it was just so horrible and pathetic that I couldn’t look.” In one of the story’s many Orwellian details, the United States-printed leaflets warning Nagasaki residents of the coming nuclear explosion had distribution delays, and weren’t dropped over the city until August 10. The governor of the region, when he crossed the mountain and saw the damage, said: “It was. In an instant, a thriving city populated almost entirely with civilians had been reduced to a huge cauterised field of rubble through which tens of thousands of horrifically burnt victims now stumbled in complete confusion. The mountains to the north, east and west of the Urakami Valley served to contain the extent of the damage somewhat, but about 74,000 people were killed either in the initial detonation and firestorm – their bodies hurled through the air like dry leaves, their heads and limbs and skin blown off – or in the blast’s aftermath of unprecedented radiation poisoning (greater levels, as Southard points out, than any set of humans had ever been exposed to before). “Directly beneath the bomb, infrared heat rays instantly carbonised human and animal flesh and vaporised internal organs. “The thermal heat of the bomb ignited a fireball with an internal temperature of over 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” Southard writes. The centre of the explosion reached temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun, and the shock wave ripping out in all directions travelled faster than the speed of sound. An atomic cloud rose 4,000 feet over the city. The explosion’s flash was visible 16 kilometres away. When the bomb was just 1,650 feet above the athletic field roughly in the centre of the city, it exploded.Īs Susan Southard writes in her grimly excellent new book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War: 'The entire city convulsed.' At its heart was a small core of enriched plutonium-239 surrounded by 64 timed explosives whose detonation would provoke a nuclear fission reaction. The bomb was nicknamed “Fat Man.” It was 10 feet 8 inches long, 5 feet in diameter and weighed 4,900 kilograms. For the second and last time in human history, an atomic bomb had been used as a weapon of war.

The Bockscar then dropped its payload, peeling steeply up and away to escape the blast its pilot knew was coming. The city had suffered extensively from bombs and fires in the course of the war, but even so, as much as possible, this was an ordinary day, with summer heat in the offing and cicadas whining in the city’s foliage.Īll of that – every last vestige of normality – was about to end.Īt 11.02 in the morning, the American bomber Bockscar, running low on fuel and finding its primary target, the city of Kokura, obscured by cloud cover and by the smoke of buildings bombed in a recent air raid on a nearby city, settled on its secondary target, Nagasaki.

On the morning of August 9, 1945, the 240,000 citizens of the beautiful southern Japanese port of Nagasaki began their day.

Nagasaki by Susan Southard