On August 6, 1945, An american B-29 bomber named Enola Gay which was piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb on a Japanese City called Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90% of the city and killed about 80,000 people. 10,000 people later died from radiation exposure.
Hiroshima was 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. Hiroshima’s population was around 360,000 before the bombing. After the bombing it dropped to nearly 137,000. Arriving on the U.S. base on the Pacific Islands of Tinian, about a 9000-pound uranium-235 was loaded onto a modified B-29 bomber. The plane dropped a bomb known as “Little Boy”, attached to a parachute at 8:15am, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima equal to a blast of 12,000-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city. The B-29 bomber would have never made its target unless if the Japanese air defense wouldn’t have called off because there was only one plane so they saw no threat. But, little did they know that that plane was carrying one of the biggest bombs in the world. All of the other cities did not believe there was a bombing.
Japan didn’t believe anything from anyone at first. They all thought that the people were making up horrible rumors from the little truth they had. Japan made a young officer,
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The second bomb “Fat Man” was on a second bomber “Bockscar” from Tinian. Bockscar was piloted by Major Charles Sweeney whose primary target was Kokura but, due to thick clouds Major Charles Sweeney was driven to the secondary target which was Nagasaki. Aboard Bockscar was Fat man which was a plutonium bomb which was more powerful than the one used at Hiroshima. Fat Man weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22 kiloton blast. Nagasaki is nestled in narrow valleys in between mountains. This reduced the bombs total amount of damage it was calculated to make to 2.6 square