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On This Day In History: The Atomic Bombing Of Hiroshima, Japan


On This Day In History: The Atomic Bombing Of Hiroshima, Japan

On August 4, 2020, Beirut, Lebanon was rocked by an explosion equated to 1.1 kilotons of TNT. You can find the videos yourself, but understand the scale of what you will be watching: a crater that’s 390 feet or so in diameter is where shoreline once was. Six miles away, houses have damage. The US Geological Survey recorded the blast as a 3.3 earthquake, while the Jordan Seismological Observatory recorded it as a 4.5 on the local magnitude scale. Those notes are important, but the scene of what happened was recorded in full clarity: a fire at the Port of Beirut set off a small explosion that had stirred up smoke and created light flashes that look like either electrical arcs or fireworks. Then, at 6:08 p.m. (local time) the big one went off. And we mean “big”. 2,750 short tons of ammonium nitrate had been collected in hangar at the port. The ammonium nitrate had been removed from a cargo ship in 2014, a year after the ship had been deemed unseaworthy and barred from leaving port. The shock wave rocked everything in it’s path…buildings, destroyed; a cruise ship rocked so badly it capsized overnight. I checked in with a friend of mine from my college days who I know is in Lebanon and made sure he was okay, and in his response, the only thing he asked for was prayers. The photos I’ve seen over the last few hours tell the tale of devastation. He isn’t lying…they need everything they can get over there.

When I sit down at the computer, I have a quick routine: I check my social media real fast, then Wikipedia to see what happened on the next day in history (when you will read the story). I was not expecting the first of the two atomic bombings to pop up in such a close proximity to the Beirut explosion, but here we are. August 6, 1945, the day that many who were in the know back then feared, the day that the world learned of a new hell, the day that stopped even the most battle-hardened dead in their tracks. It was the day that the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, running with a crew of twelve men, cut loose a Little Boy bomb at 8:15 in the morning. Not quite one minute later, a 16 kiloton nuclear detonation occurred and warfare that even Sun Tzu could not have prepared for became a reality. 30% of the population of the city died between the blast and the firestorm that ensued. The devastation was indiscriminate and complete.

Three days later, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki after weather forced the crews to abandon their original target of Kokura. On August 12, 1945 Emporor Hirohito made his capitulation announcement. With the Soviet Union treading into the war on Japan and the atomic bombs a very real item, the surrender went into effect on August 15, 1945. The Japanese Instruments of Surrender were signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, bringing to an end a war that had killed nearly three percent of the world’s population between warfare, genocides, slave labor, POW camps, chemical weapons and other atrocities. There will forever be an argument over the use of the atomic bomb. Did it end the war quickly and as bloodlessly as possible? Was it radical overkill in terms that hadn’t been seen up to that point?

Human beings are capable of some genuinely, horrifying acts against each other. What happened in Beirut seems to be, at the moment of this writing, a combination of negligence and a horrifying accident. What happened in Japan seventy-five years ago was deliberate. It is one of the most gut-wrenching things that humans have ever done to themselves, the most self-destructive act imaginable for a species. In the blink of an eye, as many as 150,000 people were instantly wiped off of the face of the earth and many more would suffer the effects for decades to come.

May we never revisit this section of the past.


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2 thoughts on “On This Day In History: The Atomic Bombing Of Hiroshima, Japan

  1. john

    That grain elevator saved the entire city from destruction. The Texas City blast of 1947 and the Halifax ship fire/explosion in 1917 were equally as horrendous. As for Hiroshima / Nagasaki, there will always be pro-con debate.

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