The sixth of August, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan by the US bomber B-29, named Enola Gay.
Three days after, it bombed another Japanese city, Nagasaki.
The world’s first atomic bomb to be used in warfare against Hiroshima nicknamed “Little Boy,” had an explosive yield of 15 kilotons.
This is a force equivalent of 15,000 tonnes of TNT.
The second bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki, killed 74 thousand people instantly.
A total of 110 thousand were killed instantly in the two bombings, and hundreds of thousands more died from related effects of radiation exposure and physical injury.
As of today, nine countries – US, Russia, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel – have nuclear weapons, some of them 80 times more potent than the ones dropped on Japan.
A total of 12 thousand nuclear weapons are believed to be in the world today. About 90% of them are in US and Russia.
In 2016, Barack Obama became the first US President to visit Hiroshima. He called for a world free of nuclear weapons, but did not apologise.
A grassroots organisation, Nihan Hidankyo, made up of mostly survivors of the Japanese nuclear bombings, have been campaigning against military use of nuclear technology, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024.
Today, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum stands as a stark reminder of the dangers of nuclear warfare.
