Today, August 6, 2007, is the 62nd anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons in war, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. August 9 marks the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
Please see my post of last year — the links all still work, and they provide significant resources for teachers and students to understand the events.
Performance of Texas students on questions about the end of the war in the Pacific, in the TAKS exit exams in 2007 showed minor improvements.
Other sources teachers may want to use:
- Walter Burchett’s video interview years later, featuring film from Hiroshima; Burchett defied Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s order that kept reporters out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and saw the destruction; he filed his report “as a warning to the world.” Burchett, an Australian, made a career of reporting wars from the enemy’s side; his account offers significant historical value, and in this case, no skew away from history standards, more than 60 years later.
- The Hiroshima Gallery from Lewis and Clark College
- Bob Greene’s excellent book on Paul Tibbets, the man who flew Enola Gay on August 6, 1945, Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War; NPR’s story on the book is also very good, providing audio you can use in the classroom.
- “Compensating for Health: The acts and outcomes of Atomic Testing,” a 1995 article about the effects of Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Radiation Compensation Act, compensating victims downwind of U.S. atmospheric nuclear testing; compensation for U.S. radiation victims came only after the epidemiological results from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were thoroughly studied by the National Academy of Sciences, providing a firm scientific foundation for compensating victims; this article notes compensation schemes rarely get close to justice, and cannot restore lives.
- A report on the anniversary from a national Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun
- A post from First Morning.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
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Thanks for the links. This inspired me to look for the Los Alamos Science Museum website. I visited it a couple of decades ago. Besides a mock-up of the bombs they built (including the ones they set off near Rulison, Colorado in the early 70s) (it’s just 9 miles down the road from where I live), the most fascinating items in the museum to me were the letters which lined the walls–from Oppenheimer and others. They have some digitized documents which I haven’t completely gone through under “related reading.” Here’s a link to start with:
http://www.lanl.gov/history/atomicbomb/littleboyandfatman.shtml
They also have good biographies of participants at
http://www.lanl.gov/history/
as well as other interesting information.
Thanks for inspiring me to check!
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