Japan and the atomic bomb, 1945
On 6 August 1945, the USA dropped an A powerful and destructive bomb that gets its power from the energy released when atoms are split. on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The blast devastated an area of five square miles, destroying more than 60 per cent of the city鈥檚 buildings and killing around 140,000 people. Three days later the USA dropped a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing around 74,000 people.
Why were the bombs dropped?
The official US justification for the dropping of the two atomic bombs was to force the Japanese government to surrender, which it did on 14 August 1945. Some historians have speculated that the bombs might also have had another purpose - to send a warning to the Soviet Union about the strength of the American military.
Whatever the intention, the USA had changed the nature of warfare, and for the remainder of the Cold War the threat of atomic weapons and nuclear war would be a constant theme. Stalin himself remarked that future wars were inevitable and the Soviet Union now stepped up its own programme of atomic research. American 'Only one country having nuclear weapons, the situation in 1945 when America had an atom bomb but no other country did.' would not last long.