06 August 2012

Sixty-seven years since Hiroshima

The first use of a nuclear weapon against people was sixty-seven years ago today, August 6 1945, when the United States Army destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. The city of Nagasaki was destroyed by another bomb three days later. Some two hundred forty thousand people, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians, died from the attack and its aftereffects.