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Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, better known as the man who piloted the Enola Gay during the bombing of Hiroshima, became a well-known figure in the United States at the end of the Second World War. Despite his fame, Tibbets asked that upon his death he receive no funeral or gravestone. Paul Tibbets started his career as an abdominal surgeon before enlisting in the US Army Air Corps. He initially served for three years, qualifying as a pilot in 1938, and opted to stay on active duty when the US entered the Second World War. While he is best known for...

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. On Aug. 9, 1945, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The bombings resulted in thousands of causalities in Japan. The decision to drop the bombs on the cities is controversial, even today, due to how many lives were lost. Thousands of people died from the atomic bomb, but the action also ended World War II. Here is everything you need to know about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.

The choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worseThis year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L. Simon is right: atomic weapons are “as close or closer to...

The anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki present an opportunity to demolish a cornerstone myth of American history — that those twin acts of mass civilian slaughter were necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender, and spare a half-million US soldiers who’d have otherwise died in a military conquest of the empire’s home islands.Those who attack this mythology are often reflexively dismissed as unpatriotic, ill-informed or both. However, the most compelling witnesses against the conventional wisdom were patriots with a unique grasp on the state of affairs in August 1945 — America’s senior military leaders of World War...

I saw this interview of Paul Tibbets who piloted the plane that did it. Interesting (to me at least) what led up to August 6 for him with the B-29's development and his preparation for the bomb drop. These are about 20 minutes each. Part 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG2n3EmNtqY&t=159s Part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UelE357z58M

President Biden would be blameless in the event that the U.S. defaults on its debt in the coming days, the president declared Sunday. Biden made the claim during a news conference in Hiroshima, Japan, where he had traveled for meetings with G-7 nations. Republicans in Congress forced Biden to the negotiating table after months of the White House insisting there would be no debate over the issue. Biden now argues that certain "MAGA Republicans" are seeking to cause a default in an effort to crash the economy ahead of Biden's re-election effort. "I've done my part," Biden said regarding negotiations,...

Biden in Hiroshima, Japan on 5/19/23.

In a 1945 summary, a U.S. Army Air Forces unit on Okinawa described August as “an eventful month in world history.” That understatement holds up 77 years later. Events had accelerated in the spring and summer of 1945. Germany surrendered on May 8 but Russia already was shipping massive amounts of men and materiel eastward. Moscow and Tokyo had a non-aggression treaty that Soviet premier Joseph Stalin cancelled on August 9. That night a massive Russian assault into Japanese-held Manchuria opened the Far East end game, briefly overlapping impending Japan’s surrender to the Allies. American forces began deploying from Europe...

Seventy-seven years ago Saturday, August 6, 1945, American servicemen in their airplane Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb, Little Boy, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, another group of American servicemen released Fat Man, another atomic bomb, over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. As a result of this relatively peaceful display of American power, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Americans on August 10, 1945."Relatively peaceful!" very unpeaceful lefty demonstrators will screech in harsh opposition, as they gather once again — e.g., here — to mourn the final chapter of the brutal war, while...

Early in the morning of August 6, 1945, a U.S. Air Force B29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from the its base in Tinian, near Guam, and headed for the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan. It was carrying a 9,700 top-secret bomb named Little Boy. Its pilot was Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., who led a crew of 12 men on a mission that would change the history of the world....... Pilot Tibbetts Jr and other crew members believed to the end of their lives that the bomb was necessary — and they say that it ultimately saved...

Bill Whittle demolishes Jon Stewart's contention that the U.S. should have dropped a demonstration atomic bomb before using real bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This video is one year old today.

Reiko Yamada was 11 years old on August 6, 1945, when the US dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Now 88, she is among the few survivors of the horrific attack, which killed around 140,000 people, and is determined to pass on the lessons of history. But Yamada and other survivors fear their voices are not being heard. On the 77th anniversary of the bombing, FRANCE 24 reports on the survivors of the attack. Bells tolled in Hiroshima on Saturday as the city marked the 77th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing. Reiko...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Saturday the prospect of Russia using nuclear weapons was "increasingly real", welcoming a visit by the U.S. ambassador to Hiroshima, the first city to suffer a nuclear attack. Japan, the only country attacked by atomic weapons, has regularly spoken out against nuclear armaments. Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in parliament, visited the city's peace memorial and museum on Saturday with envoy Rahm Emanuel. “When the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia is increasingly real, I believe Ambassador Emanuel's visit to Hiroshima and his experience of seeing the nuclear reality will...

Last week’s eruption of the volcano near the Pacific island nation of Tonga was 600 times more powerful than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II. As a result, the eruption was so loud that many Tongans went deaf after the first explosion. “The first explosion…our ears were ringing and we couldn’t even hear each other, so all we do is pointing to our families to get up, get ready to run,” Marian Kupu, a journalist on Tonga, told Reuters. The eruption was so loud that it could be heard across the world, even thousands of miles...

Researchers have identified a potential reason why lower numbers of COVID cases have appeared amongst smokers compared to non-smokers, even as other reports suggest smoking increases severity of the disease. Researchers have identified two drugs that mimic the effect of chemicals in cigarette smoke to bind to a receptor in mammalian cells that inhibits production of ACE2 proteins, a process that appears to reduce the ability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter the cell. The findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports on 17 August. Something of a paradox exists with respect to smoking cigarettes and COVID-19. Active smoking is...

TOKYO (AP) — Hiroshima on Friday marked the 76th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing, as the mayor of the Japanese city urged global leaders to unite to eliminate nuclear weapons, just as they are united against the coronavirus. Mayor Kazumi Matsui urged world leaders to commit to nuclear disarmament as seriously as they tackle a pandemic that the international community recognizes as “threat to humanity.” “Nuclear weapons, developed to win wars, are a threat of total annihilation that we can certainly end, if all nations work together,” Matsui said. The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb...

Question: Was it immoral to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yesterday, August 6th, the world commemorated the 75th anniversary of America dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, thus commencing the “atomic age.” Seventy-five years later, the debate still rages on whether it was immoral for President Truman to authorize the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later. I believe that President Truman made the right decision, the moral decision and one that stands moral scrutiny and the test of history. To properly evaluate the decision to...

Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.” People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” And there’s an eloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what...

On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. His destination, the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was not an especially notable target. His payload, however, a single bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” would change the course of history. True watershed moments in history are rare — the agricultural revolution is one such example, as was the Battle of Salamis, the advent of Jesus Christ, and the fall of Western Rome. Yet in the last 1,500 years, no two distinct epochs of time...

It is August, 2020, now seventy-five years since the end of America's World War II hostilities with the nation then known as the Empire of Japan. August 6 and 9 are the historic anniversary dates of the first and only use of nuclear weapons in warfare. In the ensuing three quarters of a century, the attacks of 1945 on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — their usefulness and their rectitude — have been the subject of vigorous debate over their military, scientific, political, historic, and moral significance. Schools of thought regarding yes-or-no justification generally break down as follows:...