Visit to the Atomic Bomb Museum

On August 9th at 11:02am an American B-29 bomber
plane dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. As a result of this almost 74,000 died and just over 74,000 were injured, 6 days later Japan announced they had surrendered.

So on Saturday we went to the Nagasaki atomic Bomb Museum and Memorial Hall.
As you walk up to the museum, its not very clear where the entrance is. There’s a large structure of glass, and a massive red brick cube building, which is the art museum. We realised however that the entrance was underground and to reach it you were directed around a large water feature. It was a circle of black marble; about 30ft in diameter with water flowing unbroken down the edges in every direction.

 

In the centre were two large green glass pillars. As we walked around the arc, we read the meanings of the feature on the walls. The water is there to symbolise the victims of the bombs struggle to find basic things like water. The glass pillars extend into the remembrance hall below, and form a line pointing towards the hypocentre. As night falls, 70000 LED lights set into the black marble turn on, in remembrance of the dead.

 After walking around the arc, we were led down some steps into a dark, quiet hall. As we walked round we were directed in a certain way, to observe different elements of the hall. The first was a room with liquid crystal displays with photographs of the victims of the initial blast. Then there was a room with the two glass pillars that extended from the water feature. These pointed towards a glass structure, with all the names of the dead written in it, kept from air and UV light to preserve them. There were many offerings and origami around this main room, and the atmosphere was very peaceful, but sad.

After the hall, we were directed to the museum. This too was underground, and was reached by a long half spiral walkway under a glass mosaic ceiling. Along the walkway was a length of 1000 origami cranes.

The first thing as you walk into the exhibit, are two photographs, one of Nagasaki 5 years before the bomb, as a large prospering harbour city, and one just after the blast, with almost all buildings and plant life gone. It was a very emotional picture, so we stayed here for a few minutes. The room containing the pictures was very dark, with lights on only the exhibits. There were recreations of twisted staircases and blackened stone littered about the place. There was a wall clock that had been found near Sanmo Shinto shrine is sakomoto-machi, which was around 800m from the hypocentre. It had been saved by the building it was in, but stopped at the moment of the blast.
There were melted rosary beads, recovered from the ruined Urukami Cathedral , and recreations of the only remaining wall of the cathedral, with blackened statues of saints.

There were charts on the walls with dates and events that lead up to the bombing. Originally, Nagasaki was not the main target after Hiroshima, it was Kokura, however the clouds had been too thick for the pilot of the bomber ‘Bockscar’ to see the city of Kokura. Nagasaki too was covered with cloud, and the pilot had considered returning to the base to refuel, when the clouds parted, and he dropped the bomb.

The bomb ‘fat man’ was an implosive device, around 3.3m long and 1.5m in diameter, and used plutomium-239. A ball of plutonium, surrounded by high explosives. Over 30 detonators were fired simultaneously to pressurize the core to cause nuclear initiation. This caused the explosion to occur 469m above the Mitsubishi plant works. The resulting blast generated heat of 3900°C and winds of around 1005km/h.

The initial blast killed around 60000 people, through severe burns or being crushed by rubble. There were many testimonies in the museum of people who were children at the time of the bomb, watching their parents die of the burns, or seeing their families become sickened by the radiation poisoning.


Everyone has different opinions on war, and on whether the dropping of the atomic bomb was justified. I know that I have only seen this side of the story, and there were many other factors involved, but I don’t believe devastation on this scale is ever justified. The demolition of an entire city. Men, women and children alike burned alive, there’s never justification for that.