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There are not many people who have survived a nuclear attack. There is only one person who officially survived two. On this day, 80 years ago, young engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the horrors he had seen in the Japanese city of Hiroshima when the room went blindingly white. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he told UK Newspaper, The Independent. Yamaguchi was an engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi, then 29, was in Hiroshima for a business trip...

Eighty years ago this week, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing the end of World War II. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” uranium bomb on Hiroshima, killing up to 166,000 people. Three days later, on August 9, the B-29 Bockscar was diverted from its primary target of Kokura due to bad weather and instead dropped the more powerful “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on the secondary target of Nagasaki, killing up to 80,000 and compelling Japan’s surrender.

Eighty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this analysis explores Operation Downfall, the massive Allied invasion of Japan that was averted by Tokyo’s surrender. The two-stage plan, Operations Olympic and Coronet, would have involved more than twice the forces of the Normandy landings and was expected to be unimaginably costly.

An atomic cloud is captured by a bomber over Nagasaki in 1945; tourists visit the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on June 28, 2025. August 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings in Japan and the end of the Pacific theatre of World War II. Aug. 6 marks the 80th anniversary of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima – and three days later, on Nagasaki – during World War II. Today, most Americans (83%) say they know a lot or a little about these events, according to a new Pew Research...

Eighty years ago today, in the early morning at a place called Trinity in the desert outside Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert, a new star arose from the landscape. It was not a natural phenomenon. This unprecedented display of light and heat, brighter than two suns as one observer said, was a thing engineered by the minds of men. It was seen for hundreds of miles in every direction. "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," project lead Robert Oppenheimer uttered when he beheld the culmination of years of research. Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge perhaps summed it up better: "Now...

Will we soon witness the world’s first nuclear war? Following nuclear-armed India’s attack on nuclear-armed Pakistan, media outlets all over the globe quickly published stories about the possibility of nuclear war. In fact, this morning the main headline on the Drudge Report was “WORLD HOLDS BREATH” in all capital letters. Yes, it is entirely possible that a nuclear war could erupt between India and Pakistan. But will someone else use nuclear weapons first? In the Middle East, a showdown is looming between Israel and Iran. We know that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, and there are some experts that are convinced...

ROME — Pope Francis prayed Sunday for the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a topic he has returned to on numerous occasions. In these days we have commemorated “the anniversary of the atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the pontiff told visitors gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly Angelus address.

Today is August 6, 2024. December 7, 1941: August 6, 1945 Lest we forget.

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.

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

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...

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...

President Joe Biden made another one of his infamous gaffes on Monday as he referred to a Japanese-American civil rights activist as “Karen Nagasaki” when her actual last name is “Narasaki.” The president somehow made the unfortunate error despite reading from a teleprompter during a ceremony celebrating a law that will establish a commission to study the creation of a National Museum of Asian American and Pacific Islander History and Culture, according to CNN. “You can’t even make this stuff up,” tweeted The Daily Wire’s Cabot Phillips. “Biden just called an Asian rights activist ‘Karen Nagasaki’ instead of Narasaki.”

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...

Nagasaki, Japan, Aug 7, 2019 / 04:42 pm (CNA).- An Ohio college is returning to Nagasaki's Immaculate Conception Cathedral a wooden cross that was recovered from the cathedral's remains after the Aug. 9, 1945 atomic strike on the city. Dr. Tanya Maus, director of Wilmington College's Peace Resource Center, planned to return the cross Aug. 7. “Very few artifacts from the cathedral were retained and that’s why it’s crucial to give back that cross, which is so deeply tied to their identity,” Maus said, according to Wilmington College, a Quaker liberal arts institution in Wilmington, Ohio. The return is being...

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...

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...

Don’t worry too much about this story. I’m sure Barack Obama would have waited for Japan's apology for Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the treatment of American POWs … The cable indicates the Japanese government was then effectively discouraging Obama from visiting Hiroshima despite growing expectations over it following his call for a world free from nuclear weapons in a speech in Prague in April 2009.The cable, dated Sept. 3, 2009, and sent to U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton, reported Japan’s then Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling Ambassador John Roos on Aug. 28 that...