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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:...

(CNN)The world's oceans are now heating at the same rate as if five Hiroshima atomic bombs were dropped into the water every second, scientists have said. A new study released on Monday showed that 2019 was yet another year of record-setting ocean warming, with water temperatures reaching the highest temperature ever recorded.

TOKYO - Pope Francis has told Japanese Emperor Naruhito that he remembers seeing his parents cry over the news of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 74 years ago. The pope traveled on Sunday to the two Japanese cities, where he urged world powers to renounce their nuclear arsenals and declared the use and possession of atomic bombs an “immoral” crime. Palace officials say the pope told the emperor on Monday that he recalled the memory of his parent’s sorrow when he addressed survivors of the atomic bombings in the two cities. Naruhito told Francis that he has high...

Never-before-seen photos of the aircraft crew that dropped the world's first atomic bomb receiving a heroes' welcome upon returning from the historic mission have come to light. The black and white photos show the 12 airmen posing before and after they deployed the B-29 bomber 'Enola Gay' to drop the devastating bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. One photo is of pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets being given an immediate gallantry decoration by a general after stepping off the aircraft.

In 2015, retired geologist and marine ecologist Mario Wannier was examining samples of beach sand collected from Japan's Motoujina Peninsula, just 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) south of Hiroshima's hypocentre, or ground zero. Primarily, Wannier and fellow researcher Marc de Urreiztieta were looking for traces of microscopic organisms called foraminifera in the sediment, but that's not all they found. These strange glass spherule particles – some of which resemble the kind of glassy debris ejected into the atmosphere during meteorite impacts – are estimated to constitute up to 2.5 percent of all the sand in the beaches around Hiroshima. Wannier ended...

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium-fueled atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 repeated the attack on Nagasaki, Japan, with an even more powerful plutonium bomb. Less than a month after the second bombing, Imperial Japan agreed to formally surrender on Sept. 2. That date marked the official end of World War II -- the bloodiest human or natural catastrophe in history, accounting for more than 65 million dead. Each August, Americans in hindsight ponder the need for, the morality of, and the strategic rationale behind the dropping of...

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It was the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in warfare. There were three strike planes that flew over Hiroshima that day: the Enola Gay, which carried the bomb, and two observation planes, the Great Artiste and the Necessary Evil. Russell Gackenbach was a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps and a navigator on the mission. Today, the 95-year-old is the only surviving crew member of those three planes.

In the decades immediately following World War II, American public opinion generally supported President Truman's historic decision to unleash nuclear weapons on Japan. Everyone accepted that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unfortunate necessity brought on by the unwillingness of Japan to surrender. Those two bombs, which killed over 140,000 civilians, were viewed as a way to avoid the obscene costs in men and materiel associated with invading the Japanese homeland. Nowadays, many question whether those bombs were necessary. Given that they killed almost exclusively civilians and that the second of the two was dropped only two days...

Hiroshima atomic bombing survivor Setsuko Thurlow and International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) leader Beatrice Fihn on Saturday urged the United States and North Korea to negotiate and avoid nuclear war. On Sunday, the two will receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Thurlow, 85, was 13 years old at the time of the Hiroshima bombing. "No human being should suffer what we suffered," Thurlow told reporters Saturday. "I deeply and strongly urge the leaders of North Korea and the U.S. never to use nuclear weapons ... Negotiate....

Seventy-two years after two torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine sunk cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), the ship’s wreckage was found resting on the seafloor on Saturday – more than 18,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface.