How Many Were killed?

The two cities perished instantly-Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Exposed to a blinding flash and blast of 7,000°C. Death en masse, in an instant. The victims did not even know what it was that hit them. In one sense, the attack was a consequence of Japan's militaristic aggression, but most of the victims were civilians—women and children—who died a cruel death one week before the war's end.

How many were actually killed or wounded? According to U.N. Secretary-General U. Thant's Special Report on Nuclear Weapons of 1967, the casualty figure, based on the estimate made by the Japanese authorities six months after the bombing, is 78,000 killed and 84,000 wounded in Hiroshima; 27,000 killed and 41,000 wounded in Nagasaki; those missing in the two cities number many thousands.

But later it was disclosed that the original estimate was very rough and did not include the military population (a figure kept secret), visitors to the cities, nor the many Koreans and Chinese who had been brought from Japanese-occupied territories for forced labor in Japan. According to later reports, the most reliable figures are that 200,000 were killed in Hiroshima and 100,000 in Nagasaki.

The real effects of the bombing, however, go far beyond the physical destruction of the moment. The victim-survivors have continued to suffer a deep and complex despair. They lost the social and economic bases of livelihood; they suffer the aftereffects of massive radiation which are yet to be comprehended by modern medicine; they await compensation by the Japanese government which avoids this responsibility.

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