-- Admiral William D Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman
"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."- Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe
This week 67 years ago, a new era of global terror was born when the US dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Never before had the world witnessed such man-made power to destroy. And ever since the world has had to live with the threat of repeated devastation.
On this fateful day in August 1945, an American B-29 Flying Fortress unleashed a hell on earth over the Japanese city of Nagasaki with a single atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man.But the bombings were not merely terrible acts of war. They signaled a US policy of holding the world hostage to its global terrorism.
The day before, Radio Tokyo and the American media were already reporting the devastation inflicted on the city of Hiroshima where, on the morning of 6 August, another American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, had dropped the first atomic bomb - codenamed Little Boy.
Comment: Transcript of this speech from Wake Up from your Slumber blog.