100 Interesting Facts About Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The US Airforce dropped pamphlets in Hiroshima warning people of the bombing

27. The inscription on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial reads "please rest in peace for 'we/they' shall not repeat the error." In Japanese, the sentence's subject is omitted, thus it could be interpreted as 'we' or 'they'. This was intended to memorialize the victims without politicizing the issue.

28. Godzilla is covered in "keloid scars" to evoke the gruesome marks borne by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. After these incidents, Godzilla was conceived in Japan as a metaphor for the danger nuclear weapons represent to humanity.

29. In 1955, a Hiroshima survivor named Kiyoshi Tanimoto, on tour to raise funds for victims of the blast, was tricked into meeting with Enola Gay co-pilot Capt. Robert A. Lewis on national television.

30. In the Japanese version of Fallout 3, there is no option to rig the Megaton bomb to explode due to the still sensitive memory of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Just months after the Hiroshima bombing, Kix cereal offered an atomic-bomb-shaped ring in exchange for a box-top and 15 cents. Each contained a glowing sample of polonium.

32. There was a conventional bombing raid that surpassed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. used 1700 tons of incendiary bombs to light a giant flaming X in the most populated part of Tokyo. The death toll is unknown, but it destroyed homes of over a million people, killing at least 100,000.

33. The most destructive bombing event of WWII was neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki. It was Operation Meetinghouse, the American firebombing of Tokyo.

34. After the first Hiroshima atomic bombing in Japan, one Hiroshima policeman went to Nagasaki to teach police about ducking after the atomic flash. As a result of this timely warning, not a single Nagasaki policeman died in Nagasaki's atomic blast.

35. 300,000 Chinese were killed by the Japanese during the Rape of Nanking, which is 80,000 more deaths than the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima are no longer radioactive, aside from trace amounts, due to the fact that the bombs exploded at a height of 500+ meters.

37. Karl-Bernd Esser, the grandson of the woman who helped design Hitler’s bunker, was the chief designer of Saddam Hussein’s bunker. According to Esser, Hussein’s bunker could have “survived anything short of a direct hit from a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon.”

38. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but before Japan's surrender, the United States was preparing 7 additional atomic bombs ready to use as early as August 19th, 1945.

39. The thermal energy released from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which devastated Pompeii in AD 79 was 100,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bombing.

40. About thirteen-year-old Yoko Moriwaki the "Japanese Anne Frank," who kept a diary about her life during WWII. She was killed by the atomic bomb in her hometown of Hiroshima and her diary was later published by her brother.

A clock in a tower at Hiroshima University stopped at 8:15 (the time of the Atomic Bombing) 3 days before the bombing.

42. "Horton Hears a Who" was an allegory about Hiroshima and the American occupation of Japan and may have been Dr. Seuss's way of apologizing for his support of Japanese Internment.

43. US President Harry S Truman believed that Hiroshima was a "purely military" target when he authorized its bombing in 1945 and was surprised to learn of the many resulting civilian casualties.

44. A single US stealth bomber can carry 16 B83 nuclear bombs. Each of those bombs can produce 75 times the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

45. More than 100,000 people working on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge Tennessee in the 1940s had no idea what they were working on. It wasn't until the local newspaper printed the bombing of Hiroshima were the workers told what they had been working on for the last several years.

It is estimated that 1 in 5 victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were Korean conscripts, brought over as forced labor.

47. When the Atom Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the light from the fireball was so intense that it melted the copper of the surrounding buildings

48. It took Tokyo 3 hours to realize Hiroshima had been bombed

49. Kyoto was high on the list of targets for the atomic bomb, but was removed after the intervention of Henry L. Stimson, the American Secretary of War during WWII. He visited Kyoto during his honeymoon in 1920s and was aware of its historical and cultural significance for the Japanese people.

50. A survivor (Shigeki Tanaka) of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima finished first in the 1951 Boston Marathon