Is There Anyone Alive 7 Stories From Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Marching orders See the operations orders given to Jacob Beser, the electronics specialist who had to make sure radio waves didn't interfere with the device and "the only man to fly both atomic bomb missions." These military documents are now part of the collection of The Museum of World War II in Natick, Mass. The first reaction The Aug. 20, 1945, issue of TIMEpublished just after that infamous weeknot only explained who developed the technology and how it worked, but also how it would change diplomacy forever, An eyewitness account As part of TIME's July 29, 1985, cover package for the 40th anniversary of the bombings, Yoshitaka Kawamoto, the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, described what it was like to be 13 years old and attending school near the site on that day, The ruins See LIFE magazine photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. One photographer on scene, Bernard Hoffman, wrote his photo editor that, "most of us felt like weeping not out of sympathy for the Japs but because we were revolted by this new and terrible form of destruction. Compared to Hiroshima, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne are practically untouched.", Get your history fix in one place sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter , President Obama's historic visit This year, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. President Gerald Ford, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Japan, had earlier been advised not to go because some at at the White House "felt that such a visit would be adding a dose of negativity to an otherwise positive trip, and that it would risk opening old wounds.", Was the bomb necessary? Knowing Obama's visit would reignite debates about whether the bombings could have been avoided, historian David Kaiser evaluated new theories on the use of the bomb while explaining the original rationale behind the decision, What remains See photos of the Genbaku Dome convention center, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the only building left standing after the 1945 bombing.