Japan Speaking Tour #8 - Nagasaki
By Pat Elder
September 30, 2024
August 19, 2024 - Ken’ichi, Pat, and Rachel offer prayers at the epicenter
of the A-bomb blast in Nagasaki.
The official American narrative of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki follows.
The bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki with the Fat Man plutonium bomb device on August 9, 1945, caused terrible human devastation and helped end World War II. The Target Committee appointed by President Harry Truman to decide which Japanese cities would receive the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombings did not place Nagasaki among their top two choices. Instead, they identified Kokura as the second target after Hiroshima. Kokura had large ordnance factories, including the production of chemical weapons.
Urakami Catholic Cathedral is shown here in this 1925 photo.
It was the largest Christian church in Asia, located
500 meters from the epicenter.
The third choice, Nagasaki was a port city located about 100 miles from Kokura. It was larger and had two Mitsubishi military factories. Nagasaki also was an important port city. Like Kokura and Hiroshima, it had not suffered much thus far from American conventional bombing.
The Fat Man bomb was a plutonium implosion device of greater complexity than the Little Boy bomb used at Hiroshima, which used uranium-235. The scientists and ordnance experts at Los Alamos had agonized for years over how to use plutonium in an atomic weapon, and Fat Man was the result.
We typically see photos of the bombing from the sky..
The Americans believed that two bombings following in quick succession would convince the Japanese that the Americans had plenty of atomic devices and were ready to keep using them until Japan finally surrendered. Reports of approaching bad weather convinced the Americans to drop the next bomb on August 9.
A B-29 named Bock’s Car took off from Tinian Island at 3:47 on the morning of August 9, 1945. In its belly was Fat Man, and the atomic bomb was already armed. Major Charles W. Sweeney flew the plane while its namesake, Captain Fredrick C. Bock, piloted Sweeney’s usual mount christened “The Great Artiste.” The two men had switched aircraft as “The Great Artiste” held the sensitive measuring equipment used to monitor the atomic event. The Enola Gay took part in the mission, flying weather reconnaissance.
The bomb was dropped 500 meters from the church while parishioners celebrated a Catholic Mass.
Over Kokura, heavy clouds and the smoke from nearby American bombing raids obscured visibility. The Americans could see parts of the city, but they could not identify the arsenal that was their target. Instead, they headed for the secondary target: Nagasaki. Clouds also obscured visibility over Nagasaki, and Maj. Sweeney, running out of fuel, prepared to turn back toward Okinawa. At the last second a hole opened in the clouds to the city below. And so, Fat Man began its journey, detonating over Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. local time.
Fat Man detonated at an altitude of 1,650 feet over Nagasaki with a yield of 21 kilotons, about 40 percent more powerful than Little Boy had been. It did so almost directly above the Mitsubishi factories that were the city’s primary targets, rather than over the residential and business districts further south. Tens of thousands of civilians, especially children, had already been evacuated from the city. The series of hills bracing Nagasaki also somewhat confined the initial blast and restricted the damage.
A close-up of the destruction of Urakami Cathedral.
Everything within a mile of ground zero was annihilated. Fourteen thousand homes burst into flames. People close to the blast were vaporized; those unlucky enough to be just outside that radius received horrific burns and, there and further out, radiation poisoning that would eventually kill them. Although estimates vary, perhaps 40,000 people were killed by the initial detonation. By the beginning of 1946, 30,000 more people were dead. And within the next five years, well over 100,000 deaths were directly attributable to the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
The rebuilt Urakami Cathedral is known as
the Immaculate Conception Cathedral today.
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Counter-Narrative
· On the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, we should remember that deploying the bomb wasn’t necessary to win the war. At least two dozen of the most prominent American military generals and admirals later said we should never have dropped the bomb.-
· Japan was on the brink of surrender when these weapons were deployed, and they had been trying to surrender for months.
· The Americans said that an invasion of Japan resulting in a million American lives would have been likely without dropping the atomic bombs. The historical record shows this is ridiculous.
· Certainly, the bombs hastened the end of the war, but the U.S. dropped the bombs to warn the Soviets to back off or they would be next. The Soviets developed their bomb four years later.
· In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most victims died without any care to ease their suffering. Many of those who entered the cities after the bombings to provide assistance also died from the radiation. It takes around 10 seconds for the fireball from a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size, but the effects span across generations.
· Several years after the bombings, the incidence of leukemia increased noticeably among survivors. After about a decade, survivors began suffering from thyroid, breast, lung and other cancers at higher than normal rates.
A Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter taxis the runway at nearby Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, Feb. 4, 2022.
Today, Japan is rapidly militarizing and now supports the stockpiling of nuclear weapons.
· The scalable B-61 nuclear bomb is being fitted to the popular F-35 at Büchel Airbase in Germany. Will it soon be made available at Iwakuni? The device may deliver a warhead from 2 kilotons to 100 kilotons. Pilots may change the size of the blast en route, in this case, presumably to nearby China, Russia, or North Korea. The smaller blast may only obliterate a few neighborhoods in a city, making the weapon a more attractive tactical option for the war-minded. The larger blast is expected to be 6 times larger than the Nagasaki bomb.
· Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, 43 kilometers from Hiroshima, is believed to have at least 32 of the jet fighters.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
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