Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945: 21 Historical Photos Explained

20 Historical Photographs of Hiroshima and the Atomic Bombing

At 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a single uranium bomb exploded about 580 metres above Hiroshima. Three days later a plutonium bomb fell on Nagasaki. Between 90,000 and 166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki were dead by the end of that year, about half of them on the first day. These remain the only nuclear weapons ever used in war.

The photographs below follow the story in order: the secret programme that built the bombs, the first test in the New Mexico desert, the two missions over Japan, the people who lived through them and the surrender that followed. Each caption explains who or what you are looking at and why it matters, and points out where captions that have circulated for years get the facts wrong.

Two things are worth keeping in mind while you scroll. First, the scale of these weapons is small by modern standards, which is exactly why the images still matter: today's warheads are many times stronger. Second, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only victims. Their survivors, the hibakusha, went on to build one of the world's most persistent peace movements, and in 2024 it received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The city after the blast

A man on a bike crossing the destroyed Hiroshima, a few days after the first atomic bomb was dropped.

A man pushes his bicycle along a cleared road a few days after the bombing. Almost everything around him has been flattened or burned, but the steel-framed dome on the horizon still stands. That building, the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, was one of the few structures near the hypocentre to survive in part, and it is preserved today as the Atomic Bomb Dome, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

How the bomb was built: 1939 to 1945

Albert Einstein and the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, photographed together after the war re-enacting their famous letter. Szilard drafted the letter and Einstein signed it on 2 August 1939; it warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might build a bomb based on uranium fission. The economist Alexander Sachs handed it to Roosevelt on 11 October 1939, which led to a small Advisory Committee on Uranium with a first budget of only $6,000. Einstein later told Newsweek that had he known Germany would fail to build a bomb, he would have done nothing.

General Leslie Groves (left) and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (right). The US Army Corps of Engineers took charge of the bomb programme in June 1942 under the name Manhattan District, and Groves, an engineer who had just overseen construction of the Pentagon, was given command that September. He was a brigadier general at the time, not a lieutenant general as older captions say; the honorary third star came only in 1948. Groves picked Oppenheimer to run the new weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is why Oppenheimer is often called the father of the atomic bomb.

Workers at Los Alamos posing with 100 tons of TNT.

Workers on a wooden platform stacked with high explosive, ready for what was called the 100-ton test. On 7 May 1945, the Los Alamos team detonated about 108 short tons of conventional explosive laced with radioactive material. It was a dress rehearsal: it let them check their instruments, practise their procedures and estimate how radioactive debris might spread before risking the real device.

Signboards like this reminded workers that the Manhattan Project was a secret.

A billboard reminding staff that what they saw, did and heard at work had to stay there. The Manhattan Project employed well over 100,000 people across sites such as Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Hanford in Washington and Los Alamos, yet most of them did not know what they were building. Secrecy was kept by splitting the work into small compartments, and signs like this one were a constant part of daily life.

Trinity: the first nuclear explosion

The bomb two days before the first successful test.

The test device, nicknamed "the gadget", being prepared on its steel tower at the Trinity site shortly before the test. It was a plutonium implosion design, the same type that would later be dropped on Nagasaki. Scientists wanted to test this design because, unlike the simpler uranium gun-type bomb, nobody was sure it would work.

The explosion of the first bomb test, codenamed Trinity, became in the desert Jornada del Muerto (Day of the Dead).

The Trinity fireball a fraction of a second after detonation at 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945. The site lay in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, roughly 56 kilometres southeast of Socorro. The name is often mistranslated as "Day of the Dead"; it actually means something closer to "Dead Man's Journey", after a dangerous old trail across the basin. Recent analysis puts the yield at about 25 kilotons of TNT.

Some weeks ago, USA had first tested an atomic bomb in New Mexico, on July 16th.

Another frame of the same explosion, the dome of the fireball just 0.016 seconds after ignition, with a 100-metre scale bar for size. High-speed cameras captured the test from several angles. Oppenheimer is usually credited with choosing the code name Trinity, possibly inspired by a poem by John Donne, although its exact origin is unclear.

6 August 1945: Hiroshima

The pilot of Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, a few minutes before the departure to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Colonel Paul Tibbets waves from the cockpit of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, named after his mother, before take-off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands. The bomb on board, "Little Boy", used about 64 kilograms of uranium-235 in a gun-type design that had never been tested. Navy Captain William Parsons armed it during the flight, so that a crash on take-off would not destroy the island. Robert Lewis, who flew as co-pilot that day, later said he had written down the words "My God, what have we done?" after seeing the explosion.

The mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima minutes after the blast. The bomb took about 44 seconds to fall before detonating above the city centre. The heat set off fires across several square kilometres, and many of those who survived the initial blast died later from burns, injuries and radiation sickness.

US President Harry S. Truman, sailing, reading reports of the bombing of Hiroshima.

President Harry S. Truman at a desk aboard the cruiser USS Augusta as he sailed home from the Potsdam Conference. It was there that he received word of the bombing and reviewed the statement announcing it to the world. Truman's announcement described the weapon as an atomic bomb that harnessed the basic power of the universe; Tokyo learned what had hit Hiroshima largely from that statement, some sixteen hours after the attack.

The white line, a point that was not burned by the heat wave is considered to be a man's shadow.

A bridge railing in Hiroshima, with the pavement behind it bleached by the flash except where the railing blocked the light. Such "atomic shadows" form because surfaces exposed to the intense heat were scorched or lightened, while anything in the way left a darker outline. Older captions say the white line here is a person's shadow; the clearest shadows in this picture are of the railing itself, and claims about a human figure should be treated with care.

An elderly woman in a makeshift hospital in Hiroshima after the destruction.

An elderly woman lies in an improvised hospital in Hiroshima, her body marked by burns and wounds. Most of the city's doctors and nurses were themselves killed or injured, so survivors were often treated in schools, temples and other makeshift wards with almost no medicine. Many patients who seemed to recover then developed hair loss, bleeding and fever in the weeks that followed, the first widely seen symptoms of acute radiation sickness.

9 August 1945: Nagasaki

"Fat Man" on its trailer at Tinian before being loaded into the B-29 Bockscar, flown by Major Charles Sweeney. This was a plutonium implosion bomb like the Trinity device. Nagasaki was not the first choice: the crew's primary target was Kokura, but clouds and smoke hid it, so they turned to the secondary target. The bomb exploded about 500 metres above the city with a yield of roughly 21 kilotons, larger than the Hiroshima bomb.

Nagasaki 15 minutes after the explosion.

The cloud over Nagasaki, photographed from a distance shortly after the explosion. Nagasaki's hilly terrain limited the damage in some valleys while concentrating it in the Urakami district, home to factories, a large prison and one of Asia's biggest cathedrals. Bockscar itself barely made it out: it landed on Okinawa with almost no fuel left.

Survivors move through a landscape of rubble and burned trees in Nagasaki. Many walked for hours searching for relatives or water. For decades afterwards, people exposed to the bombs faced higher rates of leukaemia and other cancers, and many also faced discrimination when looking for work or marriage because of fears about radiation.

70,000 people died instantly in Nagasaki. Photo of a survivor with her child

A mother and her small child, both injured, holding rice balls handed out as emergency food in Nagasaki. Older captions claim that 70,000 people in Nagasaki died instantly. Current estimates are lower for the first day: about 60,000 to 80,000 died in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, roughly half of them on 9 August itself. The Japanese government has since recognised around 650,000 people as hibakusha, of whom about 99,000 were still alive in March 2025.

Surrender and the end of the war

Screenshot of the White House press office when Truman announced the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945.

Reporters race out of the White House press room to file their stories after Truman told them Japan had accepted the Allied terms. Older captions date this scene to 15 August, but in Washington the announcement came on the evening of 14 August 1945. In Japan it was already 15 August when Emperor Hirohito's recorded address was broadcast to the nation, the first time most Japanese had ever heard his voice.

An aerial photograph that has long circulated as "Hiroshima three weeks after the bombing". Look closely and you will see dozens of round craters, which are typical of conventional high-explosive raids rather than a single airburst. The image may therefore show a different target, and it is safest to treat this caption as unconfirmed.

Soldiers and sailors on the USS Missouri watching the formal surrender of Japan in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

Sailors and officers crowd the decks of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 as Japan formally surrendered. Truman declared that day V-J Day. Whether the atomic bombs were what forced the surrender is still debated by historians: the Soviet Union's declaration of war on 8 August and its invasion of Manchuria also weighed heavily on Japan's leaders. You can read one critical view in our piece on why the United States used the bomb.

What Hiroshima still teaches

Historian Odd Arne Westad, speaking to CNN for the 70th anniversary in 2015, argued that the horror of the two cities is part of why no nuclear weapon has been used in war since. That pattern, sometimes called the nuclear taboo, has now held for more than 80 years. It is a habit, not a law of nature, and it depends on people remembering what these weapons do.

The arsenals have shrunk since the Cold War, when tens of thousands of warheads existed, but they have not disappeared. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated about 12,187 warheads worldwide at the start of 2026, held by nine countries. Since 1945, more than 2,000 nuclear tests have been carried out, most of them by the United States and the Soviet Union.

The strongest voice against those weapons has come from the survivors themselves. Nihon Hidankyo, the national organisation of hibakusha, was founded in Nagasaki in August 1956. It has spent seven decades lobbying for medical support and for disarmament, and above all telling what happened. On 11 October 2024 the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave it the Peace Prize, honouring its campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons and for showing, through witness testimony, that they must never be used again.

A few myths are worth correcting. The bombs did not leave the cities uninhabitable forever: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt and are home to more than a million people combined. Most of the deaths came from blast, heat and fire rather than long-term radiation. And the bombings were not the only deadly raids on Japan that year; the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed a comparable number of people in a single night. Hiroshima today looks nothing like the photographs above, as you can see in our then-and-now gallery of the rebuilt city.

If you visit, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum both hold survivors' belongings, letters and recorded testimony. Spending an hour there tends to change how these photographs look afterwards.

Sources: Wikipedia: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Wikipedia: Trinity (nuclear test); Wikipedia: Einstein–Szilard letter; Wikipedia: Leslie Groves; Wikipedia: Robert A. Lewis; Wikipedia: Surrender of Japan; Wikipedia: Nihon Hidankyo; NobelPrize.org: 2024 Peace Prize ceremony speech; Vision IAS summary of the SIPRI Yearbook 2026. Photographs: US government and Manhattan Project archives, Japanese survivors' archives and press agencies.

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