Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Long and Short Term Effects
On the 6th and 9th of August 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped by the United States of America in a successful attempt to cause Japan’s ‘unconditional surrender’ at the end of WWII (CNN, 2019). As well as causing the end of the war, the dropping of the bombs caused immediate devastation on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The more long-term effects include those on the Cold War and the possible long-term health effects people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have experienced due to radiation exposure.
first glance these casualties seem very great, however some people believe that the bombings were perhaps no more damaging than other events during the course of WWII. Dr Tami Davis Biddle, stated that the use of atomic bombs on Japan wouldn’t have crossed ‘any moral lines that hadn’t already been crossed’ (Biddle, 2019) due to the Firebombing of Tokyo in March which had already killed around 130,000 people (History.com Editors, 2009). Moreover, British bombings on cities such as Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin are estimated to have caused over 100,000 deaths in total (Heziel Pitogo, 2015). In summary the deaths caused by the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were extremely devastating. However, there were also other bombing campaigns such as the Firebombing of Tokyo and the British strategic bombing of German cities that caused similar numbers of immediate casualties.
Both of the atomic bombs caused many casualties almost immediately after being dropped. The first bomb dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th of August was named ‘Little Boy’ and the second bomb, named ‘Fat Man’, was dropped 3 days later (Atomic Heritage Foundation, 2014). It was estimated by the Manhattan Engineer District that there were around 199,000 casualties caused by both bombings and the Japanese made an early estimate that in Hiroshima 95% of deaths were caused by burns (Yale Law School, 2008). The percentage of casualties out of the entire population of Hiroshima was considerably higher than of Nagasaki this is due to the geography of the two cities, rather than the power of the bombs. At
Another immediate effect of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the fact that they caused the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the Japanese on the 2nd of September 1945 (The National WWII Museum - New Orleans, 2022). The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S Military defines unconditional 6
