The Day Time Stopped (the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

August 6th and August 9th - days that live in infamy.

Sixty years ago the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in a horrific blink of an eye. In Hiroshima, on August 6th 1945 at 8:15 a.m. - 80,000 people were instantly vaporized, and a total of around 140,000 people, representing around 40% of the city’s population of 350,000, were to be dead by the end of that year.

The death toll from radiation-related diseases in Hiroshima continues to grow, reaching a total (as of August 6, 2005) of 242,437 (95% civilian). 1

Three days after Hiroshima was decimated, Nagasaki was hit. At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945 - the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. 74,000 people were killed and another 70,000 were wounded.

"I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense... I said the word, It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki."
- said Kurt Vonnegut in his semi-autobiographical novel Timequake.