It's Been 80 Years to the Day Since We Dropped the First Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima

August 6, 1945 — The Bomb Falls

At 8:15 a.m., a B‑29 named Enola Gay drifts over Hiroshima and releases Little Boy, a uranium-fueled bomb built by the Manhattan Project. Forty‑three seconds later, at about 580 m above ground, it detonates. Within that heartbeat, up to 78,000 people were killed instantly, and over 140,000 died by year‑end from burns, blast trauma, and radiation. Sixty-two thousand buildings are incinerated across five square miles. The firestorm consumed everything within 2 km, heat rays between 3,000–4,000 °C vaporized people instantly, their flesh turning to ash. The blast winds exceed 440 m/s near ground zero. Those on the fringes would fall ill from residual fallout or never recover from radioactive “black rain.”

It was a hell on Earth, never before the likes of wh