Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Dawn of the Nuclear Age

In just one second, an entire city vanished. It was August 1945, near the end of World War Two,

but Japan still refused to surrender. On August 6th, the United States dropped the world’s

first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A blinding flash lit up the sky, temperatures hotter

than the sun hit the city, and more than seventy thousand people died instantly.

Three days later, on August 9th, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

By the end of the year, over two hundred thousand people were dead,

most of them innocent civilians. Those who survived suffered from severe burns,

radiation sickness, and cancer for decades. Soon after, Japan surrendered, the war came to