80 years ago the U.S. dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, changing human history

The first reports were met with disbelief.

A single bomb with the explosive force to level a city; a bomb, detonated with such intensity it burned as bright as — maybe, even brighter than — the sun.

Even newsman Walter Cronkite, then a young correspondent for United Press, was so dubious of the initial accounts of the atomic bomb that exploded the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, Japan, that he changed the mention of its capabilities from the equivalent of more than 20,000 tons of TNT to what he thought a more believable figure: 20 tons.

He assumed those first reports were an error. He was wrong.

Eighty years ago, on a Monday just after 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay, a four-engine Boeing B-29 that pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets had named for his mother, dropped a uranium-based atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy" that detonated 1,968 feet over Hiroshima in a 7,000-degree Fahrenheit fireball that would vaporize all in its path: buildings, animals, people.

In a micro-instant, in a blinding flash of white-hot light, forever changing the very course of human history.

Three days later, a B-29 bomber named Bockscar dropped a plutonium-based atomic bomb named "Fat Man" on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

On Aug. 15, 1945, in a nationwide radio broadcast where most Japanese heard his voice for the first time, Emperor Hirohito announced he had instructed his government to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, the surrender ultimatum issued weeks earlier by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and new U.S. President Harry S. Truman.

Hirohito did not use the term "surrender," though he referenced the weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a "new and most cruel bomb."

His announcement signaled the end of World War II in the Pacific.

Celebrated by Allies worldwide, Aug. 15 is known as V-J Day, Victory over Japan. It followed V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe, which took place with the surrender of Germany, on May 8, 1945. On Sept. 2, 1945, Japan signed a formal surrender agreement aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending World War II — a war which, for the United States, had begun with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.

Reports in the news

News of the atomic bomb made headlines worldwide. Across the nation, newspapers screamed the news to Americans.

The Boston Daily Globe roared "ATOM AGE AT HAND," while the Miami Herald noted an atomic bomb had been "hurled" onto Hiroshima. The Brooklyn Eagle reported the dead were "too numerous to count," while the Daily News relayed a new atomic bomb had rocked Japan, adding: "More on Way, Truman Warns; Biggest War Secret Revealed."

Newsday called the damage inflicted "terrific," a second-day account later reporting a Japanese assessment of the horror at Hiroshima: "ALL LIFE WIPED OUT BY ATOM BOMB."

A first-day account written by United Press correspondent Chiles Crittenden Coleman appeared in countless newspapers nationwide.

It began: "The United States has unleashed against Japan the terror of an atomic bomb 2000 times more powerful than the biggest blockbusters ever used in warfare. President Truman revealed this great scientific achievement today and warned the Japanese that they now face ‘a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.’ "

An account offered by The Associated Press read: "The most terrible destructive force ever harnessed by man — atomic energy released by the disintegration of uranium — is now being turned on the islands of Japan by United States bombers. The Japanese face a threat of utter desolation and their capitulation may be greatly speeded up."

The Knoxville News-Sentinel localized the accounts, explaining the long-held secret behind the massive plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Key to building the bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the plant was part of a top-secret U.S. research program called the Manhattan Project — a group of scientists headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer under the direction of Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves.

"Atomic Super-Bomb, Made at Oak Ridge, Strikes Japan," The News-Sentinel reported, adding: "Oak Ridge Has Over 425 Buildings."

"It’s news and a complete shock," John Curatola, historian at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, said this week of the breaking stories. "The reaction is, ‘Oh, my God.' We didn’t know we even had this thing." 

The bomb used at Hiroshima killed 80,000 people outright, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

The bomb used at Nagasaki killed 74,000.

One United Press account, reported by Joseph L. Myler, hinted at the controversy to come: "For good or ill, man has unlocked the incalculable power of the atom. He has entered upon the atomic age. His first use of this power — the same that energizes the sun and the stars — has been to make a bomb."

Was bombing necessary?

Patricia Welch, a professor teaching Japanese comparative literature, languages and linguistics at Hofstra University, said while the United States argued the atomic bombs were used to hasten the end of the war because planned invasions of mainland Japan might have cost more than 1 million American lives, postwar revelations indicate their use likely was unnecessary.

"Most of the major cities had firebombed," Welch, who has visited Japan almost two dozen times, said, noting the firebombing of Tokyo killed more than 100,000. "Many Japanese were destitute ... The real situation is Japan probably couldn’t have fought for another two or three months; the tide had definitely changed ... But, the U.S. has a new weapon it wanted to try out. It turns out, a lot of that is done to show the Soviet Union — that it's done to position the United States in a particular way in what will be the emerging Cold War."

The first in-depth report on the lasting atomic bomb impact came in a 30,000-word, Aug. 31, 1946, article in The New Yorker by correspondent John Hersey.

That story chronicled the post-bomb horror of six survivors, recalling how that morning all was quiet in the skies over Hiroshima.

The usual air-raid sirens warned B-san — Mr. B; American B-29 Superfortress bombers — were on the way, the article recounted. Warnings ignored, because the city had been so far spared the horrifying brunt of World War II; ignored, because it appeared there were just three planes, not some threatening armada.

But those three planes — Enola Gay, The Great Artiste and an observation photo plane named Necessary Evil — were not, as many residents assumed, on some reconnaissance mission. And then came the bomb.

Debate on use of atomic weapons has raged across the decades since, with entities such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, ICAN and even the National Park Service's Manhattan Project National Historical Park estimating those killed in the blasts, coupled with those who suffered radiation-fueled injuries, illness and death, is now well into the hundreds of thousands.

Bomb survivors became known in Japan as hibakusha, which, the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, said, literally means "bomb-affected people."

Accounts can be found online on a website titled Hibakusha Stories: Working Together for a Nuclear-Free World, part of an initiative of Youth Arts New York, a nongovernmental organization affiliated with the U.N.

"In 1945," Curatola said, "we don’t fully understand atomic technology and the fallout. We’re a baby with a handgun — and all we know is this is a way to help us end the war ... There are nuclear scientists saying we shouldn’t do this — and others who know their friends are dying and so don’t have a problem with it ... But, once you’ve walked into that room you’ve locked the door behind you and you can’t get out."

"What is the line Oppenheimer quoted?" Welch said. " ‘I am the destroyer of worlds.’ Some thought, now this is the world that we’re in."

As she said: "How could you imagine something that would damage so incredibly? Nobody could. It was beyond imagination — until it no longer was."

'No hand-wringing'

But, Curatola said, it’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback.

Truth is, he said, thousands were being killed daily under Japanese occupation — not just Americans, but also civilians in Japanese-controlled China, Malaysia and the Philippines. In fact, an Associated Press brief the very day of the A-bombing of Hiroshima reported China had accused the Japanese of "murdering 50,000 persons in Kanhsien," located in Kiangsi Province, now Jiangxi, about 250 miles north of Hong Kong.

Estimates are 16.4 million Americans fought in World War II. In 2025, according to figures available from the Department of Veterans Affairs, fewer than 50,000 survive — fewer than 3,500 of those in New York.

"Look at it from an American perspective, which is what we must do, right?" Curatola said. "So, yes, when you look at Japan contextually, most of her merchant fleet has been sunk, there’s a lack of food, people are starving, most of her cities have been burned to the ground — and, we’ve pierced the inner defensive circle, the Japanese Navy decimated. But still, the Japanese have not agreed to surrender ... And so if you’re Truman and you know you have this weapon the government has spent $2 billion on developing, what do you say if you have to invade, if the war goes into 1946, if it causes American deaths? How do you explain that to all those mothers, all those widows, that you had this weapon — and you didn't use it?

"There’s no hand-wringing here," he said. "You drop the bomb."