are very strong here.” The task is becoming increasingly vital as more and more of the survivors who directly witnessed the events pass away. The ranks of these survivors, known as hibakusha, have halved over the past two decades and their average age is now 82. As they become less mobile, they find it more difficult to travel and give first-hand accounts of the horrors of nuclear war in the hope of preventing any repeat amid growing global tensions. The year-six students at Shiroyama, therefore, are taking on more responsibility and being trained as “mini-storytellers”. Each year, about 400 schools from across Japan send thousands of students on field trips to Shiroyama to learn about the A-bomb. After passing the school gate etched with pictures of doves, the visiting children hear the song lyrics describing how students and teachers’ lives were snuffed out “in a brief flash … expiring meaninglessly”. Then the sixth-graders host the visitors on a tour around the school, including the old building ruins, in an activity called “Peace Navi (navigation)”. The junior storytellers tell their peers what happened and convey an overarching message of peace, says Takemura. These sorts of activities give hope to A-bomb survivors such as Setsuo Uchino, 74. Uchino was just one year and nine months old when Nagasaki was attacked, but fared better than many others because he had been placed in an air raid shelter at the time. Setsuo Uchino, 74, who was just one year and nine months old when Nagasaki was attacked, wants to pass the peace baton to the next generation. Photograph: Daniel Hurst “Unfortunately I don’t think I will see nuclear weapons eradicated while I’m still alive, but I’m hoping that during the next generation’s time something will improve,” Uchino says. “That’s why I feel that it’s a responsibility and duty for me to talk about the stories and my own experience to the children, to the young generation – so that they understand how dangerous and horrific and inhumane the A-bombing was, and how scary and horrible nuclear arms are.” ‘Hell on earth’ It may be a confronting topic for children, but Uchino himself had to come to terms with the horrors of the Nagasaki bombing at a very young age. Although he doesn’t have many direct memories of the day, Uchino says his parents spoke to him for the first time about the family’s experiences when he was in the fourth grade of elementary school. His mother, who had seen the burnt remains of many victims including some bodies without heads, told him the post-bombing scene was like “hell on earth”. People clinging to life were desperately crying out for water on that hot summer day. Uchino urges the children who hear his story to start conversations with their peers. “I get so many letters of gratitude from students and young people who said they’re determined to share the stories with their families,” he says proudly. In Hiroshima, too, local authorities are working to preserve the memories. Children from Shiroyama Elementary School talk to visitors about the bombings. Photograph: Shiroyama Elementary School To date, 117 adults have successfully completed three years of training to become “A-bomb legacy successors”, with a further 250 set to join their ranks soon. These volunteers “inherit” hibakusha’s experiences and share their message of peace to students on field trips and foreign visitors. “It is a fact that young people in Japan don’t know much about the A-bombings,” admits Hirotaka Matsushima from Hiroshima City’s peace promotion division. As Japan prepares to commemorate the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Guardian and other international news organisations were invited to these cities by Japan’s ministry of foreign affairs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will soon make their annual peace declarations, which typically call on world leaders to reflect on what happened in those cities and pursue nuclear disarmament. This, of course, is easier said than done. Many survivors are incredulous that Japan, despite being the only nation to have suffered a wartime atomic attack, has shunned a new international treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. “Actually the leaders of this country are not serious about nuclear abolition,” says Kosei Mito, 72, who was in his mother’s womb when Hiroshima was bombed. “This is the most annoying thing to me.” Disarmament campaigners could be forgiven for being pessimistic about recent world events. At the height of tensions between the US and North Korea, Donald Trump publicly boasted of having a bigger nuclear button. While the temperature has since been lowered, there are few signs of concrete progress on North Korea’s pledge to “work toward” denuclearisation the Korean Peninsula. But on at least one front, there’s reason to be positive, according to Fumihiko Yoshida, a professor at the Research Centre for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. Many young people and middle-aged people are taking the survivors’ stories very seriously and trying to prepare “for the new stage when we will not be able to listen to hibakusha anymore”. “So, yes, we will lose many real voices from hibakusha in coming years,” Yoshida says, “but also we are seeing increasing new messengers who can talk about what happened 73 years ago.”<doc-sep>
Relations between the U.S. and Japan 73 years ago were epoch-definingly bad: Monday marks the anniversary of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima; the anniversary of the Aug. 9, 1945, bombing of Nagasaki falls on Thursday. A week later, it was announced that Japan would surrender, four years after its attack on Pearl Harbor had catapulted the U.S. into World War II. Today, however, things are very different. Eighty-four percent of Japanese people feel “close” to the U.S., according to the Japanese government’s annual Cabinet Office poll, and 87% of Americans say they have a favorable view of Japan, according to a Gallup poll. So how did the U.S. and Japan get from the situation in 1945 to the strong alliance they have today? The process of reconciliation began as soon as the war ended, but it didn’t always go smoothly. The first phase was the United States’ roughly seven-year occupation of Japan, which began following the surrender. When Japan got a new constitution, which took effect on May 3, 1947, its terms came largely courtesy of American influence, specifically that of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur and his staff. For example, while the new constitution democratized the political structure of Japan, it also kept Emperor Hirohito as the nation’s symbolic leader, per MacArthur’s wishes. “Japan experts said if you dismantle the emperor system, there will be chaos,” explains Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of Asian Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The constitution also made a key determination about Japan’s military future: Article 9 included a two-part clause stating that “Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes” and, to accomplish that goal, that “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Though it was meant to keep the peace, the clause created an unequal power dynamic — the military force of the occupying power was growing while that of the occupied nation was stuck — and thus led to problems of its own. “The U.S. could use its Japanese bases to support military action elsewhere in Asia, could bring into Japan any weapons it chose, including H-bombs, could even use its forces to aid the Japanese government in putting down internal disturbances,” TIME later reported. “These were bonds that left Japan precious little room for international maneuver and that chafed increasingly against dark memories of Hiroshima and the deep national pride of the Japanese people.” And within a few years, as the Korean War broke out, the U.S. was looking for ways around the terms it had been so instrumental in establishing, as it pressed Japan to build up its own military (called “self-defense forces” to get around the constitutional prohibition) as a backstop against the North Korean side. Many Japanese people were uncomfortable, or worse, with this obvious violation of the constitution and what was seen as a movement away from peacefulness, which had quickly become part of the post-war national identity. But the shift was just one part of a larger motivation for the U.S. and Japan to get back on the same side: the Cold War and the global threat of communism. The American occupation of Japan ended in 1952, after the U.S. and Japan signed a security treaty for a “peace of reconciliation” in San Francisco in 1951. The agreement let the U.S. maintain military bases there, and a revision in 1960 said the U.S. would come to Japan’s defense in an attack. “After the Korean War, the U.S. had to rethink how it would deal with Asia, so in order to contain communism, the U.S. and Japan signed a peace treaty that says Japan is a sovereign country but agrees that the U.S. can stay and provide security,” explains Green.