U.S. Atomic Bombings Didn’t Save Lives or End the War

Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, Japan. Image by Alessandro Stech.

August 6 and 9 are the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima was the effect of detonating a 60-million-degree Celsius explosion (ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun) over the city. Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb reported, “People exposed within half a mile of the … fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black...