Some events, like some people, are inextricably linked together. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one such event.
Two events in reality, following the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima a few days later, 9th August 1945, another atom bomb was used to kill occupants of the city of Nagasaki.
Extract from Socialist Standard November 2019
‘The atom bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – affectionately named: ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ by the perpetrators – instantly killed 100,000 Japanese people. An additional 100,000 died of injuries and radiation poisoning in the following months. But these bombs are akin to peashooters compared to the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, invented in the 1950s, which packs a punch hundreds of times greater than its smaller cousin.
Alex Wellerstein’s Nukemap model (nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ ) illustrates this bigger punch, by allowing the user to choose the location and size of the hydrogen bomb in a simulated detonation. I chose London as my target and selected the biggest bomb from the drop down menu; known as the ‘Tsar Bomba;’ produced in Soviet Union times, it weighs in at a whopping 100 Megatons (100,000 Kilotons) which makes it around 7000 times the size of the US atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Or, put another way, this single bomb exceeds the total explosive capacity of all munitions used during WWII by a factor of twenty. The result of the simulation indicated that 18 million people would be caught in the blast covering a radius stretching north to Cambridge and south to Brighton; of which around 6 million would be killed instantly and a further 6 million would suffer substantial injuries. The model helpfully clarifies that such casualties do not include the effects of radiation which are apparently too difficult to estimate. In such circumstances advising children to shelter under their school desks is not really going to cut the mustard as a strategy for survival.’
Tim Hart
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/11/nuclear-threat-resetting-doomsday-clock.html
Why they dropped the bombs
A two part article from the Socialist Standard.
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/why-they-dropped-bombs-2005.html
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/blog-post_29.html