atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki ww2 japan

Together, the two bombs dropped in Japan would kill more than 300,000 people, including those who died instantly and those who perished from radiation and other lingering effects of the explosions.Įmperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender via radio address on August 15, bringing World War II to a close.

forces dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki. “But once the Soviets invaded Manchuria, it was clear that was not going to happen.”

“The last hope for the Japanese government, the peace faction, was that the Soviet Union might actually agree to negotiate a peace with the United States as a neutral party,” he explains. Herken argues that the Soviet invasion may have had at least as great an effect on Japanese morale as the first atomic bomb. Then on August 8, Soviet forces invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, violating an earlier non-aggression pact signed with Japan. Despite its devastating effects, Japan didn’t offer unconditional surrender right away, as the United States had hoped. bomber Enola Gay dropped the uranium bomb known as “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, just days after the Potsdam Conference ended, the U.S. President Harry Truman, with a radio at hand aboard the cruiser USS Augusta, reads reports of the first atomic bomb raid on Japan, while en route home from the Potsdam conference on August 6, 1945. While Stalin didn’t take the atomic threat as seriously during wartime as some of his spies did-he had other problems on his hands, thanks to the German onslaught and occupation-Truman’s words at Potsdam made more of an impact than the president realized. Roosevelt’s death, Soviet intelligence had begun receiving reports about the project as early as September 1941. program to develop atomic weapons just three months earlier, after Franklin D.

In fact, while Truman himself had first learned of the top-secret U.S. side was that the Soviet premier didn’t know the exact nature of the new weapon. Truman never mentioned the words “atomic” or “nuclear” to Stalin, and the assumption on the U.S. But it also came as a relief, as it meant the United States wouldn’t have to rely on the increasingly adversarial Soviet Union to enter World War II against Japan. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Soviet Intelligence Knew About the Bombįor Truman, news of the successful Trinity test set up a momentous choice: whether or not to deploy the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.

Atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki ww2 japan