need to know facts!
Top ten list:
- Many people suffered for several years before dying, or died in the following years due to radiation exposure from the bombs.
- Cancer was the most common radiation-caused disease, but many victims died from other diseases, such as liver failure and respiratory diseases.
- It is estimated that for every 6 deaths from the atomic bombs, 5 were civilians and 1 was military.
- Nagasaki had been targeted by bombs several times previous to the August 9th atomic bombing. Although there were many good bomb shelters, people were unconcerned when they heard the air raid sirens, and far fewer people would have been killed if the sirens had been listened to.
- Sadako Moriyama, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, had gone to a bomb shelter when the sirens sounded. After the bomb had gone off, she saw what she thought were two large lizards crawling into the shelter she was in, only to realise that they were human beings whose bodies had been shredded of their skin because of the bomb blast.
- Both atomic bombs were carried by a B29 Superfortress bomber to their destination. Little Boy was taken by the "Enola Gay" and Fat Man was taken by the "Bockscar".
- The Little Boy bomb had a gun type mechanism that used Uraniam, while the Fat Man bomb used an implosion method detonated with Plutonium.
- Both atomic bombs took around 43 seconds to detonate once released from their airplanes.
- Fat Man's plutonium based design yielded a 22 kiloton explosion, and Little Boy's uranium based design yielded a 15 kiloton explosion.
- Although Fat Man had a higher destructive force, the bomb killed less people because of Nagasaki's hills and valleys, in contrast to Hiroshima's flat land.