Nuclear Bomb Dbq

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On August 6, of the year 1945, an American B-29 bomber plane dropped a nuclear weapon known as “Little Boy” onto the Japanese City known as Hiroshima. This was the first ever nuclear weapon used in an act of war. It detonated 2,000 feet above the city and instantaneously killed around 80,000 people. Within the next three days they dropped another nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and killed about 50,000 people instantly. Over the course of the next 2-4 months, the casualties doubled from radiation effects. The US did this in hopes of ending WWII and retaliation for Pearl Harbor. The real question we had was “is this an effective form of war?”. When looking at statistics, the bomb dropped in Hiroshima killed only 20,000 military personnel and around 50-80,000 civilians. This clearly affected the civilians of Japan heavily. The US believed that a nuclear weapon would have spared a lot of pain and made invading Japan an irrelevant idea because it would be a waste of resources. Others weighed in their opinion and came up with the idea of “detonating a nuclear weapon in a non-inhabited but observable area to compel Japan to surrender” which was personally a better idea since it was not inhumane. …show more content…

We had fireballed over 100 different Japanese Cities and Japan was ready to surrender, bomb or no bomb. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons was ultimately a sign of strength from the US. To show the devastation, a survivor named Mr. Akihiro Takahashi recounts seeing his friend hurt by saying “the soles of his feet were peeling and red muscle was exposed” and “he had to crawl on his hands and knees”. Previous battles between the US and Japan almost ended with an exponentially more causalities. The average ratio was about 22 dead Japanese soldiers for 1 dead American

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