Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Perses Reborn
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22141958
On the morning of 6 August 1945, twenty-nine-year-old marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was leaving Hiroshima following a business trip, taking the train to his home in Nagasaki. He forgot his travel papers and had to return to the office to get them. Thus, he was approximately three kilometers outside the city center when the world’s first atomic weapon exploded over Shima Hospital. Severely burned but alive, he managed to stagger to an air raid shelter, finally taking the train home the next day. Two days later, heavily bandaged, he reported for work. As he stood in his office, his superiors haranguing him for fantastical stories of a single bomb destroying an entire city, “Fat Man” exploded over Nagasaki.1
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the most controversial military actions in history. More than seventy-five years later historians are still divided over the justification, if any is possible, for the most destructive weapon ever deployed. Historians have generally fallen on a spectrum between traditionalists who defend the bombings as necessary to swiftly end the war with Japan, and revisionists who argue that the bombings were unnecessary, immoral, and ushered the world into a nightmarish existence under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. More than half a century of debate in the nuclear shadow has seen revisionist interpretations rise, ebb, and rise again. While the revisionist perspective has gained wide acceptance in popular opinion and education, it has failed to overtake traditionalist scholarly interpretation.
1. Twice Bombed: The Legacy of Yamaguchi Tsuotomu, 2011, directed by James Cameron, accessed 22 Sep 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1931497/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
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