August 9, 1945

August 9, 1945

On August 9, 1945, two days after the blast at Hiroshima, Nagasaki fell victim to a second atomic bomb because of bad weather—the plane, named Bock's Car, was supposed to drop the "Fat Man," a plutonium bomb, on the war industries of Kukora. A delay in hooking up with Bock's Car's B-29 escorts meant that when they reached Kukora bad weather had rolled in and blocked their view of the target. So they headed over to the secondary target, Nagasaki, and dropped the bomb there.

More powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the "Fat Man's" runaway fission released the heat- and light-wave radiation of a small sun, and delivered a blast pressure of tons per square inch, which explains why virtually nothing was left standing, or even recognizable, within miles. Nagasaki's hilly topography helped save a number of residential areas from total destruction, and incredibly, some didn't lose electricity. Meanwhile, 6.7 square km (2.59 square mi) were obliterated, 74,884 people were killed in the blast or shortly thereafter, and another 74,909 were injured. Radioactivity caused the deaths of an estimated 70,000 others within five years.