FORGOTTEN BOMB, FORGOTTEN CITY

...If Hiroshima indicated how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki showed that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever...

...The plutonium bomb exploded with the force of twenty-two kilotons, almost double the uranium bomb's blast in Hiroshima...

...Some 30,000 residents of the Urakami valley perished instantly, and another 45,000 or more have died since...

...What many in Nagasaki rage against, however, is not fate but foul play...

...Thirty years ago, Hiroshima built a beautiful Peace Park in the center of the city and provided it with a museum and dozens of striking memorials to the dead...

...The United States succeeded that day in killing only 75,000 human beings, though it attempted to exterminate 200,000...

...After the atomic bombings, Truman accepted that very condition and called the surrender "unconditional...

...We are the inferior A-bomb city," says sociologist Takahashi...

...The building which displays the city's A-bomb artifacts is not a peace museum but an international cultural hall...

...Nothing adorns the bombing of Nagasaki except chance, cynicism, and coldblooded slaughter...

...Many U.S...

...If "Fat Man" had landed on target, the death toll in Nagasaki would have made Hiroshima, in at least one important sense, the Second City...

...Yet Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city, the city with the most meaning for us today...

...This time Hirata did not go out and wander around the epicenter...

...He was greeted by his mother...

...The bomb that makes this white flash must be following my every step," Hirata recalls thinking...

...Many who lost their homes and families survived because they were at work in another section of the city...

...Virtually no one else in Nagasaki knew what the seemingly peaceful white flash, 500 meters in the air, meant...

...They cannot understand why destroying one city and 100,000 of its citizens in one fell swoop was not a sufficient demonstration of U.S...

...But why is Nagasaki angry...

...While Hiroshima, where everyone was in the same boat, rushed to rebuild, relief efforts in Nagasaki were slowed...

...One hundred thousand had died, hundreds of thousands more were fated to suffer or die— and the Emperor remained on the throne...

...He smelled something sickly every night and knew that bodies were being cremated in the schoolyard nearby...

...The plutonium bomb had been field-tested successfully, and the Soviet advance had been checked...

...God, Nagai argued, had "selected Urakami as a sacrifice" to end the bloodshed of World War II...

...Now Nagasaki, not Hiroshima (where peace has been institutionalized and brightly packaged), is the angry A-bomb city...

...But making the uranium bomb was far too time-consuming and expensive...

...Nagasaki, only half the size of Hiroshima, is nevertheless harder to grasp...

...Francis Xavier established the first Catholic churches in the area in 1549, and Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki, became the Catholic center...

...Three hundred years before the atomic catastrophe, Nagasaki experienced its first massacre when 37,000 Catholic peasants were slain, yet Catholicism survived in the region...

...Hiroshima rests in a bowl surrounded by hills...

...Those living in the Nakashima valley on the other side of the mountain saw the white flash, felt the blast, and heard the roar, but escaped the thermal rays and firestorms...

...Its major monument is not a graceful cenotaph but a stupendous, musclebound statue that looks like a cross between Buddha and Arnold Schwarzenegger...

...A visitor to Hiroshima feels touched, or overwhelmed, by the atomic tragedy in a matter of minutes...

...Many in Nagasaki finally studied the reasons for the bombing and began expressing pent-up resentments...

...And so, on July 24, 1945, Kyoto was dropped from the list and Nagasaki added...

...Without a field test, however, the scientists wouldn't know if it would work, or what its effects might be...

...But the Nagasaki bomb was probably seen for what it was: the first strike in the battle to control the postwar world...

...When the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete...

...Few journalists bother to visit Nagasaki...

...Hirata watched carts laden with corpses roll past the house...

...Nagasaki, in fact, was not on the original list of U.S...

...on August 8 he caught the first train leaving the city for his home town, Nagasaki...

...in fact, he did not leave the house for weeks...

...The ambiguous Hiroshima bomb could have been read by the Soviets as nothing more than a war-ending weapon...

...The plutonium bomb was clearly the weapon of choice...

...The crew knew it only had enough fuel left to make one run over Nagasaki, and when they got there that target, too, was hidden...

...Hirata excitedly started describing the unearthly white flash he had observed in the sky three days earlier—when he saw it again through the front window...

...Just before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, Truman rejected the concept of a Japanese surrender that would allow the Emperor to keep his throne...

...The uranium bomb was used first, at Hiroshima, because it was considered fail-safe...

...superiority over what had become a second-rate power...

...it was inexorable, precise, and possibly even militarily significant...

...But at what price...

...The air raid sirens were silent...

...For Kenshi Hirata, and the world, Nagasaki was the second atomic city...

...they called the atomic device "the Urakami bomb" and found it significant that the Bomb was dropped on the Catholic section...

...All of the municipal offices were far away and mostly undamaged...

...Glover's life served as a model for the story of Ma-dama Butterfly, and Nagasaki is better known in many parts of the world for Butterfly than for the Bomb...

...The windows blew in, but the house stood...

...When the train reached Nagasaki at 10:30 the following morning, Hirata got off and headed for home, a half-hour walk...

...Avisitor to Nagasaki who has just been to Hiroshima—few make these trips in the reverse order-senses almost immediately that there was a world of difference between the two bombings...

...Hiroshima proudly proclaims itself a Peace City and its mayors (including the present one, Takeshi Araki) have invariably been hibakusha—survivors of the bombing...

...Why couldn't the United States have waited more than three days after Hiroshima for Japan to surrender...

...These words had a tremendous calming influence in Nagasaki, and for more than three decades they effectively silenced political protest by those most ravaged by the Bomb...

...The entire city was wiped out by the Bomb, and one can look out at Hiroshima from any elevated spot, even a hotel room, and visualize how the Bomb went off at a point directly above the middle of the bowl...

...He knew what was coming and what to do...

...The Urakami suburb had only become a part of the city twenty-five years before," says Shinji Takahashi, a young sociologist in Nagasaki and an expert on the social effects of the bombing...

...But in Nagasaki, half the city withstood the bombing...

...What had changed...

...He knew immediately what it was...

...The most influential man in Nagasaki following the bombing was a Catholic physician, Takashi Nagai, who became famous for his heroic efforts caring for the victims and wrote many books about his experience...

...A 1970 survey of 1,000 high school students in Nagasaki revealed that fewer than 15 per cent could name the date of the atomic bombing of their city, and 19 per cent did not know that the United States was responsible...

...Most of them lived in the outlying Urakami district, where a magnificent cathedral seating 6,000 had been built almost brick-by-brick by the parishioners...

...So there was an administrative as well as a psychological problem...

...It was new to a city with a very long history...

...Greg Mitchell is the Editor of Nuclear Times and co-author of "Acceptable Risks," published recently by Viking...

...Brutal and unnecessary as it may have been, the bombing of Hiroshima was cloaked in high drama...

...Afterwards, they felt paralyzing guilt...

...Today, many tourists visit the Glover mansion, which was untouched by the bombing, and never set foot in Urakami...

...President Truman's Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, and atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer were only two of the many high-level officials who later admitted that preventing the Soviets from gaining ground in Asia (and staking any claim to Japan) was a prime concern in the summer of 1945...

...He heard the cries of the bereaved, and could not sleep...

...He shouted to the members of his family, "Lie on your stomach...

...atomic targets...

...It had been tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, but in that case it was detonated on the ground...

...FORGOTTEN BOMB FORGOTTEN CITY BY GREG MITCHELL Two atomic weapons have been used in warfare, and Kenshi Hirata, a short, slight, sixty-five-year-old resident of Nagasaki, Japan, experienced both of them...

...Bock's Car, the B-29 bearing "Fat Man...

...And it was, in fact, the plutonium bomb that was built and tested exclusively after Nagasaki...

...The most famous name in Nagasaki today is Thomas Glover, one of the first English traders in Nineteenth Century Japan, who supplied the modern rifles that helped defeat the Tokugawa Shogunate...

...Even in this fortieth anniversary year, Nagasaki will be the Second City and "Fat Man" the forgotten bomb...

...After wandering around the center of Hiroshima for two days, however, he was emotionally devastated, and at 3 p.m...

...In Hiroshima, many believe they were bombed date the Soviets and allow the Americans "to dictate our own terms at the end of the war," as Byrnes later put it...

...For years it was said in Japan that while Hiroshima agitated for peace, Nagasaki simply prayed...

...But Ko-kura was obscured by clouds, and after making three passes over the city, Bock's Car turned southwest toward Nagasaki...

...on August 9, 1945, "Fat Man" was detonated almost directly over the Urakami Cathedral, which was utterly destroyed...

...Three centuries before Commodore Perry came to Japan, Nagasaki was the country's gateway to the West...

...Those cries," he says, "remain in my memory...

...The Peace Park in Nagasaki is smaller, less impressive and somewhat off the beaten path...

...It was the Christian center in the country, with more than 10,000 Catholics among its 250,000 residents...

...But a hole opened in the clouds and Nagasaki, so close to reprieve, was instead half-obliterated...

...But this began to change in 1981, when Pope John Paul II visited the city and told 50,000 Catholics at a mass that God was not responsible for the bombing, humanity was, and humanity should do something about getting rid of nuclear weapons, soon...

...Last summer, he spent three weeks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki under a grant from the Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation...

...Hirata was, after all, at this time, one of the world's foremost living authorities on the effects of the atomic bomb...

...And just as Hiroshima exhausted Hirata's interest in the Bomb so, too, does that city almost exclusively capture the world's attention today...

...By 1945, Nagasaki had become a Mitsubishi company town, turning out ships and armaments for Japan's increasingly desperate war effort...

...They hit the floor just as the blast, which had originated about two-and-a-half miles away, reached their house...

...Looking through a book of pictures taken in the atomic cities in 1945, one is struck by the fact that the most horrifying photographs—the snapshots from hell—were taken in Nagasaki...

...The atomic bombings, Truman wrote, gave the world "a chance to face the facts...

...I did not want to see such sad, miserable sights again," he says, shaking his head...

...M for experimental purposes (or to justify the $2 billion investment in the Manhattan Project), but a large number seem to accept the official American explanation: that the bombing, however cruel, was intended merely to bring the savage war to an end...

...There was no proof that such a weapon could be exploded in the air...

...The same dramatic show of strength that might shock Tokyo into surrender could also intimi...

...Abeautiful city dotted with palm trees built on hills surrounding a harbor, Nagasaki has a rich, bloody history, as any reader of Shogun knows...

...She was happy to see him, for she had heard that a new type of bomb had been used in Hiroshima...

...It is a congested city that fans out from the harbor in two deep valleys separated by a high ridge...

...Others believe the Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki not to frighten Emperor Hi-rohito but to impress Joseph Stalin...

...Stimson felt that destroying Japan's most historic and revered city would turn the Japanese people away from the United States (and possibly toward the Soviet Union) after the war...

...military leaders (including General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral Chester Nimitz) declared, years later, that the war would have ended in 1945 without the use of atomic weapons...

...And this can be said, as well: Hiroshima was the last casualty of World War II, Nagasaki the first victim of the Cold War...

...The residents of Nagasaki do not accept that explanation for the bombing of their city...

...Many adherents of Shinto and Buddhism in the city tried to dissociate themselves from the shame of the bombing...

...As late as the morning of August 9, Nagasaki had a chance to escape...

...In Hiroshima, total devastation placed everyone who survived on the same footing...

...Even in Nagasaki this point was, until recently, largely ignored...

...While the rest of the country was closed to the West, Nagasaki, which rests on the island of Kyushu in the westernmost part of Japan, remained open for trade...

...was supposed to drop its pay-load right over the Mitsubishi shipyards at the end of the harbor, but Nagasaki was obscured by clouds that morning and bombardier Kermit Beahon let the bomb go a mile up the Urakami River...

...Besides the casualties, this display of force helped create and set the tone for the Cold War and guaranteed that a nuclear arms race would develop...

...When the Bomb hit Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Hirata was at work at the Mitsubishi shipyards three miles from Ground Zero...

...After much debate it left standing, at the edge of the park, the half-destroyed "A-Bomb Dome," which has become the symbol of the bombing around the world...

...Just like that, hundreds of thousands of people in one city were spared and thousands of others elsewhere were marked for death...

...He escaped serious injury...

...But Nagai, as Sadao Kamata, a scholar at the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Sciences, says, "transformed the bombing into martyrdom, an act of virtue...

...When Bock's Car took off from Tinian at 3:49 a.m., Ko-kura, another city on Kyushu just west of Hiroshima, was its primary target...

...The Portuguese and Dutch settled there in the 1500s...

...If she could have looked north from Glover's mansion, now Nagasaki's top tourist attraction, on August 9, 1945, she would have seen, two miles in the distance, a thread of smoke—with a mushroom cap...

...The Catholic character of Nagasaki contributed to the divisiveness...

...Some leave Nagasaki unmoved, confused...

...In Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly, standing on the veranda of Glover's home overlooking the harbor, sings, "One fine day we'll see a thread of smoke arising...

...there was no doubt...

...no planes could be seen...

...The reason, offered in Nagasaki (and by some historians elsewhere), is that the United States was bent on field-testing the plutonium bomb...

...It met the criteria—it was a militarized city (so the bombing could be justified) and had not already been leveled by conventional bombing (so the effects of the Bomb could be studied more easily)—but it was added to the list only after Secretary of War Henry Stimson objected to Kyoto as a target...

...At 11:02 a.m...

...They were fortunate...

...Bock's Car took off from Tinian only hours after the Soviet Union had finally declared war on Japan and begun moving troops into Manchuria...