Eighty years ago, a weapon was used which would transform modern warfare and the entire world forever.
Hiroshima, in Japan, was the target of the first ever nuclear weapon, dropped by the US Air Force on 7 August 1945 – killing more than 150,000 people in the months afterwards, according to some estimates.
Although victory had been declared in Europe four months earlier, American forces continued to fight Japan over the summer, in what would be the final months of the protracted Pacific War.
Just three days after the catastrophic nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Nagasaki met a similar fate. It had been just weeks since the first successful test of a nuclear weapon was masterminded by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Eighty years later, The Independent takes a look at the direction nuclear warfare took after that seminal day – and how different nuclear weapons are now
Nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded some 1,800 feet above the city, where it delivered around 12.5 kilotons of TNT.
Large sections of the city – five square miles – were razed to ashes. Within just four days, 120,000 people were killed, many instantly vaporised and others dying due to the impact of the burns and radiation in the days afterwards.
“‘Little Boy’ was a gun-type weapon, which detonated by firing one mass of uranium down a cylinder into another mass to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction,” the National Museum of the US Air Force explains. “Weighing about 9,000 pounds (4.5 tons), it produced an explosive force equal to 20,000 tons of TNT [explosive].”
Delivered by the USAAF B29 bomber `Enola Gay’, ‘Little Boy’ has now been entirely taken out of operational use – but its creation had set US and Russian scientists into a frantic race to develop the largest and most powerful nuclear weapons, in the largest quantities.
Seven years after the two Japanese cities were decimated by the atomic bomb, the US tested a brand new type of nuclear weapon: the hydrogen bomb.
First tested at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the hydrogen bomb was 500 times more powerful than the one used in Hiroshima. It is believed that many if not all current nuclear weapons in America’s stockpile are hydrogen – or thermonuclear – weapons.
The largest ever bomb test was conducted by the Soviet Union, who tested a 58-megaton atmospheric nuclear weapon nicknamed the ‘Tsar Bomb’ near northern Russia.
In recent decades, following many years of international efforts to prevent the production of new nuclear weapons, the US has focussed on modernising its existing stockpile. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), the US has begun a modernisation programme which will “ultimately see every nuclear delivery system replaced with newer versions over the coming decades”.
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped a mere three weeks after the Trinity test, the first successful test of a nuclear weapon the world had ever seen.
