What was the tragedy in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?

In 1976, Japan donated 53 bonsai trees to the US for its bicentennial, including a white pine that had been tended daily since 1625 and survived the Hiroshima atomic blast. Its history was unknown until 2001 when two brothers showed up at the museum to check on their grandfather’s tree.

There was a 3-day Go championship game ongoing in Hiroshima when the city was nuked. The building was damaged and several spectators were injured, but play resumed normally after the lunch break and concluded later that day.

During WW2, the Japanese city of Kyoto was spared from atomic destruction solely by Henry L Stimson; the sitting US Secretary of War who had admired the city during his honeymoon decades earlier.

There are people in the world that think nuclear bombs are impossible and that every explosion has been faked for propaganda including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Major Charles Sweeny, the pilot of the B29 that nuked Nagasaki, ignored direct orders during the bombing, nearly causing the plane to crash due to low fuel.

A truck driver named John Coster-Muller nicknamed as Atomic John without a college degree has researched and published the most accurate account of the Hiroshima atomic bomb's design

Around 25% of the deaths caused by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima & Nagasaki were conscripted Koreans.

The design for "Little Boy", the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never field tested before being used because the scientists were so confident in the design and there was only enough U-235 for one bomb.

The US dropped about 49 practice bombs nicknamed “pumpkin bombs” that killed 400 and injured 1,200 before nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Six Ginkgo trees survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima without deformities. All six are still alive today.

Allied carpet bombing of Tokyo killed more civilians than the atomic bombing of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

Approximately two dozen Americans were killed by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, a fact that the US did not acknowledge until the 1970s.

Jimmy Carter is the only American president to have visited Hiroshima's ground zero

The two bombs that were dropped on Japan just days apart were actually very different in terms of design. The Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, was based on enriched Uranium-235 whereas Nagasaki’s Fat Man was instead based on 8kg of Plutonium-239 - which was refined through a more complex process.

A man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb dropped. He was wounded but returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, where the very next day the second atomic bomb was dropped. He survived both blasts and lived to 93.

Bernard Waldman (American physicist) flew on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to record the explosion, but he forgot to open the camera shutter and therefore recorded nothing.

A month after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, a massive typhoon (Makurazaki Typhoon) hit the city, killing 2,000 people.

In order to make the bomb that hit Hiroshima, the US used 141 pounds of Uranium, basically all of the processed Uranium that was then in existence. What’s interesting though is that according to Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, when the bomb exploded most of it was blown apart before the bomb reached the “supercritical” phase.

The Flame of Peace in Hiroshima, Japan has burned since 1964 in honor of the bomb victims and will be extinguished only when all nuclear weapons are removed from the world and the Earth is free from nuclear threat.

Making the flight must have been nerve-wracking enough for the air crew, but it turns out that they had to do the final assembly on the bomb and arm it whilst in flight. Again according to Schlosser’s book, Captain Parsons who was in charge of the mission decided that if the plane had crashed on take-off, or if something had gone wrong, he didn’t want the explosion to wipe out the US base and thousands of US soldiers on Tinian, the Pacific island where the Enola Gay was to take off from.

In 1961 the US Air Force accidentally dropped two nuclear bombs on North Carolina, each more than 250 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, but neither exploded. One of them remains buried in the ground where it landed.

After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, hundreds of people (many of them already injured), made their way towards Nagasaki. Of these, 165 survived BOTH atomic bombings and lived to tell the tale.

The amount of matter converted to energy in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 700 milligrams, less than one-third the mass of a U.S. dime.

The oleander is the official flower of the city of Hiroshima because it was the first to bloom again after the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945.

American POWS have Killed in Hiroshima At least twenty-three US servicemen were in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. They were prisoners of war, former aviators, held at several locations in downtown Hiroshima.