Yashika Ofumi was a normal, happy six year old girl sliding down the slide in the park on that warm summer morning. She was at the playground with her friends and all of their mothers for a morning of fun and relaxation, and she took full advantage of it. Laughing and running, she went from the slide to the swings, back to the slide, laughing all the way. Looking over, she saw Mr. Katsu, the old shopkeeper, out sweeping the walk in front of his shop. Laughing and calling his name, she waved…he looked up, smiled a tired smile, waved, went back to tiredly whisking his broom back and forth.
Giving up on Mr. Katsu, Yashika was looking around for others to play with when she first heard the drone. Looking up, she saw three planes…small dots really…flying far overhead. Happily, she called and waved, hoping against hope that they might see her…but they didn’t. Then, one of the planes hesitated, seemed to stall, hiccuped…and something fell off the plane…a chunk of metal, falling slowly to the earth. The plane recovered, sped away. Yashika watched with delight as the chunk of metal tumbled over and over, falling almost in slow motion…Fifty-seven seconds later, the chunk hit the altitude of 1,900 feet above the earth…and at 8:15:57 AM, the earth hit the sun…
The first indication was a bright light, brighter than the sun…and only 2,000 feet away…but no one below saw that light because with the light came the heat. The area below the blast was immediately bathed in 7,000 degrees of fiery hell…and Yashika and her friends and their mothers and Mr. Katsu and everyone else within a mile…well, their internal organs boiled, their bones turned to brittle charcoal, they were vaporized into dust, and the dust was blown away by winds up to 624 miles per hour…all within a few hundredths of a second…but they left behind reminders…in the initial blast of light and heat, their shadows were imprinted on the asphalt around them…and those shadows are still there…
As mentioned earlier, the temperature instantly went up to 7,000 degrees…melting and liquifying asphalt, concrete, steel…all of which ran in rivers and rivulets across a scarred and charred landscape…that land was totally sterilized…80,000 people vaporized or killed…of which 52,000 were under the age of nine…countless animals…microbes…germs…every living thing was obliterated for a square mile outward from the blast…fires erupted over 4.4 square miles, further destroying people and buildings…90% of the city was destroyed or severely damaged…and above it all, a massive column of smoke and dust and debris and ash and heat and radiation billowed up, soaring 11 miles above the destruction…where if billowed out, flared out, folded back in…forming a gigantic mushroom rising over the ruin and rot and destruction of the city of Hiroshima, Japan…which had ceased to exist in ten seconds. The date was August 6, 1945…
As stated, 80,000 died instantly…and by the end of the month, the death toll stood at 140,000. Several of the survivors decided to leave the city…and so they did. They fled to another city farther south…on the coast…a quiet city…called Nagasaki…where, on August 9, 1945, the second bomb finished the work of the first…
In Nagasaki, part two of the A-bomb scenario took place at 11:01:43, resulting in the immediate deaths of 40,000…by the end of the month, the toll was at 80,000…and the destruction was just as complete. The United States planned on dropping another bomb on or around August 18, with three more to come in September, and three more after that in October. After the first bomb in Hiroshima, President Truman announced, “If they do not accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin form the air the likes of which have never been seen on this earth.” He was on his way to fulfilling that promise when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945…
The survivors of both cities were bathed in waves of radiation that for years afterward caused cancers and other diseases which continued to take lives…memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki contain lists of names of the hibakusha (‘explosion-affected people’) who are known to have died since the bombings…as of August 2008, more than 400,000 hibakusha have died…258,310 in Hiroshima and 145,984 in Nagasaki.
The bomb? Comparing those bombs to the weapons of today would be like comparing a match to those first bombs…in fact, the force of those first bombs are used today as detonation devices…to set off the weapons of today…why, with what we have today, we could completely obliterate every living thing…wipe the earth clean…sterilize it…and probably not think twice about it…
Dave Writes History 
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