ng that still lived was waiting to die" (Lawrence 4).
Hiroshima's death toll grew tremendously with each day. In February 1946, the Supreme Allied Headquarters announced the casualties in Hiroshima as a result of the atomic bomb: dead, 78,150; missing, 13,983; seriously wounded, 9,428; and slightly injured, 27,997. Half of the victims died from the explosion, 30 percent from radiation burns and the remainder from other radia-tion effects. Such effects were mysterious burns not caused by the fires, but the neutrons, beta particles and gamma rays released by the explosion which destroyed body cells and caused people's skin to literally fall off.
Soldiers, burned from the hips up, and where the skin
had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy . . . And they had no faces. Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to
Other radiation effects were vomiting and diarrhea, baldness, and blood spots under the skin, most of which resulted in death. However, these deaths resulted from the qamma rays emitted during the explosion and not from the radiation presented afterwards. Later, it was said by both Japanese and American scientists that the radiation there was much less than the tolerance dose, meaning that one could live there forever (Baldwin 4). Thus, the bombing of Hiroshima would not affect the future of those that remained.
The atomic bomb represents the culmination of years of combined efforts of science, industry, and the military. The
scientific discoveries which led to the atomic bomb began at the
turn of the century when radioactivity was discovered. 1939, the work in this field was researched worldwide, until particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Denmark. The fundamental scientific knowledge of atomic energy was widely known in many countries, both Allied and Axis, before the advent of war imposed securit...