Hiroshima (広島)

This letter from Einstein to Roosevelt is kept at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.  (See here for transcript.) Dated 2nd August 1939, it outlines the feasibility of both nuclear power and nuclear weaponry, and points to the evidence that the Germans were also investigating these. (It turns out the Japanese were too.)


6 years and 4 days later Little Boy was dropped, killing around 80,000 on the first day. One of the survivors, Sadako Sasaki (佐々木 禎子), just two years old at the time, feel ill with leukaemia years later. A saying went that if you folded 1000 paper cranes you would be granted a wish, so she started making paper cranes furiously and reached 1300 cranes, but died anyway in 1955. Today, schoolchildren from around the world send paper cranes to the peace park in tribute. The picture below is a photograph of her memorial in the Hiroshima peace park


The final death toll was at least 140,000.

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