The Impact Of The First Atomic Bombs: How People Reacted To It
Ever since the birth of the nuclear age, the world has been haunted by the excruciating pain and immeasurable devastation that the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were forced to endure. This was caused by the first atomic bomb being dropped by the US Airforce on the 6th of August, 1945, followed by the surrender of the Japanese Emperor and the end of World War Two. Although there is no doubt that the use of the atomic bombs brought a swift end to the Second World War, the horrifying destruction and the substantial number of unnecessary casualties among the Japanese civilians and the lethal residual radiation will stain the world for generations to come. In addition, the dropping of the atomic bombs had also triggered the Cold War Arms Race between the United States and the Soviet Union which began in 1949. Under the threat of the international scale of nuclear warfare and fear of nuclear annihilation, many anti-nuclear activists including J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and Albert Einstein, whose Mass-Energy Equation enabled the concept of inventing the atomic bomb, were alerted and devoted themselves into promoting nuclear disarmament. Thus, the use of the atomic bomb had caused much more ramification around the world far beyond ending the WWII.
On the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, the US Airforce dropped the first ever atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the bomb has an innocent name – the “Little Boy”. The world was about to witness the catastrophe caused instantly by the hitherto most powerful weapon known to mankind. At 8:15, the bomb exploded about 600 metres above the city with a blast equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT, the temperature reached 6,000 degree Celsius and approximately 70,000 people were killed instantly as the new age dawns. The figure of 78,000 people killed was quoted in the 1968 UN report including a considerable amount of people who survived the initial explosion but died of radiation poisoning in the next few months. (The physical and medical effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) The infrastructures in Hiroshima had also suffered severe damage, 90% of the buildings were brought to the ground. The radius of destruction was about 1.6 kilometres with resulting fire across 11.4 square kilometres. (Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 2016) Only three days after the intimidating bombing of Hiroshima, the second atomic bomb the “Fat Man” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with another 27,000 Japanese citizens vaporized by the bomb following by fire across the entire city. For the people who survived (the Hibakusha), the memory of the explosion of the atomic bomb would certainly be haunting them for the rest of their life. Shinji Mikamo, who was only a boy when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in the summer of 1945, recalled the horrific explosion of the bomb decades after:
“Suddenly I was facing a gigantic fireball. It was at least five times bigger and 10 times brighter than the sun. It was hurtling directly towards me, a powerful flame that was a remarkable pale yellow, almost the colour of white. The deafening noise came next. I was surrounded by the loudest thunder I had ever heard. It was the sound of the universe exploding. In that instant, I felt a searing pain that spread through my entire body. It was as if a bucket of boiling water had been dumped over my body and scoured my skin.” (Venema, 2014)
Under the coercion from the US, on 14th of August, Japan surrendered to the Allies, thus the Second World War was brought to a hasty end.
However, the pain and suffering the citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were forced to undergo heavily outweighed the short-term effects. The residual radiation from the explosion of the atomic bomb had caused fatal diseases among the Japanese in the long term. Shortly after the attack, people in Hiroshima began to notice signs of some mysterious contagions spreading among them when some seemingly healthy people – apparently uninjured – starting to die. Petechiae started to appear on the victims’ limbs and pressure points, there were also sudden hair losses and other strange symptoms. The Petechiae in particular became a mark of death in Hiroshima. After a while, some doctors specialized in the area of X-ray started realizing that the symptoms were probably radiation sickness, high dosage of ionizing radiation was bombarding the survivors and destroying their stem cells, causing all these mysterious and fatal diseases to happen. However, in the immediate aftermath, there was little that could be done. Treatments were rudimentary and a significant amount of people died of secondary diseases such as tuberculosis as a result of weakened immune resistance. (The Fallout, 2015) A Japanese survivor of the atomic bomb later described the agonizing symptoms of the radiation sickness that:
“My friends passed from this world with acute radiation sickness. I have survived these many years, but my right elbow and the fingers of my right hand except for my thumb is bent and immobile. Keloid scars remain on my back, arms and legs. The cartilage in my ears deteriorated from the blood and pus that collected there, leaving my ears deformed. I continue to grow a 'black nail' from the first finger of my right hand. Further, I am afflicted with chronic hepatitis, a liver infection that is a nationally recognised after-effect of the bomb. I have been hospitalised ten times since 1971. Besides my liver problem, I am afflicted with numerous other ailments and cannot help but constantly worry about my health.” (Victims of Radiation Sickness, n.d.)
Even decades later people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki still suffer from deadly diseases caused by the residual radiation. Some 11% of people who developed cancer among more than 80,000 survivors assessed between 1958-1998 turned out to be caused by radiation exposure, and researches shown that there were also significant association between radiation exposure and thyroid, stomach, colon, brain and non-melanoma skin cancer, etc. (The Fallout, 2015) The decision of dropping the first atomic bombs on Japan by US President Truman had therefore caused way more devastation and suffering than he could possibly have imagined.
In addition, the use of atomic bomb had also planted the seeds of hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States. This was later to become a nuclear arms race to be known as the Cold War Arms Race. On 29th of August, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. The testing of the atomic bomb ended the American’s monopoly of nuclear weaponry and launched the Cold War. The Arms Race became the focus of the Cold War in the 1950s followed by the United States testing its first Hydrogen Bomb in 1952, beating the USSR in the creation of the “Super-bomb”, and by the time of 1953, both countries had possessed Hydrogen Bombs. The political climate of the Cold War was defined in the January of 1954, when US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the policy that came to be known as “massive retaliation” – any major attack by the Soviet Union will be returned with a massive nuclear response. As the result of the “massive retaliation”, the most significant by-product of the Cold War was founded – the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). For more than thirty years, the ICBM has been the symbol of the United States’ strategic nuclear arsenal. In October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear bomb with the denotation of “Tsar Bomb” (King of the Bombs), it was the largest nuclear weapon the world had ever seen at that time. The “Tsar Bomb” was equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT or more that all the explosives used in WWII. It was tested after the agreement between the USSR and the US to limit nuclear testing. Having no strategic value, the act of exploding the bomb was merely an intimidation by the Soviets. (The Cold War, n.d.)
