Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

by Susan Southard

As he spoke, Taniguchi held up a photograph of himself taken five months after the blast during his protracted stay at a hospital north of Nagasaki. In the photograph he is lying on his stomach, emaciated. Down one arm and from neck to buttocks where his back would be, there is no skin or flesh, only exposed muscle and tissue, raw and red. As Taniguchi finished his speech, he made eye contact with his audience for the first time. “Let there be no more Nagasakis,” he appealed. “I call on you to work together to build a world free of nuclear weapons.”

More than 200,000 men, women, and children died from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks at the time of the bombings and over the next five months as a result of grave wounds and acute radiation exposure. In the years that followed, tens of thousands more suffered from injury and radiation-related diseases. An estimated 192,000 hibakusha (atomic bomb–affected people—pronounced hee-bakh-sha) are still alive today. The youngest, exposed in utero to the bombs’ radiation, will turn seventy in August 2015.

By the early 1920s, workers and volunteer parishioners completed Urakami Church, the largest Catholic church in the Far East. With the establishment of the massive Mitsubishi Shipyard and Machinery Works, shipbuilding surpassed trade as the city’s dominant industry, and Nagasaki became the third-largest shipbuilding city in the world.

Patriotism was redefined as compulsory and unconditional loyalty to both emperor and state.

In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina and signed a military pact with Germany and Italy to secure the cooperation of the Axis powers in its bid to extend its military, political, and economic boundaries.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a U.S. naval station in Hawaii. A war between Japan and the United States and its allies had begun—a war that quickly spread throughout the entire western Pacific and ultimately led to the destruction of nearly every Japanese city. Even as late as the summer of 1945, Nagasaki was, in large part, spared.

In 1945, Nagasaki’s streets were not yet paved, and buildings rarely rose higher than three stories.

Over time, nearly every Japanese citizen was required to work for the war effort—an attempt to offset the extreme imbalances between Japan and the United States in coal and steel production and the manufacturing of aircraft, tanks, and ammunition.

Married women were urged to bear as many children as possible to increase Japan’s population.

out. We practiced this over and over.” Nagasaki was bombed a second time in April 1945, leaving 129 dead.

there. That spring, news arrived that Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, had surrendered.

Ten days later, the United States, Britain, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, an ultimatum calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender and demanding immediate disarmament, postwar occupation, prosecution of war criminals, and the end of Japan’s imperial system. “The alternative for Japan,” the declaration read, “is prompt and utter destruction.” Some of Truman’s advisers believed this message could hasten Japan’s surrender and had advocated for the inclusion of a clause guaranteeing Japan’s retention of the emperor, but this idea was rejected for the final draft. The atomic bomb was not mentioned.

Less than two weeks later, at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima’s Shima Hospital, decimating the city and its residents with an explosive force equal to sixteen thousand tons of TNT. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed that day or died from injuries by the end of the year.

News of the Hiroshima bombing reached Nagasaki on August 8, when a newspaper headline announced: “Enemy Drops New-Type Bomb on Hiroshima—Considerable Damage Done.”

The five-ton plutonium bomb plunged toward the city at 614 miles per hour. Forty-seven seconds later, a powerful implosion forced its plutonium core to compress from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a tennis ball, generating a nearly instantaneous chain reaction of nuclear fission. With colossal force and energy, the bomb detonated a third of a mile above the Urakami Valley and its thirty thousand residents and workers, a mile and a half north of the intended target. At 11:02 a.m., a superbrilliant flash lit up the sky—visible from as far away as Ōmura Naval Hospital more than ten miles over the mountains—followed by a thunderous explosion equal to the power of twenty-one thousand tons of TNT. The entire city convulsed.

At its burst point, the center of the explosion reached temperatures higher than at the center of the sun, and the velocity of its shock wave exceeded the speed of sound.

A tenth of a millisecond later, all of the materials that had made up the bomb converted into an ionized gas, and electromagnetic waves were released into the air. The thermal heat of the bomb ignited a fireball with an internal temperature of over 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Within one second, the blazing fireball expanded from 52 feet to its maximum size of 750 feet in diameter. Within three seconds, the ground below reached an estimated 5,400 to 7,200 degrees Fahrenhei...

As the atomic cloud billowed two miles overhead and eclipsed the sun, the bomb’s vertical blast pressure crushed much of the Urakami Valley. Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds; catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings. Those working in the fields, riding st...

Two miles away, thousands of people suffering flesh burns from the extreme heat lay trapped beneath partially demolished buildings. At distances up to five miles, wood and glass splinters pierced through people’s clothing and ripped into their flesh. Windows shattered as far as eleven miles away. Larger doses of radiation than any human had ever received penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals. The ascending fireball suctioned massive amounts of thick dust and debris into its churning stem. A deafening roar erupted as buildings throughout the city shuddered and crashed to the ground.

She fell to the ground, covering her ears and eyes with her thumbs and fingers according to her training as windows crashed in all around her. She could hear pieces of tin and broken roof tiles swirling and colliding in the air outside.

“The whole city of Nagasaki was—the light was indescribable—an unbelievably massive light lit up the whole city.” A violent explosion rocked the station. Wada and his friends dived for cover under tables and other furniture. In the next instant, he felt like he was floating in the air before being slapped down on the floor. Something heavy landed on his back, and he fell unconscious.

In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fatalities, injuries, and physical destruction from the bombs’ blast, heat, and radiation are described in relation to distance from the atomic explosion, creating an imagined overlay of concentric circles radiating outward from the hypocenter. Within Nagasaki’s first concentric circle—a half kilometer (three-tenths of a mile) in all directions from the blast—nearly all buildings were demolished, and bodies were disintegrated or burned beyond recognition. Mortality was estimated at over 90 percent.

Early that morning, Governor Nagano had crossed over the mountains to see for himself the barren corridor stretching the length of the Urakami Valley. The scenes before him were unimaginable and surreal. “It was . . . it was just so horrible and pathetic that I couldn’t look.”

Just a mile south of the hypocenter at the destroyed Fukuoka POW Camp No. 14, eight Allied prisoners ultimately died from the bombing, and an estimated forty more were injured.

On the evening of August 11, someone gave Dr. Akizuki a copy of the Asahi Shimbun, and for the first time since the bombing, he glanced through the newspaper and briefly reconnected to the outside world. By candlelight, he read an article issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs that ostensibly informed readers about the “new-type bomb” and how to protect themselves in the event of such an attack. The article suggested that people find an air raid shelter with a roof, or if that wasn’t possible, to wrap themselves in a blanket or layers of clothes, and turn off anything at home that could cause a fire.

The end of the war would not come without more delays and major resistance in Tokyo. Although the emperor had made the decision to surrender on the evening of August 9—fourteen hours after the bombing—tension between military and peace factions intensified in the days that followed, complicating the Japanese Cabinet’s required unanimous backing of its nation’s capitulation.

Other Cabinet members found the U.S. counteroffer acceptable and argued that the Cabinet should follow the emperor’s August 9 surrender decision without question.

In the meantime, the war had raged on. Russian troops had continued to push back Japanese soldiers in Manchuria and on Sakhalin Island north of Japan. Allied planes had delivered more conventional and incendiary bombs on military, industrial, and key urban areas on Japan’s main islands—and before President Truman received Tokyo’s response, he ordered further attacks on Japan.

On August 14, just as Washington received word of Japan’s acceptance of the Allied terms, Truman’s orders were implemented: Approximately 740 B-29s dropped bombs on specific targets, and an estimated 160 more delivered over 12 million pounds of demolition and incendiary bombs on multiple urban areas, causing the deaths of thousands more Japanese.

At seven p.m. on August 14 in Washington (eight a.m. Japan time on August 15), President Truman held a press conference to announce the end of the war. The room was packed with White House correspondents and current and former Cabinet members. Two million people jammed New York City’s Times Square, and millions of others crowded into city centers across the country to celebrate the long-awaited conclusion to the nearly four-year global war that had claimed fifty to seven...

At noon, millions of people in cities and villages across Japan huddled around single radios to hear the emperor’s prerecorded announcement.

In his extended address, the emperor justified the attack on Pearl Harbor and referred to the United States’ use of “a new and most cruel bomb.” Without using the word “defeat,” he stated only that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The emperor portrayed Japan’s surrender decision as a heroic and humane act—to prevent not only the “ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation,” but also the “total extinction of human civilization.” He implored the Japanese people to “suffer what is insufferable” with “sincerity and integrity.”

Before the atomic bombs were dropped, U.S. scientists conducted no studies on the potential effects of high-dose, whole-body radiation exposure, nor did they investigate or develop potential treatments for the medical conditions that would ensue.

However, as the bombs were developed and subsequently used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, serious consideration was not given to the people whose entire bodies would in a single instant be exposed to massive, not-yet-calculable doses of radiation. “The chief effort at Los Alamos was devoted to the design and fabrication of a successful atomic bomb,” wrote physician and radiologist Stafford Warren, chief of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project. “Scientists and engineers engaged in this effort were, understandably, so immersed in their own problems that it was difficult to persuade any of them even to speculate on what the aftereffects of the detonation might be. Their concern was whether any one of their several designs for the bomb would actually detonate, and, if the detonation did occur, how massive it would be.” Time was also a

U.S. scientists’ and military leaders’ lack of knowledge and grossly miscalculated assumptions, combined with their desire to safeguard the United States’ reputation, led to passionate repudiation of Japanese claims of radiation effects on the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the weeks and months after the bombing.

Nagano’s younger sister, Kuniko, died from radiation toxicity on September 10. She was thirteen years old.

Still, after an arduous process to determine figures as reliably as possible, the final numbers were complete. Because thousands died in the months immediately following the bombing, casualty estimates were determined through December 31, 1945: Number of people killed: 73,884 Number of people injured: 74,909 Number of people (not killed or injured) impacted by death or injury of family members, destruction of their homes and communities, and job loss: 120,820

A new name was coined for the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: hibakusha (atomic bomb–affected people).