87 Startling Facts About The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Bernard Waldman (American physicist) flew on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to record the explosion, but he forgot to open the camera shutter and therefore recorded nothing.

2. A month after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, a massive typhoon (Makurazaki Typhoon) hit the city, killing 2,000 people.

3. The Flame of Peace in Hiroshima, Japan has burned since 1964 in honor of the bomb victims and will be extinguished only when all nuclear weapons are removed from the world and the Earth is free from nuclear threat.

4. After the bombing of Hiroshima, there were “ant-walking alligators” that the survivors saw everywhere, men and women who “were now eyeless and faceless with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths.”

5. In 1961 the US Air Force accidentally dropped two nuclear bombs on North Carolina, each more than 250 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, but neither exploded. One of them remains buried in the ground where it landed.

After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, hundreds of people (many of them already injured), made their way towards Nagasaki. Of these, 165 survived BOTH atomic bombings and lived to tell the tale.

7. The amount of matter converted to energy in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 700 milligrams, less than one-third the mass of a U.S. dime.

8. The oleander is the official flower of the city of Hiroshima because it was the first to bloom again after the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945.

9. American POWS have Killed in Hiroshima At least twenty-three US servicemen were in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. They were prisoners of war, former aviators, held at several locations in downtown Hiroshima.

10. For decades, the mayor (Tadatoshi Akiba) of Hiroshima writes a letter of protest every time a nuclear test is conducted, as a plea to end the use of nuclear weapons.

In 1945, Japanese radar operators detected a small number of incoming US planes (which carried the nuclear bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but decided not to intercept them as the small number of planes were not seen as a threat.

12. An American made bank vault (Teikou bank) saved the contents from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, after reconstruction of the bank the new manager sent a congratulatory letter to the vault manufacturer.

13. Some Hiroshima survivors grew "black fingernails," which were strange rod-shaped fingernails that contained active blood vessels and bled profusely when they broke off.

14. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima released an amount of energy equivalent to the conversion of 0.7 grams of matter into energy.

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

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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

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.

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

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.