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At 11:02 (local time) on August 9, 1945, Nagasaki became the second Japanese city to suffer nuclear attack, after Hiroshima, which had been bombed on August 6. Like the Hiroshima weapon, the Nagasaki bomb was the product of the Manhattan Project; however, in contrast to "Little Boy," the uranium 235 Hiroshima weapon, the fissionable component of "Fat Man," as the Nagasaki bomb was called, was plutonium 239. Like the earlier bomb, it was dropped by parachute so that it would detonate at a preset altitude (1,625 feet) to ensure the maximum destructive effect of the blast (if detonated at ground level, much of the explosive force would be absorbed by the earth). Fat Man weighed almost 9,000 pounds, was 11 feet, 4 inches long, and packed the explosive equivalent of 22 kilotons of TNT.

The B-29 from which Fat Man was dropped, Bock's Car, piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney, had as its first-choice target the city of Kokura, now part of Kitakyushu. Heavy cloud cover prompted diversion to the second-choice target, Nagasaki.

Although Fat Man was more powerful than Little Boy, the topographical situation of Nagasaki, within narrow valleys bordered by mountains, resulted in less destruction. Approximately 2.6 square miles of Nagasaki were razed as compared with 5 square miles of Hiroshima. Nearly 23 percent of the city's 51,000 buildings were destroyed or badly burned; just over 36 percent were left essentially undamaged. Of the 270,000 people in the city that morning (a number that included some 2,500 Korean slave laborers and 350 Allied prisoners of war), at least 73,884 were killed and 74,909 injured. Over the years, many others suffered the long-term effects of exposure to high levels of radiation--although, as at Hiroshima, the very high rates of cancer anticipated did not occur. Within days of the bombing, Japan's emperor Hirohito broadcast his surrender message.

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