The Atomic bomb

• 6 August 1945: USA dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. (a second was dropped on Nagasaki 3 days later on 9 August 1945).

  The blast at Hiroshima was equivalent to over 12,000 tons of TNT used in ordinary bombs. It is estimated that over 120,000 Japanese civilians were killed by the 2 bombs.
• Some historians argue that the USA could've won the war against Japan without the use of nuclear weapons. They say that the real reasoning behind the USA using them was to establish a stronger bargaining position with the Soviet Union.

  • Is true that the atomic bombs made the countries of Western Europe feel more secure about placing themselves under American protection, rather than looking to individually make an agreement with the Soviet Union.
• The atomic bomb did not make it easier to persuade Stalin to allow Eastern European countries more freedom, as the USA may have hoped. In fact, Stalin now felt more determined to make the Soviet Union secure. His immediate aim was to create a buffer-zone of countries sympathetic to communism, between Germany and the Soviet Union's western borders.
• The effect the development of the atomic bomb had on US-Soviet relations was exactly the opposite to what the Americans had hoped for and additionally it dramatically increased tensions, as Truman had not informed the Soviet Union before dropping the bomb, increasing secrecy.
• The bomb posed as a symbol that a war involving nuclear weapons could kill millions of people and destroy the world many times over. Equally, the terrible consequences of using an atomic bomb may have made both the USA and Soviet Union more reluctant to go to war. Instead, they entered an arms race in which each side tried to make sure their nuclear weapons were more powerful than their rival.
• In the Soviet Union, scientists were working on their own version of the atomic bomb, and their first successful test of that was on August 29, 1949 (four years after the USA). By 1964, Britain, France and China also had the atomic bomb.