Drop The Bomb?
Instructions
Ø Look through all the evidence
Ø Sort out the Reasons/Causes for dropping the bomb
Ø Prioritize these, which do you think was the most important reason and why
Ø Sort out the Consequences/Results of dropping the bomb
Ø Sort these into Long and Short term results of dropping the bomb
Ø Which do you think was the most important result of dropping the bomb?
So Would You Have Dropped it?
On the 14th of August 1945 Japan surrendered
An eyewitness said, ‘the skin was burned off some of them and was hanging from their hands and chins
Survivors began to notice in themselves a strange form of illness. It consisted of vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea with large amounts of blood, purple spots on the skin, bleeding from the mouth, loss of hair and usually death
Three days after the 1st bomb was dropped another one was dropped on Nagasaki, 36,000 people were killed
In Hiroshima, 30 days after the bomb was dropped, people who were not injured by the blast were still dying mysteriously and horribly from an unknown something, which can only be described as an ‘atomic plague’.
The Americans thought that the Japanese would never surrender
If the U.S. Army invaded Japan, hundreds of American soldiers might be killed
The Japanese had been very cruel to prisoners of war, some people wanted revenge for this
A Japanese journalist described a glaring pinkish light in the sky, which burnt peoples’ eyes out. Anyone within a kilometer of the explosion became a bundle of smoking black charcoal in seconds
The Atomic Bomb had cost $2,000,000,000 to make; the Americans did not want to waste this money
Using the Atomic Bomb was a way for America to show it was the strongest country in the world
On the 6th of August 1945, an American plane dropped the 1st atomic bomb on the City of Hiroshima
Within minutes of the 1st bomb being dropped about 70,000 people were dead. Those who were still alive writhed in agony from their burns. Then there was a blast wave, which destroyed 70,000 of the city’s 78,000 buildings
Father Kliensorge found about 20 men in the bushes. They were all in the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burnt, their eye sockets hollow, the fluid from their mouths were swollen, pus covered wounds, which they could not stretch round the spot of a teapot