Nagasaki
Peace statue at Nagasaki Peace Park
With the anniversary of the atomic bombs being dropped in Japan last month we hear an extraordinary tale of an ordinary man surviving the impossible and educating the masses.
At 11.02am on August 9th, 1945, a plutonium bomb (codename, Fatman) was dropped over the city of Nagasaki. Only three days before this date a similar bomb was dropped over the city of Hiroshima. These bombs were the first and last time nuclear weapons would be used in a time of war. Nagasaki was, in fact, the secondary target after the city of Kokura but due to bad weather on August 9th in which cloud covered the skies of Kokura the target of annihilation was swiftly moved to Nagasaki. The exact instant at which the atomic bomb detonated generated heat up to 3,900 degrees Celsius and winds around 624 miles per hour. In an instant, ordinary Japanese citizens who were going about their daily business were turned to dust, leaving only shadows as their last mark on history. The immediate death toll was estimated to be between 40,000 and 70,000, the figure rising to 80,000 by the end of 1945, four months after the dropping of the bomb.
This website gives the account of what happed that day by Mr Hayasaki. The details within this site are Mr Hayasaki's experiences from the interviews that were conducted in 2011. As Mr Hayasaki does not speak English, getting his story out to English speaking countries has proved difficult. With the aid of this website he hopes to share his story with more countries and people around the world.
Mr Hayasaki wishes to share his story with as many people as possible to stop anything like this occurring again, strives for peace in the world and the use of atomic weapons to end.
