Being the intellectual dregs that most of you are it will have probably escaped your collective notice that today is the 65th anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. Of the 9 countries that have (or are believed to have) nuclear weapons, only one country (the United States) has ever used such a weapon of mass destruction on another nation.

At 0815 on this day 65 years ago, the American B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" dropped an atomic bomb (called "Little Boy") from 32,000 feet above Hiroshima, a city with approximately 350,000 inhabitants. The bomb took 43 seconds to fall to 2,000 feet above the ground, its point of fission, at which point it detonated in a type of explosion called an airburst.

Around 75,000 people were incinerated within 3 seconds of the blast. Another 70,000 were burned and died in the ruins of thirst in the chaos of the fallout. The flash heat of the radiation burned shadows onto walls, fused clothes to skin, and charred and melted flesh so that it ran like water. The shockwave demolished everything within a radius of 12 square kilometers.

President Truman rationalised this act of genocide by concluding that Operation Downfall (the proposed Allied invasion of Japan) would be so costly to human life that it was better to use the atom bomb to force Japan to surrender.





In 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb in history, above the Kola Peninsula. The fireball from this weapon from ranged from ground level to 35,000 feet. The shockwave caused earth tremours 620 miles away, and the shockwave passed around the Earth three times. The mushroom cloud was 40 miles high, stretching up into the Earth's mesosphere. Everything within 35 square kilometers of its detonation was reduced to ashes.