Nagasaki, Japan

[Overview]

On August 9, 1945, Nagasaki was the target of the world's second [atomic bomb] attack at 11:02 a.m., when the north of the city was destroyed and an estimated 39,000 people were killed. According to statistics given at the Nagasaki Peace Park, the dead totaled 73,884, injured 74,909 and diseased 120,820.Most of those who died were civilians.
Photo: The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rises 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air.

TOXILOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

On the morning of August 9, 1945, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress Bockscar, flown by the crew of 393rd Squadron commander Major Charles W. Sweeney, carried the nuclear bomb code-named "Fat Man", with Kokura as the primary target and Nagasaki the secondary target. The mission plan for the second attack was nearly identical to that of the Hiroshima mission, with two B-29s flying an hour ahead as weather scouts and two additional B-29s in Sweeney's flight for instrumentation and photographic support of the mission.

At 11:01, a last minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The "Fat Man" weapon, containing a core of ~6.4 kg (14.1 lbs.) of plutonium-239, was dropped over the city's industrial valley. Forty-three seconds later it exploded 469 meters (1,540 ft) above the ground exactly halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north. This was nearly 3 kilometers (2 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills. The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. The explosion generated heat estimated at 3,900 degrees Celsius (7,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and winds that were estimated at 1005 km/h (624 mph).

Casualty estimates for immediate deaths range from 40,000 to 75,000.[58][59][60] Total deaths by the end of 1945 may have reached 80,000. The radius of total destruction was about a mile (1.6 km), followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to two miles (3.2 km) south of the bomb.

An unknown number of survivors from the Hiroshima bombing had made their way to Nagasaki, where they were bombed again.

above from wikipedia

INTERNAL LINKS

References

EXTERNAL LINKS

wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

US Department of Energy, The Manhattan Project

remembmering Nagasaki