By 1950, over 340,000 people had died as a result and. Even though the War Council still remained divided (“It is far too early to say that the war is lost,” opined the Minister of War), Emperor Hirohito, by request of two War Council members eager to end the war, met with the Council and declared that “continuing the war can only result in the annihilation of the Japanese people…” The Emperor of Japan gave his permission for unconditional surrender. On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and others gathered at the Trinity test site south of Los Alamos for the world’s first attempted nuclear blast. When the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the cities were obliterated. Groves, the man responsible for organizing the Manhattan Project, which solved the problem of producing and delivering the nuclear explosion, estimated that another atom bomb would be ready to use against Japan by August 17 or 18-but it was not necessary. Atomic Bomb Dome Before The ruins around the Industrial Promotion Hall, now known as the Atomic Bomb Dome. Hiroshima - Before and After Aerial photographs show ground zero before and after the atomic bombing. Mushroom Cloud About 15 minutes after the explosion.

READ MORE: The Hiroshima Bombing Didn't Just End WWII-It Kick-Started the Cold War The smoke cloud rising over Hiroshima, Japan. The hills that surrounded the city did a better job of containing the destructive force, but the number killed is estimated at anywhere between 60,000 and 80,000 (exact figures are impossible, the blast having obliterated bodies and disintegrated records). Wells imagined a uranium-based hand grenade that would continue to. The explosion unleashed the equivalent force of 22,000 tons of TNT. It was HG Wells who first conceived the atomic bomb and even gave it its name, in a 1914 novel called The World Set Free.

Tens of thousands of people were killed in the initial explosions (an estimated 70,000 in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki), and many more later succumbed to burns, injuries, and radiation poisoning.

The bomb was dropped at 11:02 a.m., 1,650 feet above the city. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced effects in Japan and around the world that changed the course of history. Nagasaki was a shipbuilding center, the very industry intended for destruction.

Atomic bomb aftermath japan