TOKYO, August 6. /TASS/. Russia has published a unique report, dispatched to Moscow by staff of the Russian embassy in Japan following the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The report was placed on the website of the Russian Historical Society following instructions from the society’s chairman, State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin.
After the atom bombing Hiroshima was a scorched plain with the ruins of 15-20 ferroconcrete buildings left, says the report authored by Soviet embassy staff and TASS correspondent Anatoly Varshavsky, who took the risk of visiting the area of the bombardment in September 1945.
In the early morning of August 6, 1945 the Japanese air defense noticed a small group of US warplanes approaching Hiroshima. The command decided against intercepting the group. US B-29 bomber Enola Gay piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets flew over the city’s center without any problems to drop the four-tonne uranium bomb Little Boy. Its explosion instantly killed an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people. Many of those who survived the attack eventually died an early death from radiation sickness. As at August 6, 2014 the overall number of casualties from the atom bombing reached 292,325.
According to a medical doctor who was among those providing first aid to the victims the effects of the blast reduce the number of leucocytes in blood drastically, in some cases, by a factor of four. "The nose, throat and eyes bleed heavily. Those affected run a temperature of up to 39, 40, 41 degrees Celsius. As a rule such people die in three to four days’ time," the witness said.
"The atom bomb’s blast hit an area with a radius of 6-8 kilometers. Within a distance of 6-7 kilometers from the Hiroshima railway station to the Koi station we saw not a single building unaffected to this or that extent," the report runs.
"Those who had dared drink water or wash themselves in the area of the bomb’s fall on the day of the explosion died instantly," doctors said.
As the head of the Japan section at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s third, Asian department, Aleksandr Ilyshev-Vvedensky, said the report was the first eye-witness account of the horrors of bombardments and of what was rightly called a crime against humanity.
"It had never been published before, wholly or in part. In our opinion it deserves to be published on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atom bombings of Japanese cities," the diplomat said.
For the United States the atom bombing of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki that followed three days later was part and parcel of a systematic policy of terror against the civilian population lying beyond the bounds of morality and international law.