More than 70 years have passed since the terrible events for Japan. Every year on August 6, in the Japanese city of Hiroshima and around the world, tribute is paid to the victims of the atomic bombing. Over this city on August 6, 1945, the US Air Force detonated a nuclear bomb equivalent to 18 kilotons of TNT, which destroyed Hiroshima to the ground and literally turned into dust.
The terrifying bomb of murderous power was affectionately called "Kid". It was attached to the belly of a US Air Force B-19 bomber named Enole Gay after the mother of the pilot. In the early morning at about 8 hours 15 minutes from a height of about 10,000 meters above Hiroshima, a deadly cargo was dropped by a bomber. The colossal explosion instantly claimed 100,000 human lives.
The surviving residents of Hiroshima immediately felt the power of the light radiation. A hot, suffocating wave washed over them. The people near the epicenter of the explosion instantly became a pile of ash. Stencils of people in the form of dark silhouettes were imprinted on the walls of buildings. Within two kilometers of the place where the atomic bomb fell, all paper and paper products ignited, and many fires broke out everywhere. A few minutes after the explosion, a fire tornado swept across Hiroshima over an area of 11 square kilometers, which moved back to the explosion site, gaining a speed of 60 kilometers per hour.
The inhabitants hiding in shelters, who escaped from the bright light radiation, were overtaken by a powerful shock wave from the explosion in a few seconds. She was so strong that she didn't just throw people to the ground, but threw them across the streets.
The shock wave of an atomic explosion at a distance of 19 kilometers around knocked out all doors and windows, finely crushing all the glass. Almost all the houses of the city were destroyed by a nuclear attack, and the strongest buildings remained. For example, the Teikoku Bank vault building remained standing, its strong doors, ironically, were made to order from reinforced concrete in the US state of Ohio by Mosler Safe.
The surviving residents of Hiroshima later regretted that they did not die immediately in a nuclear explosion. After the explosion, a week later, the mortality rate among the population grew catastrophically due to radiation sickness. Doctors first encountered such a disease and did not yet know how to deal with it and treat it. Literally in the fourth week, from atomic damage, radiation sickness took another 100,000 people to the grave. The consequences of this disease have reminded of themselves for many decades, affecting the genotype of exposed people. Oncological diseases continued to afflict residents. Women exposed to radiation gave birth to mutant children with genetic abnormalities, not much like humans.
Many years have passed since the explosion of the atomic bomb, but the Japanese are still suffering from radiation contamination since that terrible day. In the late forties of the last century, there was no concept of radioactive contamination, so no one evacuated the local inhabitants in the suburbs of Hiroshima. People by themselves survived, struggling to repair their destroyed and exposed to the strongest radiation housing. The mortality rate among local residents was extremely high, and doctors, unknowingly, had not yet associated it with an increased background radiation.
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The Japanese gave the name "hibakusha" to all people who fell into the zone of destruction by a nuclear explosion and managed to survive after all its damaging factors and the most powerful radioactive contamination, as well as their descendants.
The radiation from the explosion had a strong effect on the psyche of people. Doctors diagnosed many of the victims with a severe psychological disorder. Today in the Land of the Rising Sun recorded about 200,000 victims who have suffered pain and suffering from all the consequences of a nuclear explosion. Of course, the Japanese government takes care of them and provides them with special material benefits, but the hibakushi are outcasts rejected by the local population. The Japanese attribute them to the lower stratum of the population, and do not officially hire them. Hibakushi do not have the opportunity to create a normal family, only with freaks of their own kind. Due to gene mutations, they cannot bear children. The Japanese believe that their radiation sickness is hereditary. They are simply avoided, believing that they are contagious, and from them you can get a dose of radiation contamination.
Of course, there is some truth in this fear, because the half-life of radioactive isotopes that directly enter the bodies of unfortunate people is about eighty years, which is practically the entire human life. Exhausted people continue to pay for what, in fact, is absolutely not their fault.
Even more terrible than that of the hibakushi, the nuclear explosion affected the people who turned out to be facing him. They were nicknamed alligators because of the distorted appearance under the influence of light radiation. They lost their eyes, the skin began to resemble the skin of a turtle, instead of a mouth there was a disfigured hole, they could not talk, but made a terrible sound, similar to a hysterical cry.
An origami-shaped paper crane has become a symbol of the victims of a nuclear explosion. Every year, the Japanese put cranes on memorable dates in the parks of the world created in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This tradition was laid by a twelve-year-old Japanese girl Sadoko Sasaki. On the day of the atomic bombing, she was only two years old. The house where her family lived was completely destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Although the little girl did not receive burns or injuries then, she did not escape the terrible fate of radiation contamination under the radioactive rain, under which she fell with her mother.
Until the age of eleven, the radiation she received did not manifest itself, but at the age of 12 she was diagnosed with a fatal diagnosis of leukemia, in Japan called as atomic disease. But the girl stubbornly hoped for recovery and believed in the old legend, which promised the fulfillment of her innermost dream when 1000 of these cranes would be folded by a person. Sadoko managed to create only 644 paper cranes.
The first monument to all the victims of a nuclear explosion was a girl with a crane in her outstretched arms; it was opened in 1959 in the Hiroshima Peace Park. The inscriptions are words of farewell to subsequent generations - this is our cry, our prayer, peace in the world!
