The bombing of Nagasaki

The Independent

Nagasaki after the bombing.

According to History.com in 1945 during WWll at 11:02 in the morning, the bomb “Fat Man” was dropped over Nagasaki, Japan. It exploded 1650 feet above Nagasaki. The explosion produced a 22 kiloton blast, but the effect of the bomb was decreased due to the terrain. The blast radius was reduced to an estimate of around 2.6 square miles in diameter. The explosion killed an estimated 40,000 people the second the bomb exploded.  It was the second atomic bomb the United States military dropped on Japan, coming three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki was nearly 25 percent more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. 

Some extra facts are that Nagasaki wasn’t supposed to be the second bomb site but instead the bomb was supposed to be dropped on the city of Kokura. According to History.com the city of Kokura hosted an imperial Japanese army arsenal that was on the northern coast of Kyushu. However, during the bombing run the navigator was unable to clearly see the bomb dropsite in Kokura due to cloud cover so the pilot turned towards their secondary target, Nagasaki, instead. 

Other reasons why the bomb site changed from Kokura to Nagasaki was that there had been a faulty fuel system that only let the pilot have enough fuel for one trip over Nagasaki, and as well as that there was missed meet up with other strike force bombers.

According to History.com, the ground temperature had reached 4000 degrees the second the bomb exploded, that is two times the melting point of metal. The people at Nagasaki had died from some combination of the bomb’s heat, blast force and radiation. 

The “lucky” victims died almost instantly in the blast. Most of the victims of Nagasaki died from burns and blast injuries, or from being trapped under the thousands of burning wooden houses that had collapsed after the bomb went off. The people that were the most unluckiest on that day were the acute radiation syndrome victims. Around a fifth of the city’s total victims had agonizing deaths, as their internal organs failed one after the other and as their bodies were decomposing from the inside out.