65 years. 240,000 souls.
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
We won the race of discovery against the Germans….
Sixty-five years ago today:
Harry S. Truman, August 9, 1945.
Truman described Hiroshima, a port city of some 300,000 people, a military base,
and then said, That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.
About 85% of the people killed in Hiroshima were civilians — about 140,000 people, more than half of all the people living in the city. Meanwhile, on the same day that President Harry Truman recorded this message, at 11:02am, on August 9, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces, acting on Truman’s orders, dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, an industrial center and seaside resort town. About 240,000 people were killed, all told, by these two deliberate atomic bombings of civilian centers.
What else is there to say on a day like today?
Having found the bomb, we have used it.
… on Hiroshima, a military base…
We wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.
We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor…
We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war.
See also:
- GT 2005-08-09: A day that will live in infamy
- Ralph Raico, Antiwar.com (2009-08-05): Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- John Pilger (2010-08-06): The Lies of Hiroshima Are The Lies of Today
- Design Observer (November, 2008): Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs
- Hiroshima, the pictures they didn’t want us to see
The audio clip above is from a recording of President Harry S. Truman’s radio report on the Potsdam conference, recorded by CBS on August 9, 1945 in the White House. The song linked to above is a recording of Oppenheimer (1997), by the British composer Jocelyn Pook. The voice that you hear at the beginning is Robert Oppenheimer, in an interview many years after the war, talking about his thoughts at the Trinity test
, the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the history of the world, on July 16th, 1945.
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