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Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish between civilians and military Three days later, on 9 August 1945 another larger bomb, ‘Fat Man’ with a plutonium core was dropped on Nagasaki with equally devastating effects. Close to 90 per cent of the cities medical staff had been injured in the blast however and these three hospitals, however, had a significant shortage of personnel, equipment, and supplies – no pain medication no clean dressings no antibiotics – all desperately needed by survivors. Of the city’s 45 hospitals, only three remained functioning, including the Red Cross hospital.
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Hiroshima had been laid to waste by the ‘ atomic bomb’. The city’s infrastructure was destroyed, so much so that it took several hours for word to even reach Tokyo that the city had been hit.
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People very close to the hypocentre were incinerated, leaving only eerie shadows behind, those that survived the initial blast, suffered horrific injuries and radiation sickness. The weapon, only perfected in the lab a few weeks previously, fell towards the earth and detonated approximately 600 meters above the ground. At that moment the Enola Gay, B-29 bomber dropped ‘Little Boy’, a 13 kiloton uranium based bomb over the city. The country was still at war, but Hiroshima had largely escaped extensive bombing, unlike Tokyo or Tokushima, that is until 08:15am 6 August 1945. Today as the sun rises over Dublin, for another summer’s day, I think of what it must have been like in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 people on their way to school, on their way to work carrying out household chores – going about their everyday lives.