Three hours after daybreak, a blinding flash ripped through the morning sky. August 6, 1945, began as a tranquil and clear day in Hiroshima. By 8:15, the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, reduced Japan’s seventh-largest city to cinders. Three days later, on 9 August, Nagasaki would suffer the same fate. For the first and only time in human history, atomic bombs were used in anger. Eighty-one years on from the atomic bombings of Japan, the uncomfortable truth is that nuclear weapons are the reason that World War Three has been avoided.
Because nuclear weapons were part of the equation, those crises eventually de-escalated
Yet according to the latest survey on nuclear weapons by the Pew Research Center, 69 per cent of the American public thinks that they make the world less safe. The reality is that the world would be a much more dangerous place without the Bomb.
The general public’s disdain for nuclear weapons is understandable. Nuclear weapons evoke images of mushroom clouds, fireballs in the sky, and vaporised tropical islands. The 110,000 instantaneous deaths inflicted by Little Boy and Fat Man still haunt the memory of post-war generations. Only 35 per cent of Americans believe that the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, compared to 85 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks.
