Bomb Zone

Here are a few surprising things I learned from the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima...
1. By today's standards, the bomb that the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima was quite small.
2. Hiroshima was chosen as the target by an American military committee, and was preferred over Tokyo - among other reasons - because 'if it didn't go off' the bomb would land in deep water, and couldn't be recovered and reverse engineered by the Japanese. It went off.
3. America invested $2 billion into developing the A-bomb. That was one of the big reasons they decided to use it for real rather than just stage a demonstration. More bang for your American taxpayers bucks.
3. Almost everything within a 3km radius was flattened. That's big... though I think I expected it would be bigger. Oddly, though, the building immediately under the blast remained standing, probably because the main force was downwards rather than sideways. It's now the Atomic Bomb Dome memorial.
4. A disproportionate number of school kids were killed, as they were being used as forced labour to demolish areas of timber housing around government buildings to reduce the fire threat from bombings. The museum is full of sad little stories of kids who made their way home after suffering horrific burns, and died the next day.
5. Estimates of fatalities vary between 60,000 and 160,000 people. As so many institutional records were destroyed, it was hard to assess.
6. It was kind of eerie walking the streets of Hiroshima after visiting the museum, looking around at the people doing their normal, everyday stuff... the atmosphere would have been much the same in August 1945.