When the clocks showed 02:45 on the night of 6 August 1945, when the war bled the Far East; The world was not yet aware of the fact that it would encounter an event that could not shake off its impact for years. After long negotiations, the nuclear bomb named “Little Boy” prepared for Japan was loaded on the bomber named “Enola Gay” from the American base in the Atlantic Ocean.
While loading, the Americans did not neglect to add their notes that read “Lovely from the Indianapolis crew” using the name of the ship that brought the bomb to the island, Indianapolis. “Little Boy” would explode within hours, wiping an entire city off the map.
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan left damage that lasted for years. So, how was it decided which cities to drop the atomic bomb?
What were the Japanese doing at this time?
When Enola Gay entered the skies of Hiroshima; Although the Japanese detected three planes, one of which was carrying an atomic bomb, on radar, they would not have considered this small fleet worth lifting, as conventional bombing was quite commonplace in those days.
With the first explosion, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were destroyed in seconds.
The intensity of the explosion was unbelievable. The last thing people saw was a bright white light in burning blindness.
So why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki chosen?
Considering that a nuclear weapon will be used for the first time in history, we can understand that every step to be taken is very critical. For this reason, the cities to be bombed had to be of strategic importance to end the war.
The list prepared by the Atomic Bomb Target Committee initially included 17 cities, including Kokura, Kyoto, Yokohoma, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima. Later, as a result of negotiations, this number was reduced to 4.
Tokyo was eliminated because the city was already badly damaged by conventional bombs. The ultimate aim of the atomic bomb was to cause the Japanese to give up, inflicting great damage in a short time.
The Americans wanted to observe for themselves what kind of destruction the bomb, which was used for the first time in history, would cause, and they wanted to have a deterrent effect by proving to the Japanese that the damage was caused entirely by the atomic bomb.
For this reason, a city that was largely undamaged from conventional bombardments should have been chosen. Tokyo was already in ruins.
Bombing Kyoto is not unthinkable.
The reason why Kyoto was excluded from the list, which the Atomic Target Investigation Committee focused on as the second option, was that the city had a great historical and cultural importance.
According to the information we can obtain from the diary of former US Secretary of State Henry Stimson, if this city, which is the cultural and artistic center of Japan, was destroyed in seconds by nuclear power, it would cause such moral pain that in the long run after the war, Japan would replace the USA. He could push for a compromise with Russia. For this reason, they decided not to touch Kyoto.
Thus, Hiroshima and Kokura were settled.
However, on the morning of August 6, visual contact could not be achieved due to the foggy weather in Kokura. So the arrows were pointed at Nagasaki. This natural event in the skies of Kokura had changed the fate of hundreds of thousands of people.
Why was the atomic bomb used?
According to many historians, this historical event, which marks the beginning of the Cold War, is seen as a short way for America to end the war in the Pacific with the least loss according to their own calculations and to stop the unyielding Japanese, on the other hand, it threatens the Soviets with a monopoly of nuclear armament. It had become a tool he aimed to give.
Things didn’t quite go as planned…
With the bombing of the two cities, about two hundred thousand people died. The radioactive effects of the bomb were reflected in the lives of millions of people. Although the war ended on the Far East front as Japan decided to surrender after the great destruction, in 1949 the Russians also got the atomic bomb.
Thus, countries entered an incredible nuclear arms race and made the issue one of the most current and important issues of our time.
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