Making the rounds on the web today is a silent film showing “the final preparation and loading of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb into ‘Bockscar,'” the plane that would drop a devastating bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The footage from the Los Alamos National Laboratory is raw, except for the helpful annotations added by Alex Wellerstein, who runs Nuclear Secrecy: The Restricted Data Blog. Eventually, toward the 8 minute mark, the video shows “the Nagasaki explosion from the window of an observation plane.” What you don’t see is the calamitous outcome. To get a feel for the destruction, you can see our previous post, Rare Color Footage of the Hiroshima Aftermath. (Obviously Hiroshima is the other Japanese city that experienced the ruinous effects of the nuclear bomb.) Also we have 360 Degree Images of Hiroshima After the Bombing.
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Wow!..great footage.
thank you for sharing
PS: it’s incredible he power of destruction of this bomb!
History should finally do some justice and record this act of extreme brutality as a crime against humanity.
Wrong…this saved thousands of American lives that would have otherwise been lost via a ground invasion.
Thousands of American soldiers as opposed to hundreds of thousands of Men, Women and Children.
And to think that it’s just a fraction of the power of a hydrogen bomb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjnm3V0xYjI
I agree with KT, this was a crime against humanity.
I am curious as to why KT and Ken describe the bombing as a “crime against humanity”. The dropping of the bombs ended the war with Japan at a fraction of the lives lost compared to the alternative of a ground invasion.
No, Dave. Rob may have rhetorically used the term ‘thousands’. But an invasion of the Japanese homeland would have cost millions of Japanese lives; military and especially civilian. On Okinawa masses of civilians jumped to their death off cliffs to avoid capture. Rob was correct. There are perhaps millions of Japanese alive today because their emperor bore the heavy burden of surrender rather than further atomic mobs.