The Devastating Impact of Atomic Bombs: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Without learning our past, whether that be filled with justice finally being restored or injustice, we must learn it in order to move forward. As Martin Luther King jr. has once said in his book from strength to love, “We are not makers of history; we are made by history.” We are who we are as a result of our experiences throughout history. We don't have the power to alter it. But it makes sense in a way if you think deep into it. It is impossible to change past actions with all the tragedy and pain suffering we may go through, but we can try our best to make it better for the present and the future. When we think back to historical events many of them have changed the modern world in many different ways you can imagine. One event that definitely shook the world and changed the whole course of history was the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among Japan's numerous renowned locations, have a distinct reputation. These two cities, which were destroyed by the only atomic bombs ever used in a war, are more than just important to the Japanese. They are popularly believed to be members of the international society, acting as reminders of humanity's technological accomplishments' awful powers. This viewpoint has long been expressed in guidebooks written for foreign tourists, attempting to emphasize for the listener the tragedy caused by the nuclear bomb while emphasizing the importance of the two cities as examples of an error that, as Hiroshima's central memorable monument states, 'shall not be repeated.'

Considering their long-standing associations with divine concepts of peace and compassion, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are Japanese cities, with traditions that precede the atomic bombs and trajectories that incorporate them into the greater dynamics of Japan's postwar development. Sites have also become popular locations for Japanese tourists: tens of thousands of Japanese visit these places each year, whether alone, in pairs, on school excursions, or on organized bus tours. Their curiosity in the two cities has been addressed by guidebooks outlining what is to be seen in each area since immediately after the war's end.

The dropping of the atomic bombs in August 1945 cruelly linked two towns whose connections in the Japanese consciousness were virtually as divergent as metropolitan centers of the period could be. Hiroshima was Japan's seventh biggest city at the start of the Asian war, with a huge military station and various industrial enterprises, and its castle, which served as the headquarters of the West Japanese Army at the time of the 1945 bombing, was its most conspicuous feature. The city has grown dramatically as a result of its position as the major base for military operations on the Asian mainland throughout the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and Russo-Japanese (1904–1905) wars. Hiroshima had a very limited and confined record at the time of the commencement of war with the United States in 1941, and was recognized largely as a regional industrial and educational hub.

Devastating Consequences of Dropping That Atomic Bomb

The different consequences of the atomic bombs highlight the disparities between the two cities. To summarize some of the most dependable casualty data for each city: In Hiroshima, there were 282,000 bomb-related deaths by 1950, out of a wartime population of roughly 440,000. In Nagasaki, there were 140,000 deaths by the same year, out of a wartime population of 270,000. At Hiroshima, 90% of health care professionals were killed or injured; 42 of 45 hospitals were made inoperable; and 70% of victims had multiple injuries, including severe burns in the majority of cases. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the majority of victims perished without receiving any care to alleviate their pain. Some of those who entered the city after the explosions to help died as a result of the radioactivity.

When thinking about how the atomic bombs dropped in hiroshima and nagasaki, not only was it devastating at the time it still affects the modern world today as well. The August 1945 detonation of atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in very high losses, both immediate and prolonged, but also left a substantial number of survivors who had been exposed to radiation at quantities that could be very accurately determined. Extensive follow-up of a large cohort of survivors (120,000) and their descendants (77,000) began in 1947 and is still ongoing today. In essence, survivors who got 1 Gy irradiation (1000 mSV) have a considerably higher cancer rate (42% rise) but a limited loss in longevity (1 year), whereas their descendants show no increased frequency of abnormalities and, so far, no discernible elevation in the mutation rate. These investigations, which have been described in over 100 papers, have substantially derived current tolerable exposure limits for the general population and nuclear industry workers.

People who have survived the explosions were quickly labeled as Hibakusha, and they faced significant discrimination in Japanese culture as carriers of contagious radiation ailments and possible begetters of defective progeny. While not reaching such extremes, the dominant contemporary image of the aftermath of the Hiroshima Nagasaki bombings, in line with the general perception of radiation risk, is that it left the sites heavily contaminated, that survivors suffered very serious health consequences, particularly a very high rate of cancer and other debilitating diseases, and that offspring of these survivors had a highly increased rate of genetic defects.

Many scientists began to regret their involvement in developing a weapon capable of annihilating everybody and everything in its path in seconds. The US leadership felt that creating a strong nuclear arsenal would operate as a deterrence, preventing a third global war by demonstrating that the US could defeat the USSR if it invaded Western Europe. However, as the United States began to invest in thermonuclear weapons with hundreds of times the strength of the bombs used to end World War II, the Soviets quickly followed suit. The Soviet Union tested the 'Tsar Bomba' in 1961, a massive weapon capable of generating a mushroom cloud the size of Mount Everest and delivering the equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT. This one event in history changed the course of the modern world and we now live in an area where countries are focused on nuclear weaponry in a line of defense.