Human civilization 2
4/9/2014
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved two nuclear attacks against the Empire of Japan by the United States of America (USA) under USA President Harry S. Truman. On August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, followed on August 9, 1945 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki, for the first and only time in history, atomic bombs were used against mankind killing over 200,000 civilians. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a common place of death, and living became the exception. People’s eyes came out of their sockets and peeled skin hung off their bodies. Many flocked to the rivers looking for water. People no longer looked human. Parents had to abandon their children, children could not rescue their parents, and family members were unable to recognize one another. Victims overflowed out of hospitals and …show more content…
Early critics of the bombings were Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Szilard, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:
Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged