“Little boy”

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was an important city due to their industrial and military. Even some military camps were located there, such as the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defence of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a storage point centre, and a communication centre.

It was one of several Japanese cities that have never been touched during the WW2, allowing to measure the damage caused by the atomic bomb, thats why Washington decided to assign it highest priority.



The centre of the city contained a number of reinforced concrete buildings and lighter structures. Outside the centre, the area had many small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses. A few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs, and many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.



On August 6, 1945 at the time of launch, the weather was good, and the crew and equipment functioned properly. The Japanese early warning radar net detected the approach of some American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. The alert had been given and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, among them Hiroshima. At 08:15, the Enola Gay dropped the nuclear bomb called "Little Boy" over the centre of Hiroshima. It exploded about 600 meters above the city with a blast equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT, killing an estimated 70–80,000 people.

Radiation poisoning and necrosis caused illness and death after the bombing in about 1% of those who survived the initial explosion. By the end of 1945, thousands more people died due to radiation poisoning, bringing the total killed in Hiroshima to about 90,000. Since then about a thousand more people have died of radiation-related causes.

The survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha a Japanese word that means "people exposed to the bomb". The suffering of the bombing is the root of Japan's postwar pacifism, and the nation has sought the abolition of nuclear weapons from the world ever since.
 

                                                                                                         Arianne Velez