Old is Gold

Mushroom Cloud Over Nagasaki, Lieutenant Charles Levy | 1945

- Nivedita Basu

Three days once AN A-bomb nicknamed very little Boy blotted out Hiroshima, Japan, U.S. forces bore a fair amount of powerful weapons dubbed Fat Man on Nagasaki. The explosion shot up a 45,000-foot-high column of fallout and debris. “We saw this massive plume mounting up, up into the sky,” recalled Lieutenant Charles Levy, the bombardier, who was knocked over by the blow from the 20-kiloton weapon. “It was purple, red, white, all colors—something like boiling coffee. It looked alive.” The officer then shot sixteen images of the new weapon’s awful power because it yanked the life out of some 80,000 folks in the town on the Urakami River. Six days later, the 2 bombs forced Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito to announce Japan’s unconditional surrender in war II. officers expurgated photos of the bomb’s devastation, however, Levy’s image—the just one to indicate the complete scale of the mushroom from the air—was circulated widely. The impact formed a yank opinion in favor of the nuclear bomb, leading the state to celebrate the atomic age and proving, however again, that history is written by the victors.