Hiroshima, A-Bomb Dome

Photos say it. The A-Bomb Dome. Few structures withstood the intense heat, shockwaves and blast of thermal energy like it did. Partially collapsed but the main outline is there.

The A-Bomb was did not hit the ground. It detonated 600m in the air. Thus, the area hit is magnified. 160m away from this dome was the hypocentre of the blast. The force came from above and that was prob. why the building could stay intact.

The metal stairs and dome skeleton melted partially and is slanted if you look closely enough.

Radioactive waves, Gamma, could pass through all the walls in all buildings.. Thus, almost everything within the 2km radius were destroyed. Some vaporised. Some charred black. Some blasted away by the tremendous shockwaves.

2+ km away, a man was thrown and bounced around the walls of his house from the shockwaves. Imagine that.

The fire ball, 280m wide, from the nuclear fission of only 50kg of Uranium, produced a searing 1 million degrees hot core. A City destroyed in an instant. Count to 10 and it's over. Hundreds of thousands of lives, dreams, family, thousands of buildings, forests, plants, animals, history.. In less time than it takes youto take a lift up to your home. That was 63yrs back. The nuclear bombs of present will easily wipe out the entire Asia in the same time taken.


On the ground beneath it, temperatures reached 3000 to 4000 degrees in an instant.

It's impossible for us to imagine exactly how it could have been. The waters, canals, seas could have been boiling.

The Cenotaph where annually on August 6, there would be a ceremony where many thousands around the world would attend.. To remember this date and remind everyone not to repeat history.

Beneath the Cenotaph is buried a list of people who have died from the bombing.
That's at the Army Cemetrary.. looking down at the city from above... gives us sad thoughts of how the burning charred Hiroshima would have looked like.

The hills, trees and plants where we are standing will probably have been razed to the ground too.

I took 2 shots of the sky above Hiroshima as i was imagining how those killed would have done so too, as they looked up seconds before the blast and saw the bomb coming down at them from 10,000 feet above. They wouldn't have expected that their lives were ending soon.

No warning was given on the potential damage of this then-new technology, nucleur fission. Everything was top secret till the instant people were killed and Hiroshima destroyed.

Benny and i had a debate whether the Americans should have warned about the capability of their new weapon first before massacring many innocents. We reached no conclusion.. America definitely couldn't sabotage their own pilots and war efforts by informing the enemy.. But this was at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands.. many innocent civilians. What do you think?

Stuart reflecting..