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The Original Target For The Second Nuclear Bomb
When I was twenty, I visited Hiroshima when I worked in an organic chemistry lab in Japan. Being in Hiroshima gave me a lot of chills — and one of the places I visited was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I felt a lot of the pain and anguish surrounding the nuclear bomb and its legacy.
I didn’t expect to learn that Nagasaki was not the original target for the second nuclear bomb. As a matter of chance, the original target was another city in Japan, known for its military arsenal: Kokura.
Today, people in Japan still refer to “the luck of Kokura” on how the city was spared. So why did the U.S. target Kokura? And why did it bomb Nagasaki instead?
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times called Kokura “the luckiest Japanese city in the war.”
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “Fat Man” was a plutonium implosion bomb that was supposed to be dropped on Kokura in the days after “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima. Kokura had a military arsenal that was “a massive collection of war industries adjacent to the city of Kokura.”
According to Mariko Oi at the BBC, before any bombs were dropped, a selection of American military generals, army officers, and…
