8 Year Old Keiko Survived Nuclear War - 70 Years Since

Keiko Ogura felt the explosion of the world's first atomic bomb in her own body. She tells her story so that no one else ever should have to go through the same thing.

Keiko didn't go to school on August 6 with the other students because her father felt that something bad was about to happen that day. I was unhappy as all my classmates had gone, she recalls. She had celebrated her 8th birthday two days before.

Keiko Ogura the year after Hiroshima

I remember everything clearly as if it had happened yesterday. I stood on the street near our house when a blinding flash suddenly appeared in the sky. I was thrown to the ground and lost consciousness, says Keiko Ogura on the phone from Hiroshima where she has lived all her life. Keiko was a second grade elementary school student, the bomb exploded at 8.15 a.m.

She does not know how long she was unconscious, but when she woke up the whole world was black and from the sky came a black rain. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand, there was debris falling on me and all over and I couldn’t hear anything.

“When I went home, it was smashed and some of it had blown up, I could see the ceiling and tiles gone and hundreds of pieces of window glass on the wall. My father was lucky. He was between the open glass doors and the pantry and he was alright. My sister and brother were bleeding from the head, but it wasn’t serious. When I stepped out, I saw black rain, what’s this I thought - it was charcoal colour and it was very sticky and I touched it,” she narrates.

National Georgraphic Channel Reenactment

There was a complete calm around. The house was 2.4 kilometers from the place where the atomic bomb was dropped. I strongly remember all the terrible smells that hovered in the air during the following days. At first there was the smell of burnt hair which was then mixed with the smell of burned bodies.

Near our home was a Shinto shrine that was made to a first aid station. Therefore it came injured people to our area and I saw hundreds of sick and dying people. They were walking like ghosts. I only saw dark figures who stretched out their arms and legs. Many people's skin was severely burned.

The family miraculously survived

Keiko saw how skin hung from human body parts and especially from the fingers. They were swollen due to radiation damage.

Some people were completely soaked in black rain and developed health complications and diseases. Some foreigners died. 25,000 including Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, foreign students and around 10 American prisoners. It was one of the reasons Hiroshima was chosen - it had few prisoners at that time in the city, she says.

It was horrible

“In Ushita where I lived, each home was an air raid shelter. Usually in the mornings there is an air raid warning but on that day August 6, 1945, there was a warning but no air raid.” Strangely, the night before, Keiko says people couldn’t sleep as they kept going in and out of air raid shelters after the sirens kept blaring. B-29s appeared above Hiroshima accompanied by air raid sirens. “We went home and tried to sleep. All the time we kept wondering why no air raid despite the siren. On August 6 there was one air raid warning. We thought Hiroshima would be skipped. We had heard that Tokyo and Kobe were destroyed, maybe God decided to spare our city. That morning people didn’t worry why there was a warning and no raid,” she says.

Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Photo: EPA / Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

It was a miracle her own family got saved. No family member died that day 70 years ago when an unprecedented terror spread out over the world.

Keiko's father began working at the crematoria in which the bodies were burned. He burned hundreds of bodies the days after the atomic bomb fell.

“After the bombing, everyday someone died, they didn’t have any scars but they died, we were wondering if it was poison gas, we didn’t know then that it was radiation,” she says. Now the survivors “the hibakusha” as they are called, fall into four categories. Keiko says those who helped in cremating bodies also became sick. “Everyday I saw lines at the cemetery, of people to be buried and we wondered who would be next. One of my friend’s who was living out of the city, was exposed to radiation when she came here and fell sick and her younger brother died after a six-hour exposure in Hiroshima."

People told me that all of Hiroshima had been destroyed. Our own house was full of broken glass but the walls were still standing.

A few days after Keiko began to do short trips to the horrific battlefield.

When someone died, we said that they died of "the light"

A special memory from the day after

“There was a bad smell, their hair and flesh were burnt and they were lying down, squatting and suddenly someone grabbed my ankle, and asked for water. Till then everyone was silent but suddenly there was a cry for mizu or water. Some thanked me after I got water for them but to my horror some died. It is said that people shouldn’t be given water when in shock, but I didn’t know that as a little girl. I ran home and got it from the well. I was shocked and I thought there was some poison. My father said you shouldn’t give people water and I kept silent. Keiko thought she killed people by giving them water. She was so scared that she did not tell anyone about the water until decades later, when her father had passed away. That became my trauma. I had nightmares and I cried. It took me a long time to recover,” she explains.

Typical symptoms of radiation injuries include high fever, loss of appetite, bleeding and hair loss. Keiko had almost no symptoms at all except that she got nosebleeds.

I could not connect the bleeding with the atomic bomb until decades later, when I heard that it was common among the children who lived near the area affected by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

She also suffered from anemia, but otherwise her health has been good.

But the most fearful thing for her was that babies were born with deformities, with microcephaly or small heads. Keiko later met a girl in her forties who was like a three-year-old. She wouldn’t say anything and watched TV all day, and could recognise only the faces of movie stars. People were worried about having handicapped children.

Many children died, many were orphaned or maimed. By the end of 1945, the number of dead had risen to 140,000,” she adds.

Her brother was behind Hiroshima station working to break down houses and clear fire lanes among the debris. He and others had heard the sound of the airplane - there were three planes - but from one he saw a tiny black thing (the Americans called it Little Boy) that was released. As the planes turned, the black dot exploded and they were all thrown to the ground unconscious. “There were people lying on the ground all over and my brother’s classmate was so severely burnt that he took off his shirt and all of them had severe burns as they tried to go home. There were so many dead bodies on the road. He decided to climb up the hill and go another way to avoid the bodies. My brother said the cloud was like ice cream, and he saw the whole city destroyed. It was my brother who came and told us the whole city was burnt,” Keiko says.

We did not understand what had happened. No one spoke to us about the atomic bomb. We thought that tens or hundreds of bombs were detonated. Only much later did we realize that our city had been destroyed by the force of a single bomb.

Right after the bombing, the question was how to overcome it and not think of revenge, she says. There was nothing to eat, everyday was so hard, everyday people died. “Right after the bomb our thoughts were - how could we overcome it? What can we eat? Nothing was there. Some vegetables and rice. We caught grasshoppers or insects and ate them after cooking. Everyday was so hard and we were so afraid of dying.”

Shame joins Hiroshima and Fukushima

Many so-called "hibakushas", those who survived the atomic bomb, has for decades kept secret where they were when the bomb detonated.

We were afraid of discrimination. For example, no one wanted to marry someone who had been near the site where the bomb struck. Maybe one feared that there would be something wrong with the descendants, the now 78-year-old Keiko wonders.

Survivors are seemingly okay but get easily tired, didn’t have 100 per cent energy. We used to think survivors are lazy, they catch a cold easily, develop stomach ache, she says. “People are worried about getting married or getting jobs. The first thing I was asked by a young man from Tokyo whether I was from Hiroshima and exposed to radiation. There was denial too. Most people didn’t want to admit to being survivors, “she points out.

Keiko says she was also stunned by the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011.

The people in Fukushima have the same fate as us. People are afraid of them and they are discriminated against in Japanese society. People begin to distort the truth, telling lies about the past and keeping secrets about disabled children who are born.

Keiko Ogura - Photo: Keiko Ogura

Because the atomic bomb have so much association with secrecy and shame, Keiko Ogura have decided to tell her own story to the world. She has devoted her life to preserving the historical memory and are grateful to all who would listen to her story.

“Survivors at first hated America, especially the President of the USA for ordering the bombing, but there was guilt too that we couldn’t save our children. There was always regret. Why did I survive many people wondered but later we felt hope when elementary school children visited us and wanted to hear our stories. For the first time, people felt hope that they had survived. There was a feeling that before we all died our stories would be told to the world,” she adds.

She tells of the shock when she heard that the United States continued it's nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean even in the 1950s. There, began her work for peace.

Among other things, Keiko founded a small group of hibakushas, the Hiroshima Interpreters for Peace, who tries to explain to the world what happened in Hiroshima 70 years ago.

So that no one should have to experience the same thing.

Keiko confessed that the people she loved most in the world were teachers and the media. “They conveyed our stories. One time I was on TV and my son’s friend said he didn’t know I was a survivor. The only time I didn’t like the media was when I went to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. in 2003. I was supposed to work as an interpreter. I started to cry. I didn’t want to see the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the bomb. They took pictures of me crying and everyone in Japan saw it,” she says regretfully.

That’s the dilemma of the survivors. Without staying on the story, the world wouldn’t be better but then they will be identified as survivors. Keiko, like other survivors, was afraid of the stigma but she was clear on one thing - “If we think of revenge, the world will be unhappy. This is my message.”

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The 1995 Experiment That Could Have Ended Civilization

It wasn't an international group of mad scientists back in 1995 that announced that they will go ahead with plans to activate their latest world-destroying device and try to create miniature black holes that could consume the entire earth and spell the end for civilization. Unlike CERN (Central Evil Research Node) "please correct me if I got the name wrong in the chat", with their Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Rocket fired at Northern Lights Norway

Back in 1995 the experiment that almost ended our civilization was something quite the opposite and the scientists had no idea that their experiment could spell the end of civilization.

On Jan. 25, 1995, Norwegian and American researchers fired a rocket into the skies of northwestern Norway to study the Northern Lights. But the four-stage rocket flew directly through the same corridor that American Minuteman III missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, would use to travel from the United States to Moscow.

The rocket's speed and flight pattern very closely matched what the Russians expected from a Trident missile that would be fired from a US submarine and detonated at high altitude, with the aim of blinding the Russian early-warning system to prepare for a large-scale nuclear attack by the United States. The Russian military was placed on high alert, and then President Boris Yeltsin activated the keys to launch nuclear weapons. He had less than 10 minutes to decide whether to issue the order to fire.

Yeltsin left the Russian missiles in their silos, probably in part because relations between Russian and the United States were relatively trusting in 1995. But if a similar incident occurred today, as US arms expert Theodore Postol warned recently, it could quite possibly lead to nuclear catastrophe.

For more on this topic visit the following links:
Read about the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

Nuclear Specter Returns: 'Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War'
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/munich-conference-warns-of-greater-threat-of-nuclear-conflict-a-1018357.html
By Markus Becker in Munich

Russian General Calls for Preemptive Nuclear Strike Doctrine

With things heating up with the conflicts in Ukraine and with the pressure from the US and Europe a Russian general has called for Russia to revamp its military doctrine, the military doctrine was last updated back in 2010, to clearly identify the U.S. and NATO allies as Moscow's enemy number one and spell out the conditions under which Russia would launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the 28-member military alliance.

Source: The Moscow Times www.themoscowtimes.com/article/506370.html

Tverskaya Central Moscow May 2014 - Photo By Vladmir Filonov

Russia's military doctrine is a strategy document through which the government interprets military threats and crafts possible responses, is being revised in light of threats connected to the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war and the conflict in Ukraine, the deputy chief of the Kremlin's security council told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

But within the Defense Ministry there are voices calling for different priorities.

"First and foremost, the likely enemy of Russia should be clearly identified in this strategic document, something absent from the 2010 military doctrine. In my view, our primary enemy is the U.S. and the North Atlantic bloc," General Yury Yakubov, a senior Defense Ministry official.

The 2010 doctrine defines NATO expansion as a threat to Russian national security and reaffirms it's right to use nuclear weapons in a defensive posture, but stops far short of declaring NATO as Moscow's primary adversary and laying preemptive nuclear strike scenarios on the table, a posture unmistakably reminiscent of the Cold War.

Yakubov said the information war being waged over the crisis in Ukraine, where the West accuses Russia of arming separatists fighting the government in Kiev, and NATO's announcement that it would establish a permanent military presence in Eastern Europe have validated earlier fears that the alliance's claims of non-aggression toward Russia were insincere.

The general added that special attention should be paid to integrating the functions of the newly created Air and Space Defense Forces with Russia's land, sea and air based nuclear forces. "In addition, it is necessary to hash out the conditions under which Russia could carry out a preemptive strike with the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces," he said.

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India Starts Nuclear Reactor on New 6000 ton Sub

Indias INS Arihant Nuclear Submarine Layout

India now got it's third nuclear weapons leg to stand on.

Today India started the nuclear reactor on the country's first nuclear submarine.
 
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: "It's a big step for the country's defense potential"

With India estimated to have around 100 Nuclear Warheads. So far, the country has only fired them from strategic bombers or in the form of intercontinental missiles. But now India has taken a step towards being able to intervene at sea too.

The "Enemy Butcher" Nuclear Submarine INS Arihant is Indias first nuclear submarine and have now started it's nuclear reactor.
Once INS Arihant is combat ready, India's defense capability increase substantially,

Indias INS Arihant Nuclear Submarine - Photo: Handout

The nuclear reactor still needs to undergo a couple of tests before it's time for the 6,000-ton submarine's maiden voyage. When that is done the crew will go on to test launching K-15 missiles.

Defense analyst Gulshan Luthra: "We need to be one of the regimes that have the technology to stop a nuclear attack. We should get four or five submarines of the same class and two large nuclear-powered aircraft carrier"

The biggest threat to India's security comes from the neighboring country who is also the nuclear nation Pakistan. The countries have on several occasions been fighting with each other, including the disputed Kashmir province in northern India. Neither country has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty which aims to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

Arnie Gundersen - WW3 Radiation Doses - Fukushima Update

Hi folks,

Arnie Gundersen came out with a new video talking about the danger of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 and it's Spent Fuel Pool. I am sure that the most of you have already heard that if / when Unit 4 collapses it will bring on the evacuation of Tokyo and probably all of Japan as we know it. The reason why this is so, is that in the Fuel Pool at Unit 4 the combined amount of old and new Fuel Rods stored there are so great that if the rods hit the ground and they will catch fire, they will spew out more Cesium 137 than all the Atomic Bomb test's that have been done in the entire history of mankind. Try and imagine this, only if we were detonate 800 Nuclear Bombs at Fukushima we would achieve the same level of contamination.

Arnie say something very important in the beginning of this video, he talks about that once the rods catch fire they can't be put out anymore. And no amount of water will extinguish the flame, in fact water would make it worse!! And they will continue to burn. This would become an even bigger ongoing contamination of the entire world, but to make matters even worse it would be impossible to stop.

When I see these things happening to Japan and think about their past I can't shake the feeling how all this have changed their culture. After WW2 with the destruction caused by nuclear weapons on the Japanese people, this was the first use of Atomic Bombs and no one had ever seen anything like it. The destruction, the defeat was so great their culture changed. Their way of thinking and looking at the world changed.

Have you ever seen young boys and girls that are from war zones paint? They don't draw happy images, their imagination most of the time goes to something much more darker than other kids.

This can be clearly seen if you watch some Japanese Movies. Godzilla comes to mind, the big creature that comes up from the sea and destroys everything in it's path. It's very different from Hollywood if you start to think about it. But it all works out in the end.. Somehow.. But this time, I'm not so sure..

OK back to the video. For you that can't watch the video below is the transcription for you to read, I included pictures from the video also. And you can also watch this video on the Fairewinds site along with the transcript.

Transcribed - The Truth and the Future -

Maggie Gundersen: Hello Mr. Hirose and hello people of Kansai. I am Maggie Gundersen. I am the President and the founder of Fairewinds Associates and the founding director of Fairewinds Energy Education non-profit.

I am here today with Arnie Gundersen, my husband, and Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Associates. We are here today to talk to you about the triple meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi. We hope to answer all your questions. I wish we could have joined you in person, but I thank you for watching this video and please send us any follow-up questions. We will be happy to answer them. Now let's bring Arnie into this conversation. Arnie, how dangerous is the situation now at Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4, particularly in Japan with its continuous danger of earthquakes and seismic activity and chance for an additional tsunami.

Arnie Gundersen: Unit 4 has always been my biggest concern. If you watched our website on the very first week of the accident I was saying that if Unit 4 were to catch fire, you would have to evacuate Tokyo. As a matter of fact the book that we wrote talks about that a lot. It is really important and it remains the biggest concern that I have about the Fukushima site. Unit 4 has more fuel in it than any of the other units in the complex, but more importantly it has the most recently used nuclear fuel. And all of that fuel is outside of the containment. So that would make it dangerous enough. Except that also, of course, Unit 4 has had a series of explosions and is weakened structurally. Before it might have withstood a 7.5 earthquake. I believe that the structural damage to Unit 4 is so great that if there is a 7.5 earthquake, it will not withstand it.

Here is what would happen if Unit 4 were to crack and the water were to drain out of the nuclear fuel pool. The fuel is hot enough that it needs to be water-cooled. If air is all there is cooling the fuel, it will burn. It will burn the zircaloy cladding on the fuel, (and) will react with the oxygen to create a fire. And it is a fire that once it starts, cannot be put out by water. Water would make it worse. So the nuclear fuel would have to burn completely before the fire would ever go out.

In the process, all that radiation would go up into the atmosphere and blow all over Japan and all over the world.

There is as much cesium in the fuel pool at Unit 4 as there was in all of the atomic bombs dropped in all of the tests in the 1940's, the 1950's, the 1960's, and into the 1970's. All of the above ground testing has less cesium in it than is in the reactor pool at Fukushima 4 right now. So it is a grave situation. I don't believe that the Japanese Government is moving fast enough. If there is no earthquake, the plan to remove the fuel slowly is going to be adequate. But we cannot wait on Mother Nature. We have to quickly move that fuel out of that pool and onto the ground. The key here is quickly. The Japanese Government finally just this month came up with a plan to build a building around the fuel pool building and begin removing the fuel in 2013 or 2014.

I said that that is what they needed to do on the Fairewinds site in an interview with Chris Martenson a year ago. These things have been evident, but TEPCO is not moving fast enough and the Japanese Government is not pushing TEPCO to move fast enough either. I think the top priority of TEPCO and the top priority of the Japanese Government should be to move the fuel out of that pool just as quickly as possible. And in the meantime, they need to strengthen that pool to make sure that it can withstand an earthquake. Remember, that pool is not in a containment. You can look down in a satellite and see the nuclear fuel. The roof is blown off. And that is what makes it dangerous.

In America, we had the Brookhaven National Laboratory do a study to examine what would happen in a fuel pool fire. Brookhaven National Labs determined that there would be 187,000 people who would develop cancer from a fuel pool fire. It is a serious concern and I do not believe that Tokyo Electric and I do not believe that the Japanese Government is taking it seriously enough. For the last year I have been working with Akio Matsumora and finally it appears that the world community is listening to Akio Matsumora's concerns about the pool. We need to tackle this as a concerned world community and encourage the Japanese Government and encourage Tokyo Electric to solve it quickly.

Maggie Gundersen: Arnie you mentioned cesium in your earlier discussion. Why is it important? What is the health effect of cesium and are there any other radioactive isotopes that would have been released during the triple meltdown?

Arnie Gundersen: Cesium is one of many radioactive isotopes that are created in a nuclear reactor. It has got a 30 year half life which means that it hangs around for 300 years and biologically it mimics potassium. You might remember that if you have a muscle cramp, you eat a banana and it goes to your muscles and relieves the cramp. Well, cesium also goes to your muscles. It is called a muscle seeker. When it goes to your muscles, it can cause cancer, but it can also cause a variety of other illnesses.

The Brookhaven study only looks at cancer. It does not look at all the other things that radioactive cesium can do. In young children with rapidly developing muscles, especially their heart muscle, it can create something called Chernobyl Heart which is damage to the heart muscle, which once it is damaged, never ever recovers for the life of the child. So cesium is just one of many isotopes, but it is relatively easy to measure and also biologically causes almost the most damage of any of the other isotopes that are in that reactor.

Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, you have said that you believe the explosion at Unit 3 was a prompt criticality. What is a prompt criticality and why do you believe that?

Arnie Gundersen: I developed my concern about a prompt criticality because of the nature of the explosion in Unit 3. Unit 1, when it exploded, blew sideways and with relatively low energy. You can measure the rate at which it moves and it moves less than the speed of sound. And that is called a deflagration. It does not do anywhere near as much damage. When I looked at the explosion on Unit 3, however, it was entirely different. You can see it, it is not hard to see. It is called a detonation. The speed at which Unit 3 exploded was faster than the speed of sound. And the important thing is not how Unit 3 exploded. What is the most important thing is that it exploded with a detonation, not a deflagration. The nuclear industry is not paying attention to this now, but it should be, because a nuclear containment can handle the slow moving deflagration, but it cannot handle the fast moving detonation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the international community are absolutely ignoring the fact that a detonation occurred in Unit 3.

Well how did a detonation occur? That was the question I asked myself. I checked with chemists and atmospheric pressure and hydrogen will not create a detonation. Like on Unit 1 it will only create a deflagration. So I needed to figure out how a detonation could occur. But there are a couple of other clues here. One clue is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission way back in March of last year, wrote a report that is on our website, that talks about nuclear fuel being deposited on the site and nuclear fuel being discovered as far away as two kilometers.

How can nuclear fuel get blown out of a nuclear reactor? The fuel that is inside the reactor is also inside the containment and there is no indication of a massive containment failure and a massive reactor failure that could have thrown the nuclear fuel out. So I had to come up with a reason that the nuclear fuel could have been released in pieces, not little fine atoms, but in pieces which is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says was discovered.

The only way that could happen is if the explosion occurred in the fuel pool at Unit 3. Now if you look at the video of Unit 3, the very first frames show the explosion occurring on the side of the building and that is the side of the building that has the nuclear fuel pool. It started on the nuclear fuel pool side and then worked it's way up into the massive cloud that you see. So what could have caused that? That is the question. Hydrogen would have been above the nuclear fuel, it would have been a gas above the nuclear fuel and if it had exploded, it would have pushed the nuclear fuel down.

That is not what happened. Remember, we have fuel fragments found off-site. Something had to lift the nuclear fuel up. The only thing I could determine is that it was a criticality in the fuel pool that caused the fuel to lift up. The division I ran built nuclear fuel racks for boiling water reactors exactly like Fukushima. The dense fuel racks that are now in every reactor everywhere are very close to becoming critical anyway. And in the accident situation where there was seismic event and explosions occurring, it is likely that they were very near to becoming critical. And what that means is that they were very near to becoming a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Way back in college 40 years ago, we watched a movie called the Borax Experiment. You can find it on the web today. The explosion at Borax was a prompt moderated criticality. It looks almost exactly like the explosion in Fukushima unit 3. So an image I had from 40 years ago led me to conclude that the same thing happened in Unit 3. That a criticality occurred in the fuel pool and it pushed some of the nuclear fuel up into pellets and the pellets wound up scattered around the site.

Now, the criticality is called prompt moderated criticality. It is not a bomb. A bomb is a prompt fast criticality. This reaction occurs slower than a bomb, but faster than what occurs inside a nuclear reactor. The Borax experiments were designed to test just how violent that reaction could be. I think if you look at Borax and compare it to Fukushima Unit 3, you will see that there are an awful lot of similarities.

Again this is a theory, but it is the only theory that accounts for the explosion occurring on the side where the fuel pool is, and it is the only theory that creates the uplift force that caused the fuel particles to be thrown about the site and discovered as far as 2 kilometers away.

Well there is one more piece of evidence and that is that the roof over the fuel pool has been totally destroyed whereas the roof over the nuclear reactor and the containment, collapsed downward. We talk about that in a video on the site as well and I think that is another important indication that whatever it was that caused the fuel to lift occurred on the fuel pool side of the building, and not in the middle where the nuclear reactor was.

The videos after the accident and after the explosion show containment leaks as well. You will see in the weeks afterward, steam coming from the center of the building. And I believe that the containment lid lifted on Unit 3 and never went back down straight, so it has lifted and twisted sideways and radioactive gasses are lifting from that containment lid. But there is not enough evidence to say that that is what caused the explosion that we saw during the accident. The jury is still out and will be for 10 years until we get inside the Fukushima reactor to see what the damage is. But right now, I think my theory accounts for the damage, the speed of the shock wave, and also the fact that the contamination has been found as far away as 2 kilometers.

Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, let's talk about the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. There have been a lot of questions about that and a lot of concerns right now. Was there a hydrogen explosion at the Unit 4 spent fuel pool and if there was, what is a hydrogen explosion and why would it have occurred there?

Arnie Gundersen: One of the biggest mysteries at Fukushima is how did Fukushima Unit 4 explode? There are a couple of very, very grainy videos that clearly show it did explode. It was a different type of explosion and perhaps a fire and an explosion that went on for a period of days. So exactly how it did explode is one of the big questions about the Fukushima accident.

There are 3 competing theories. Tokyo Electric says that the radioactive gasses over in Unit 3 went through a pipe that connected Unit 4 and entered Unit 4 causing Unit 4 to explode. So Tokyo Electric's position is that the radioactive hydrogen that was created in Unit 3 went through a pipe, entered Unit 4, and there it exploded. There is one piece of evidence that supports that. There is some contamination in some filters in Unit 4 that would indicate that gasses did come from Unit 3.

So that is a possibility, but I do not think it is accurate because I believe that the containment was so damaged on Unit 3, that there was no pressure to push those gasses into Unit 4. I can't understand how the gasses, what the mode of force was to push those gasses into Unit 4. I think the hydrogen explosion came from something in side Unit 4 itself. There are two possibilities there.

One is by Dr. Gen Saji and it is an excellent analysis. He believes that the hydrogen in the water in the pool that was dissolved because of the radiation in the pool over months and months and months, was enough to cause the building to explode. As the water got hot in the fuel pool, it liberated the hydrogen that was in the water and that hydrogen was enough to cause the explosion.

The second possibility, and this is my theory, early on in the accident, there is some video that is up on our site, that shows that the top of the fuel racks were exposed to air. I am not suggesting that the entire fuel pool ran dry. But the top of the nuclear fuel I believe was exposed to air and I think the photos show that. So if the top of the fuel was exposed to air, it is possible that a reaction could have occurred at the top of the fuel that would have created enough hydrogen to blow the building up.

Dr. Saji and I agree that the hydrogen came from the Unit 4 fuel pool. He believes it was dissolved in the water. I believe it came from the fuel. Only time will tell when we get in to analyze the reaction. But there is an important lesson here that the nuclear industry is not taking into account. And that is the fuel pool temperature. The fuel pool is a large pool and it can boil locally. And that is something the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the international community is not looking at. You can get local boiling in a pool even though the bulk temperature of the pool may be at 80 degrees Celsius. In portions of the pool, it can be boiling. That supports Dr. Saji's comment that as it boiled it would liberate hydrogen, even though the bulk temperature never ever exceeded boiling.

My theory is that I do believe that the entire pool had drained to the point where there was boiling occurring. But the real issue here is that the nuclear industry is not looking at the fact that localized boiling can occur even though the bulk temperature might be less than 100 degrees centigrade.

That is an important distinction moving forward. We have about 23 of these Mark I reactors in the United States and there are another 10 or so around the world. I think that we need to design these pools so that the hydrogen generated by dissociation can be accommodated without exploding the building. No one ever designed for that because no one ever anticipated it happening. But it did happen at Unit 4 and we need to prevent that in the future. Not just on these Mark I reactors but on the 400 reactors that all have fuel pools that are all susceptible to that identical type of failure.

Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, I want to follow up with a few more questions. In your discussion of Unit 4, you have talked about its hydrogen explosion. Is there any chance of a prompt criticality or a hydrogen explosion now at Unit 4? Would anything cause it to release more fuel or more radioactivity?

Arnie Gundersen: The fuel in the fuel pool at Unit 4 has now been cooled for about a year after the accident and it had been removed a couple of months before that. So the fuel is becoming cooler. It still needs to be water-cooled for another 2 years, but it is much cooler than it was at the beginning of the accident. So the chances of hydrogen generation are much, much lower now than when the accident occurred. So I do not believe that we are going to see an explosion in the pool now, no matter what happens.

My biggest concern is that if the pool loses water, then it is an entirely different story. So if there is a large seismic event that causes the building to topple, or the pool to crack and the water to drain out, there is not enough cooling in the air of that fuel, and it will start to burn. Now the consequences of that are depending on which way the wind is blowing, it could mean the evacuation of Tokyo as a worst case. It could also mean cutting Japan in half so that the northern part is separated from the southern part by a band of contamination. So this is a very serious accident waiting to happen and we just all have to pray that an earthquake does not happen before that fuel is removed.

Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, compared to the accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, how dangerous are the radioactive releases from the four reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi?

Arnie Gundersen: Three Mile Island was a level 5 accident and Chernobyl and Fukushima are level 7 accidents. That means roughly that Three Mile Island was a 100 times less than the accident at Chernobyl and the accident at Fukushima. People did die as a result of the accident at Three Mile Island. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says no, no one died, on their web page. But the evidence is clear that there was an increase in cancer. I refer you to Dr. Steve Wing's report that is also on our site that talks about it. And in addition some reports coming out of the University of Pittsburgh indicate just now that we are beginning to see leukemia as a result.

So while Three Mile Island was much less than either Chernobyl or Fukushima, people did die as a result of the radiation released. At Fukushima-Daiichi the evidence tells us that at least three times more radiation in the form of noble gasses were released from Units 1, 2 and 3 than from Chernobyl. We have seen radioactive gas clouds, noble gas clouds to the northwest, that are much worse than we ever anticipated to have been released. So we know that the noble gasses were larger than Chernobyl. Now iodine, which is another gas that is released, and also cesium and other gasses, seem to be roughly on the same level as the releases from Chernobyl.

There are 2 issues here. As terrible as it is, it would have been much worse but for 2 things. The first is that most of the time the wind was blowing out to sea. And of course Chernobyl was surrounded by land, so whatever way the plume meandered after Chernobyl, it contaminated the land. So when we compare Fukushima to Chernobyl, the total releases from Fukushima are likely higher than they were at Chernobyl, but because most of it blew out to sea, that is a good thing for the Japanese people.

The second important thing that happened that was lucky, if we can call it luck in such a severe accident, was that it happened on a Friday and not on a weekend. There were a thousand people at the Daini site and at the Daiichi site, because it was a weekday, who could respond to the accident. If it had happened on a weekend, there would have been a small crew of people there and the accidents at both sites would have been much much worse. Now that has an implication worldwide, because on weekends and in the evenings, we have very small crews at these nuclear reactors. And should there be a major accident, there is no way to respond quickly enough with the small crew of people that are working on the shifts, other than the main shift in the middle of the day.

The international community needs to look at that and it is not a matter of well, we can get people there in a half a day. That is too late. The staff on site has to be larger at the beginning of the accident to mitigate the potential for a serious accident. But yet it all boils down to money. The utilities that run these power plants really do not want a large staff because they have to pay for it. But in fact, it was the large staff at Daiichi and the large staff at Daini that likely saved the world. So the important take-away here is that the releases from Fukushima are as serious if not more so than Chernobyl. And that they would have been much worse if the accident had happened on a weekend.

Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, thank you. How significant is the danger of hot particles and why?

Arnie Gundersen: I am really concerned about the hot particles that were released after the Fukushima accident. Now a hot particle is more than just a single atom. An atom of cesium decays once and it is over, it is no longer radioactive. A hot particle though, contains thousands or hundreds of thousands of atoms of cesium or other radioactive material and they, of course, decay for many, many years and decades.

So if a hot particle is lodged inside you, either in your lung or in your liver or in your gastrointestinal tract, it can cause a constant bombardment of radiation over a long period of time to a very small localized part of your tissue. And that is exactly the conditions that can cause a cancer.

So we have seen in Mr Kaltofen's analysis to the American Public Health Association: he shows what an air filter looked like in a car in Fukushima and what an air filter looked like in a car in Tokyo. Those air filters are no different than our lung, our lung acts as an air filter, and that causes that radiation to get trapped in our lungs or in our livers or elsewhere in our bodies, and will constantly, over decades, cause cellular damage. It is particularly a concern in young children because they have a longer life, and because their cells are rapidly developing. So it is important that we monitor the children at Fukushima and throughout Japan over the next 3 or 4 decades to make sure that they do not develop cancers as a result of the hot particles that were released from Fukushima-Daiichi.

Maggie Gundersen: So Arnie, in closing, what do you want people to remember from your review of the accident at Fukushima-Daiichi?

Arnie Gundersen: About a month before the accident, we were walking and we were talking about an accident and where it might occur. And I said I did not know where it would occur, but I thought it would occur in a boiling water reactor of the Fukushima design, I said a Mark I reactor. And it turned out to be true.

But I think the bigger lesson from Fukushima is that this is a technology that can destroy a nation. After Fukushima I was reading Mikolai Gorbachov's memoirs and he says it was the Chernobyl accident, not Perestroika, that destroyed the Soviet Union. So we had that information for 30 years but yet we really did not realize that it could happen elsewhere. So we know that the accident at Chernobyl was a cause in the factor of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we know that the cost alone from the Fukushima-Daiichi accident will easily go to a half a trillion US dollars over the next 20 years. That is enough to bring Japan to its knees.

Japan is at a tipping point. You have an opportunity here to change the way we use energy. Or Japan can go back and turn on all its nuclear reactors again and continue business as usual and of course risk another accident. So you have a choice, you have the opportunity to change the way you use energy and to change the way you distribute energy. You can create smart grids that share power from the north to the south and from the east to the west, where the frequencies are different. We can distribute our generation, instead of having massive power plants in locations like Fukushima-Daiichi and Fukushima-Danai. We can distribute those power plants throughout Japan, throughout the world, with windmills, with solar power, with conservation and with distributed small sources of generation.

Those are all one way of doing it compared to the other which we are presently using, which is central station power. We needed central station power in the 20th century. Now with computers, we do not need central station power anymore. We can do it another way. And Japan can lead the way if it chooses to. If it leads the way, it will have an export commodity that the rest of the world will want desperately. You have an opportunity here to change your country. And you also have a business opportunity here to sell to the rest of the world a product that we all desperately need.

So the Fukushima-Daiichi accident is the worst industrial accident in history: it is a half a trillion dollars. But it also can be an opportunity for Japan to change the way it does business and to create the economy for the 21st century and beyond with distributed generation and smart grids. I hope you choose that choice. Japan is at a tipping point and it is your choice to make.

Thank you.

China's 3000 Nuclear Warheads - Underground Tunnels

Chinese media had a public discussion of the 2nd artillery’s multiple underground facilities. They said it’s underground bases can withstand multiple nuclear strikes on a single location, and that it would require perhaps thousands nukes to destroy an entire facility. On top of that reports have come out that say that the amount of nuclear warheads China have, far exceeds what they tell the world.

Professor Philip Karber, 65, of Georgetown Univeristy along with his students has conducted a three-year study on China’s Second Artillery Corps. They pointed out in the unpublished informal report that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has dug up to 3,000 miles of underground tunnels, which house nuclear warheads.

The number of nuclear warheads that China has far exceeds what they tell the world. The U.S Department of Defense and this private teatcher-student think tank are very concerned. Experts believe that China’s military expansion is not only about competing with Western democracies on a military basis, the CCP also wants to compete with West on an economic basis, too. On November 29, the Washington Post reported that Kappa and his students translated and studied many writings, including Chinese military secret documents, satellite images, and online resources. They then wrote their conclusions. Kappa believes that China’s Second Artillery Corps has excavated up to 4,828 km (3,000 miles) of underground tunnels, equal to the distance from Boston to San Francisco. 

It’s there that they hide 3,000 nuclear warheads, far more than the 80-400 that they tell the world they have. Although this 363-page informal report has yet to be officially announced, it’s message has reached the Pentagon and U.S. think tanks. The U.S. Congress is expected to invite Kappa to a formal hearing. In August 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense announced China’s military assessment report, citing some of Kappa’s research. Current affairs commentator, Wu Fan, believes that what the CCP has done has caused friction between China and United States, as well as neighboring countries and Western countries.

Wu Fan: “At whom are they pointing 3,000 missiles at? With whom are you getting ready to fight? Who will attack you? If all these missiles are strictly for defense, and you (CCP) won’t fire the first shot, it does not mean the CCP won’t expand outwards, of infringe on other people’s interests.”

Wu Fan pointed out that regarding economic interests, 15% of China’s oil imports come from Iran. The CCP has also made investments in Iran, and provides them with nuclear weapons technology. The two countries continue to trade weapons and technology for oil. According to Chinese Customs data, in the first half of 2011, China’s crude oil imports from Iran increased by 50% over last year, reaching 13.5 million tons.

Wu Fan: “It is good to expose this issue, and let the world know where the CCP’s interest lie.”

On November 8, the United Nations fist openly accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons technology and described the evidence in detail, adding that Iran continues to cover up the development of atomic bombs. Evidence shows that Iran has already exceeded it’s own energy and medical research goals in atomic bomb research. This has made international leaders very worried. However, the CCP has opposed international sanctions against Iran’s nuclear research and development. Jia Shaye, Iran’s armed forces deputy chief of staff has warned Israel that if it attacks Iran, it will be digging it’s own grave. And Iran’s retaliation would not be limited to the Middle East. China refuses to agree to levying sanctions against Iran, which is not a decision based soley on the CCP’s own economic interests, but also because CCP wants to use Iran’s authoritarian regime to compete politically with democratic Western countries.

Shi Mingkai, former chief of the China Branch in the U.S. Department of Defense said, there is no doubt CCP has spent huge amounts of funds digging these tunnels, so we need to pay attention to this and question it. It has been reported that Kappa served in the U.S. Department of Defense during the Cold War. During the Wenchuan earthquake, he learned that numerous radiation experts in China entered the disaster area and noticed a large number of broken concrete pillars sticking out of the top of a collapsed mountain.

He suspected that a local underground nuclear arsenal could have been damaged in the earthquake. It was at that time that Kappa became interested in doing research into the excavation of underground tunnels by the Second Artillery Corps.

Fukushima China Syndrome Reactor Melted Through

There have been a lot of talks these last days about Fukushima and the fact that TEPCO have made analysis of the reactor units confirming that the Nuclear Fuel have melted the pressure vessel and eroding it's way down into the earth. They can't seem to find the Corium (melted nuclear fuel) because they can't get near the reactors because of the radiation.

Experts have also come out to say that the Fukushima Disaster is the worst Nuclear Disaster in the worlds history and that there was an Nuclear Explosion when Reactor Unit 3 went boom. This is because if it would have been an Hydrogen explosion that happened, then there would not have been the black smoke and mushroom cloud seen on video afterwards. I have done some hydrogen explosions in the kitchen and I can tell you they are loud and hurt your ears, but I never encountered black smoke. I'm not joking, however if for some reason there was some evaporation of concrete or other flammable materials along with the explosion I could understand that there would be some smoke.

I remember how much crap was said early on from idiots here and on other sites. Media downplaying the Disaster (well still is actually) and Japanese Government coming out with all sorts of crap. Highly respected medical doctors assuring people that if they smile radiation wont hurt them and go ahead and eat the contaminated food, visit Japan.. If not you are not supporting us. Bla bla.. Everything is under control, nothing to see here, move along.. And most people fell for it, again like they do, walking into a trap, believing everything they hear.

I do see a change though, the "internet experts" are not getting much headway in their attempts to downplay this anymore because they have been proven wrong so many times already. Now they are pretty much laughed at and put to the wall when they come online. And I would like to put a shout out to all my buddies that stood their ground and still do in these "battles". We actually saved lifes, we made people move away from affected areas, gave our oppinions and prevented people from moving to Japan. And much more!! So keep going!! If you that are reading this remember even doing something simple as posting a link, then my hats off to you. It counts and it still does.

Anyhow I would need to summarize the past days, but due to some blogger problems I have not had the time to do regular updates and stay updated with the news these last days for that matter. So I give you Arnie Gundersen. Arnie talks this time about the probable China Syndrome that is going on at Fukushima Daiichi and how it would happen, even giving us a clip from the 1976 blockbuster movie The China Syndrome.

Here is the video and below I have the transcribed text if you want to read what's said.
And this is the link to the Fairewinds website where Arnie gives us regular updates of the Fukushima Disaster situation: https://fairewinds.com/content/fukushima-could-it-have-china-syndrome

Fukushima - Could it Have a China Syndrome? from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Arnie Gundersen: Hi, I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds.

Last week, Tokyo Electric announced that the core inside the nuclear reactor had definitely melted through and had also melted partly through the containment at Fukushima. I wanted to talk about that today because I think that there have been a lot of exaggerations and misunderstandings on the internet about what is actually going on.
So the question I would like to talk about today is, can Fukushima become what is called The China Syndrome? And what exactly does The China Syndrome really mean?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Clip of The China Syndrome begins)

(male actor #1) "I don't know. They might have come close to exposing the core.
(male actor #2) "If that is true, then we came very close to The China Syndrome."
(Jane Fonda's Character) "The what?"
(male actor #2) "If the core is exposed, for whatever reason, the fuel heats beyond core heat tolerance in a matter of minutes. Nothing can stop it and it melts right down through the bottom of the plant, theoretically to China. But of course, as soon as it hits ground water, it blasts into the atmosphere and sends out clouds of radioactivity. The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind is blowing, render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable, not to mention the cancer that would show up later."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arnie Gundersen: The term is really old; it dates back at least until the 60's. And what it means is that the nuclear core melts, and of course it is an American term, so it melted from America toward China through the center of the earth. That is what the term means. It is an over-exaggeration to begin with, but it does mean that the nuclear core leaves the nuclear reactor, leaves the containment, and gets into the earth. That is what a China Syndrome really means. Now I will be using some rather crude demonstration items today. I realize a lot of engineers watch this and just bear with me here. I think these are analogies and they are always a little risky, but I do think they explain what is happening inside Fukushima.

The first phase of the accident was when the nuclear reactor core lost it's cooling. Now you will remember uranium atoms split; 95% of the power comes from uranium atoms splitting. But these pieces that are left over are called fission products, and they retain a lot of heat. When you shut a nuclear reactor down, a process that takes about 2 seconds, 95% of the heat stops immediately, but 5% of the heat cannot be stopped. That, as long as there is extra water flowing, is all you need to keep a nuclear reactor cool. You remember back in April, I did a video where I talked about a nuclear reactor fuel pellet. It was about as big as my pinkie, and the fuel rod is about the diameter of my pinkie, but 12 feet long. In a lot of ways, it is like spaghetti. It is just as flexible as spaghetti, but of course it is 12 feet long. And there are thousands of these nuclear fuel rods inside a nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor is not anything but a glorified pressure cooker. A pressure cooker cooks at 15 pounds. A nuclear reactor cooks at 1,000 pounds. But essentially they are the same thing: they are designed to hold really hot water and not to leak.

Well, the nuclear fuel is placed into the nuclear reactor, and as long as the water is in there, everything is fine. But like when you overcook spaghetti, what happens? It can form a blob on the bottom of your pressure cooker. That is what happened at Fukushima. The decay products created enough heat to boil off all the water, the nuclear fuel collapsed, the pasta broke, and is now a blob at the bottom of the nuclear reactor. That happened in about 6-8 hours on Fukushima I and perhaps as long as 10 hours on Fukushima II & III.

So the first phase of this accident is called a meltdown. That is when the pasta collapses and lays in the bottom of the pressure cooker. That is when the nuclear fuel melts and lays in the bottom of the nuclear reactor. Phase one is a meltdown.

The second step in the process is something called a melt-through. Now we are at a point where we have got a blob of nuclear fuel at the bottom of the nuclear reactor vessel. TEPCO is saying that the nuclear reactor vessel is about 8 inches thick, about 30 centimeters thick, and that is enough to hold the nuclear fuel for quite a long time. I do not think that part of TEPCO's analysis is right. I have talked about it before, but on a boiling water reactor, there are over 60 holes in the bottom of the reactor for the control rods to go in and out. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already identified that it is likely that the nuclear fuel did not have to melt through the 8 inches of steel, but instead could do an end run around that and shoot out holes at the bottom of the reactor.

So almost like soft ice cream falling out of a dispenser, it is like hot nuclear fuel pouring out of these holes on the bottom of the reactor. That phase is called a melt-through. Probably within a day of the beginning of the Fukushima accident, we were in the phase where nuclear fuel was melting through the nuclear pressure vessel.

Now remember the nuclear reaction has stopped. None of this is heat from the chain reaction and all of it is coming from the nuclear daughter products. After about a day, instead of about 5% of the heat coming from the nuclear daughter products, we are down to less than 1% of the nuclear heat. So now we have got a blob that has left the pressure cooker, and is now lying flat on the floor underneath the nuclear reactor.

There are some assumptions here. If there were a crater on the bottom of the nuclear reactor, the blob would have fallen into that crater and the heat would have been concentrated. That would have allowed this nuclear blob to work it's way down into the nuclear containment faster. And again, that is an assumption. No one really knows what is really going on underneath that nuclear reactor. No one can get within 100 feet of the bottom of that nuclear reactor. And it will be 20 or 30 years before we really find out what that area looks like. But the assumption is that the nuclear fuel lying on the floor, has begun to eat away at the containment. So phase 2 is when it ate through the containment.

Phase 3 is the beginning of what would ultimately become a China Syndrome. At the bottom of the nuclear containment is about 3 feet of concrete and about 2 inches of steel. We are quite certain that the nuclear fuel has left the reactor and is lying on the bottom of the containment. The question is how deep into the concrete it has worked it's way and has it broken through the steel? I do not think it has broken through the steel and I think it is perhaps as much as a foot or two into the 3 feet of concrete. But that does not make a China Syndrome. The reason it is not working it's way down any further, is because the radioactive daughter products are no longer generating anywhere near as much heat as they did on the very first day of the accident. In fact, they are probably generating less than a million watts of power right now. Now that is a lot of heat: a million watts is ten thousand 100 watt light bulbs and you can imagine that that would generate a lot of heat. But compared to what was available on the first day, and the second day, and first week, the amount of decay heat is very small.

In addition, right above all this nuclear melted fuel, is an awful lot of water. The water is at less than 100 degrees Centigrade. It is not boiling. And what that means is that there is an enormous ability for that water to suck the heat out of the nuclear core as it lies on the bottom of the containment. I do not believe that the nuclear core can melt down through the containment and into the water table. There have been all sorts of postulations about violent explosions from this. And again, I do not think that can happen because the amount of heat available (now we are almost 9 months after the accident) is not great enough to create what is called a steam explosion.

So the good news is I do not think a China Syndrome can happen. I do not think this core can keep melting into the bottom of the earth. And I do not think there will be a steam explosion either. That is the good news.

Here is the bad news. That nuclear core is in direct contact with tons of water. And that containment, while not leaking down, is leaking out the sides. That contaminated water is going into every other building on site. And there is literally thousands and thousands of tons of water in other buildings. That water contains radioactive cesium, radioactive strontium, and it also contains nuclear fuel. There will be uranium in that water and plutonium in that water as well. We know for sure that that water is leaking into the ground water and into the Pacific Ocean. So while it is important to know that we are not going to release the nuclear core directly into the center of the earth, the problem is not over. And as a matter of fact, the problem will last for tens, perhaps even as long as 30 years because this contaminated water is in the basements of all the buildings on site. And not only does it contain cesium (that hangs around for 300 years), strontium (hangs around for 300 years), but it also contains plutonium and uranium and they have half lives of tens of thousands of years.

So the problem is, what do we do with all that water that is contaminated? It is already leaking into the groundwater. It is already leaking into the ocean. TEPCO is frantically catching it and putting it into tanks. But just today, TEPCO announced that they are running out of tank space on site, and eventually they are going to have to release those tanks into the Pacific Ocean. Now they will try to clean up some of the isotopes like cesium. But they have been unable to capture all the strontium. Strontium is a bone seeker that causes leukemia.

So we are not out of the woods. We are far from out of the woods. It will be 30 years before we capture all that nuclear fuel that is underneath that reactor vessel. And until then, it will be surrounded with water that is leaking into the groundwater.

I will keep you informed as situation develops.
Thank you.

Watch 24 Hours After Hiroshima Documentary

The documentary 24 Hours After Hiroshima premiered August 17, 2010 on the National Geographic Channel. This documentary is very well done and also give us real stories told by living hibakusha (the survivors and witnesses of the horrors to what the bomb did) The three hibakusha share their personal experiences and this is what makes this documentary stand out.

The Hiroshima Bomb was an experimental weapon and it was the first test. Three Japanese cities had been chosen as potential targets for the attack, the primary is the port city of Hiroshima, located on the delta of the Ōta river. A city of considerable military importance, it houses a communications center and an assembly area for troops. But it's far from just a military target, 80% of the people here are civilians. Since the previous March of 1945 almost every major city in Japan had been fire bombed. Yet Hiroshima remains untouched.

Richard Rhodes Author, The Making Of The Atomic Bomb: The people of the city worried about that, were they being chosen for something especially terrible?

As the Enola Gay reaches Japan, Hiroshimas fate is still not final. It all depends on the weather. One of the requirements of the target is that it has to be visible from the air. Weather planes fly ahead to check the conditions over the three selected cities. As it happens it is a clear morning at Hiroshima. The cities fate is now sealed. 13 year old Shigeko Sasamori can feel the sun burning down on her on this hot cloudless morning. She runs to join schoolmates in their assignment to clear the streets for firebreaks in case of an attack.

Shigeko Sasamori: I look up at the sky, I saw the beautiful silver airplane, and the white long tail. And blue sky, it looks beautiful. And at the same time, I saw something drop.

Shigeko is less than a mile from the Enola Gays target, the distinctive T-Shaped Aioi bridge, running across the river in the center of downtown it can be spotted easily. Even at 3200 feet. 90 seconds before it was released the bombardier sets his sights on the target about 2 miles below, and makes careful last minutes maneuvers. Will they hit the target? And will it explode at the preset altitude of 190 feet over the city?

Morris Jeppson Weapons Test Officer, Enola Gay: They are hydraulic actuated doors, big long doors 12-15 feet long. They don't just slowly open they fly open.

Jeppson and fellow crew members had done the math and they expect the bomb to detonate at 42 seconds.

Morris Jeppson Weapons Test Officer, Enola Gay: That 43 seconds I was nervous, I was monitoring the test box, thinking and counting in my head.

The crew of the Enola Gay are not the only ones counting down at 8:15 on August 6, 1945. 8 year old Takashi Tanemori left home at 8 AM  to get to his school. He is looking forward to playing with his friends.

Takashi Tanemori: I was excited this particular morning for "hide and seek" because I was chosen as "it". So I was standing against the window, looking outside.

While Takashi counts, thousands of others are outside on route to work and school. As the lone Enola Gay flies overhead there is little alarm. It looks nothing like the bombing squadron most people fear.

Richard Rhodes: People assumed it was a weather plane and instead of doing what the scientists had assumed would happen which is that they would run into bomb shelters and be safe from the affects from the blast. People came outdoors to look.

Takashi Tanemori: All of a sudden, bang. Flash in the sky, pure white. I saw the bones in my fingers as though I was looking at an X-ray, so intense.

This is the only footage ever taken of this atomic explosion. Scant documentation of an event that changes the course of history. Within moments the mushroom could is ten miles high, it spreads three miles over the city, and it's more than 350.000 inhabitants. On the day of the attack the United States has been in the war for 4 years, and has lost over 100.000 men on the Pacific front alone. Despite loosing over 1 million men the Japanese continue to fight fiercely. Some fear that if the war goes on millions more will be lost on both sides.

Richard Rhodes: They saw the atomic bomb as an potential way of shock them into surrendering.

This radically new bomb reduces the living, breading downtown of Hiroshima to a wasteland. 70000 human beings are dead instantly, another 70000 injured. It's the highest death toll ever caused by a single weapon. Yet Japan continues to fight. 3 days later on August 9th, the United States drops a second atomic bomb, this time on the city of Nagasaki. Another 40000 die. Japan formally surrenders 3 weeks later. The worlds bloodiest war have ended.