Remembering Nagasaki – August 9

August 9, a date which Japan will always remember.  On this day in 1945 the Japanese city of Nagasaki was hit with a nuclear bomb in an attack which effectively ended World War 2.

Three days earlier, on August 6 it was Hiroshima that took a direct hit from Enola Gay, an American B29 Superfortress, which dropped a plutonium-based atomic bomb called “Little Boy” But on this day in 1945, it was another B29 Superfortress called Bockscar which dropped an uranium-based atomic bomb called “Fat Man” on Nagasaki.

Japan thus became the recipient of 2 atomic bombs exploded in anger.  Many people died in these 2 attacks, and emergency medical services at that time simply did not know how to help survivors. Eyewitnesses described seeing survivors with “great sheets of skin hanging off of their bodies; grotesque swollen faces; torsos covered with large blisters”. And nobody then really knew how to treat survivors for radiation poisoning.

Think about it.  Nuclear bombs have grown more powerful since the end of World War 2.  More nations now possess these weapons of mass destruction. Where is the world heading to?  Will earth be dissolved one day in a ball of fire, triggered by a nuclear war among nations?  How many billions of lives will be destroyed?  And how will survivors survive?  Or like the comic character, will a real life latter day superman come to rescue the world of mankind?

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