Hiroshima attack: 78th anniversary of US atomic bombing today. All you need to know

The Japanese city of Hiroshima, the victim of the searing heat of the world's first nuclear attack, observed the 78th anniversary of the US atomic bombing on Sunday. Marking the day, Hiroshima mayor urged the abolition of nuclear weapons while the country's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that the road to a world without nuclear weapons was getting steeper amid looming threats due to growing geopolitical differences.

"World leaders have visited this city, seen its monuments, spoken with its brave survivors, and emerged emboldened to take up the cause of nuclear disarmament," United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres weighed his remarks, read by a UN representative. "More should do so, because the drums of nuclear war are beating once again."

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Recalling Hiroshima horror: August 6, 1945

1) About 20 days after the United States harnessed nuclear energy on July 16, 1945, following the ‘Trinity Test’, it dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, nicknamed 'Little Boy' which killed about 140,000 people by the end of the year. Another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9 and Japan surrendered a week later on August 15, ending World War II. The second world war had begun on September 1, 1939, after Germany invaded Poland.

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2) The events ended Japan's nearly half-century of aggression in Asia. The US had declared a war on Japan, after the Japanese military launched a surprise attack on the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. The attack came in response to the US's act of supplying weapons to Great Britain in the fight against Nazis in Germany and its efforts to halt Japan's military expansion in Asia and Pacific, the National WWII Museum, US stated.

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3) On August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima, before any realisation, the uranium bomb with a force equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT, incinerated everything around it. The ground level was hit by a wall of heat up to 4,000 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt steel. The city turned into a wasteland, reduced to rubbles. The mushroom cloud formed after the blast was 16 km tall, covering the entire Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing had resulted in the death of another 70,000 people.

4) A peace bell rang at 8:15am in Hiroshima on Sunday, the time the bomb was dropped. In the following decades, though both the Japanese cities revived themselves from their ashes, the scars of the bombing, physical and emotional, still remain. Many survivors of the bombings have lasting injuries and illnesses resulting from the explosions and radiation exposure and have faced discrimination in Japan.

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