Date: August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945
The American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, in an attempt to bring an earlier end to World War II. The bomb wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people and thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later another A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an approximate 40, 000 people. On August 15, following the bombings, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address. Before the outbreak of war, a group of American scientists became involved with the research of the nuclear weapons being conducted in Nazi Germany and in 1940, the U.S. government began its own atomic weapons development program. This top-secret program, codenamed “The Manhattan Project”, was undertaken by the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. entry into World War II. |