ABSTRACT
At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, a single B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, piloted by Paul W. Tibbets dropped a nuclear bomb, known as “Little Boy,” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Hiroshima had been selected as the target because it had not been previously bombed, thereby making it easier for American observers to judge the effects of the atom bomb. The atomic explosion cut a blast of light across Hiroshima’s sky “from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun.”1 It is estimated that 140,000 of Hiroshima’s 350,000 inhabitants were killed in the atomic blast and as a result of radiation. Five square miles were devastated, and more than 60 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.2 Although nuclear weapons have not been used in combat since World War II, wars today are just as violent. In Rwanda, where a brutal civil war erupted between two dominant ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, in April 1994, an estimated 800,000 people were killed. For four days, the attacking Hutus killed thousands, smashing heads with stones and decapitating and slicing open bodies with machetes. Maimed victims hid among the corpses, pretending to be dead, as they watched family members die.
