The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki

The city of Nagasaki was the target of the world's second atomic bomb attack at 11.02 a.m. on the 9th of August, 1945. The north of the city was destroyed when the bomb exploded 500 meters above the ground and an estimated 70,000 people were killed outright with another 70,000 doomed to die in the following months, years and decades that followed. The Nagasaki bomb was larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier was was a plutonium bomb, whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb. It was a much more powerful bomb (22 kilotons of TNT as opposed to 13), but the destructive effect was not as great as at Hiroshima owing to Nagasaki's mountainous topography. Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki was chosen as a target because it was a major naval and shipbuilding centre. In fact, at the time of the bombing the Nagasaki shipyards were the largest privately owned shipyards in Japan.

Nagasaki was not the primary target of the bomb dropped on August 9th - this was Kokura, near Fukuoka, but it was dropped on the backup target of Nagasaki instead because of cloud cover at Kokura. Ironically, among the things destroyed by the most potent development of western technology was the largest Christian church in Asia, the longest established school of western medicine in Japan and the shipyard which Thomas Glover had founded. Japan surrendered unconditionally on the 15th of August, which in Japan is the festival of O-Bon, when dead ancestors are remembered.