Socialist Challenge 23 July 1981 'MY watch stopped at 8.15. It was 6 August. As 1 got slowly to my feet after the blast, the yellow dust that had enveloped everything gradually dispersed to reveal literally a hell on earth — half-burned people, their skins peeled, hanging in strips, the flesh raw, groaning in agony. there. Some were trying to escape' That is how one surVIWUL described Kiyoshi the day Sakuma the dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. The bomb was equal to 20,000 tons of TNT Today there are bombs 500 times as powerful.
So, on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imagine the effects five hunoreo limes over ot what happened there.
conservative estimate a quarier million people died when two Jabanese cities 580,000 were injured in the bombed. holocaust. Up to 1.2 kilometres from the centre of the explosion people simply shrivelled and roasted.
Burns Even four kilometres away thermal radiation was 20 times greater than that from in sas badiy and fulllal burned. skin The was fireballs reached temperatures of several million degrees centigrade. has been estimated that 50 per cent of the deaths in the two bombings resulted ourlls. Unable to move they crouched As the moisture condensed on the particles activated by the explosion, a 'black rain of lethal ash and dust fell over the two cities. Houses which had been seriously damaged by the blast were completely destroyed by fire. Large steel structures such as factories were stripped bare of roofing and walls by the blast wave, resulting twisted, skeleton-like shells.
An American nalist on the scene, Hersey, reported the experiences of those around him. There was the case of a German priest, Wilhelm Kleinsorge:
'When he penetrated the bushes he saw there about 20 men and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish Lnel faces were wholly burned, LOCU eye sockets hollow, the fluid their melted eyes had run down their cheeks... their mouths were mert swollen, pus-covered wounds.
1 ne survivors were called Hibakusha literally those wAG had seen hell. Many had other The aftermath hells to suffer the Leukaemia TULUC genetic defects, retarded malignant ucyciu olilcilt. diseases, cancer of the lung, the breast and thyroid, were just some of the after-effects of the One of the worst was The reason whv the bombs were dropped has been explained historian John Bagguley:
"The decision to use the atomic bomb had been made at a higher, political level: not in order to defeat with the minimum Jaball