The Bomb
Rachel Moltz
Fri, 08/04/2023 – 08:49
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped the first two and, so far, the only atomic bombs fired in anger. It was an event so monumental that every August, we ask whether it was ethical or even necessary. This summer a movie has underlined the subject: the critical- and box-office-hit, Oppenheimer. The film concerns the father of the A-Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his subsequent doubts and regrets about what he had created.
The targets of the bombs in 1945 were the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The effect on the people living in these two places was catastrophic. An estimate of the total casualties, dead and injured, in the two cities is about 200,000, with the dead alone numbering about 105,000; the pre-raid populations totaled about 450,000, yielding a casualty rate of about 45 percent. About as many people died in the U.S. firebombing attack on Tokyo on the night of March 10, which is estimated to have killed at least 100,000 people and wounded somewhere between 40,000 and 125,000. Still, the affected parts of the city had a population of 1.2 million, so the casualty rate …read more
Source:: Hoover Institution
