Lest we forget
Sunday, 6 August 2006
On August 6, 1945, at 8:15am in the morning, the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” was dropped on the city center of Hiroshima, Japan by the “Enola Gay”, a U.S. Air Force B-29 bomber which was altered specifically to hold the bomb. About 70,000–80,000 people were instantly killed by the shockwave, fireball, and radiation. By the end of 1945, tens of thousands more had died from their wounds, from radiation sickness, and from cancer related to the radioactivity. 90% of the city was destroyed or badly damaged. The true death toll will never be known. Estimates put the deaths at between 140,000 to 200,000 people, but the effects of radiation exposure continue on today, 61 years after the unleashing of the first-ever atomic bomb to be used in military action.
Sixty-one years ago a civilian population the size of Palmerston North died immediately; within months, an population of a similar size to Wellington had also died. It is a sobering thought.
George Bernard Shaw wrote, “we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.” Sadly, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, he may have been right.
