When tests on nuclear weapons were made on cities populated by civilians
On the morning of August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am, the US Air Force dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by the launch of the bomb “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. The number of direct victims is estimated to be 100,000 to 200,000, almost entirely civilians. The seriousness of the direct and indirect damage caused by the bombs, and the ethical implications concerned with the use of a weapon of mass destruction, was the first and only use of nuclear weapons in the killing of the civilian population of a militarily inferior nation and devoid of atomic technology.
The role of the bombings in the surrender of the Japanese Empire, as well as the effects and the justification, have been subject of countless debates. In the United States prevails the view that the atomic bombings were useful to shorten the Second World War by several months, saving the lives of American soldiers, destined to perish in air and ground operations in the planned invasion of Japan. In Japan, public opinion, however, tends to support the bombing as war crimes committed to accelerate the process of surrender of the Japanese military government.
Others argue that the bombings could not be justified only by a victory over the Japanese front already close to surrender, but they were a demonstration of power towards what outlined as the new enemy: the USSR which was preparing the invasion of Japan in the dates subsequent to the bombing. Yet others add to the reasons the test of the power of the bomb cost billions of dollars, and this would explain the two bombings in which were used the two types of bomb produced till then. In this sense, Japan has been treated as a “field test” for new nuclear military technologies.
The United States, with the military and scientific assistance of United Kingdom and Canada, had already managed to build and test an atomic bomb. The first nuclear test, code-named “Trinity”, was held July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. A bomb test, called “The Gadget”, was detonated successfully. The launches on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then, were the second and third “test” detonation in the history of nuclear weapons.
The president of the United States, Harry Truman, who was aware of the existence of the new atomic technology only after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, decided to use the new bomb on Japan. In his stated intentions, the bombing had to lead to a quick resolution of the war by inflicting destruction and instilling in the Japanese government the fear of further destruction: this would be enough to determine the surrender of the Japanese Empire.
The two bombings in the leap of just a few days, hundreds of thousands of victims and the annihilating power of this weapon forced the Japanese to surrender on August 15, 1945. It was the end of World War II, the most violent and bloody conflict of human history. The survivors of the bombing were called hibakusha (被 爆 者), a Japanese word that literally means “person exposed to the bomb”. Survivors and rescuers became the core of Japan’s postwar pacifism, and since then the country has become the paladin of the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide.
Two of the leading critics of the bombing were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who together had spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a letter written jointly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then change their mind once they knew of the actual destructive power of the bomb (Einstein initially underestimated this capacity). Szilard argued:
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