UPDATE: A thought: Nagasaki was the center of Catholicism in Japan. The bomb landed on the edge of the Catholic enclave and killed 60% of Catholics in the city.
In the Washington Post, on the 70th anniversary. I posted my thoughts on the immorality of the bombings here Hiroshima atomic bombing, 70th anniversary
Go here for the pictures –
What Nagasaki looked like before and after the bomb
And some text from the US government's dispassionate report –
The images were printed in 1946 inside the U.S. government's "strategic bombing survey," an analysis of the epochal nuclear strikes on the second Japanese city. The full report, a dispassionate narration of the events, built in part through interviews with Japanese witnesses, is worth reading.
In particular, it includes the official report of the incident by the Nagasaki Prefecture. Here's a chilling excerpt:
Within a radius of 1 kilometer from ground zero, men and animals died almost instantaneously from the tremendous blast pressure and heat; houses and other structures were smashed, crushed and scattered; and fires broke out. The strong complex steel members of the structures of the Mitsubishi Steel Works were bent and twisted like jelly and the roofs of the reinforced concrete National Schools were crumpled and collapsed, indicating a force beyond imagination. Trees of all sizes lost their branches or were uprooted or broken off at the trunk.
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