Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Two cities are destroyed by single bombs, and the nuclear age begins.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 3 days
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
The Manhattan Project produces a working weapon by July 1945, and bombs are dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, killing between 130,000 and 225,000 people, most of them civilians and most immediately. Whether they were necessary to end the war remains genuinely disputed. What is not disputed is what they established: that a single aircraft could now destroy a city, and that this capability would spread.