![]() ![]() Had the “Fat Man” detonated over Nagasaki’s center, Hiroshima would have been the Second City in its death toll: Nothing alive would have escaped. Few Japanese soldiers were stationed there-far less than in Hiroshima-and only about 250 would perish as a result of the Nagasaki blast, along with several Dutch POWs. Nagasaki, with a population of 250,000, served as an important site for Mitsubishi’s industrial war effort, but by 1945 the Allies’ blockade of Japan was severely cutting production. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.” Footage of gruesomely injured Nagasaki civilians, most of them women and children, taken by Japanese and US Army teams after the war, would be buried by American officials for decades. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who survived the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, would later say, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” He described it as “purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. “We are an asterisk,” Shinji Takahashi, a Nagasaki sociologist, told me with some bitterness when I visited the city. Nobody ever wrote the Nagasaki counterpart to John Hershey’s Hiroshima or produced a film titled, Nagasaki, Mon Amour. This left Nagasaki to sink almost into oblivion. Oppenheimer does a bit better than that, at least.įrom the start, whenever the attacks on Japan were recalled in the media, that one word, “Hiroshima,” was inevitably used as shorthand for both. You could watch that film start to finish and have no idea we even dropped a second bomb. As development progressed on that film, the Nagasaki attack gradually lost its place in the script and in the end it received no mention at all. The history of Hollywood downplaying Nagasaki goes back to 1947 and the first movie drama about the bomb, MGM’s The Beginning or the End. Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trials, asserted that while the “rights and wrong of Hiroshima are debatable” he had “never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.” “Dropping the bomb on Nagasaki was an atrocity.” While historians remain divided on the justification for bombing Hiroshima, even some supporters of the first attack declared the Nagasaki annihilation avoidable. Allison, a leading Manhattan Project scientist at the Met Lab in Chicago, declared years later. “Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was a mistake,” Samuel I. ![]() Some of the other scientists at Los Alamos who celebrated the Hiroshima bomb would later claim they felt physically sick upon learning of the second attack. “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” The Nolan film, as I noted in my Mother Jones recap, barely mentions the Nagasaki bombing, and when it does, it’s a parenthetical or an awkward reference, such as when one character cites the destruction in Hiroshima and Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) adds, “and Nagasaki.” This is unfortunate, especially since the real-life Oppenheimer exhibited few qualms about the massive loss of life in Hiroshima but appeared haunted and possibly regretful in the wake of the Nagasaki bombing. Yet Nagasaki today might as well be called the “forgotten A-bomb city.” Every August, media and public attention focuses overwhelmingly on Hiroshima, site of the first blast three days earlier-though the attack on Nagasaki was in many ways even more questionable and appalling.Ĭhristopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer did nothing to change that narrative. Seventy-eight years ago today, on August 9, 1945, the US military detonated a powerful atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, ultimately killing as many as 90,000 people, nearly all civilians. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. ![]()
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