@itnarchive1955: The only man to fly both Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing missions shares his memories. Today is World Nagasaki Day, the 78th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. It was the second and last nuclear bomb to be used in warfare, the first having been dropped on the city of Hiroshima three days before, on 6 August 1945. On the 40th anniversary, ITN spoke to Jacob Beser, the only man to fly on both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki missions. Beser served as a radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber tasked with dropping the bomb (codenamed 'Little Boy') on Hiroshima, as well as Bockscar, the plane that dropped the bomb ('Fat Man') on Nagasaki. Beser remembered how, on the way back from Nagasaki, he hoped he would never have to fly another mission like it. But he also spoke frankly of his sense of wartime duty. "If there had been two more, I'd have gone. It was my job." Historical, political, and philosophical debates about the reasons behind America's decision to drop a second atomic bomb on Japan, the necessity of doing so, and the long-term implications of the bombing have persisted since the Second World War. Most recently, many of these themes have been explored in Christopher Nolan's biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Allied effort to develop the atomic bomb, known as the Manhattan Project. #WorldNagasakiDay #Nagasaki #AtomBomb #Japan #SecondWorldWar #WorldWarTwo #WW2 #WWII #NuclearBomb #Hiroshima #Oppenheimer #JRobertOppenheimer #USA #FatMan #LittleBoy #EnolaGay #Bockscar

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Wednesday 09 August 2023 11:38:12 GMT