(6 of 7)
Thus did Nagasaki enter history, an afterthought on the day of its ordeal and ever since a footnote: the second city to be hit by an atomic bomb. Fat Man exploded 1650 ft. above the city of some 240,000 people on the western coast of Kyushu at 11:02 on the morning of Aug. 9. In many ways, the event was a carbon copy of the horrors of Hiroshima: flash, heat, blast, radiation; permanent shadows cast by bombshine; thirsty, mortally burned people, emerging from the smoke and dust, trailing strips of their skin behind them. Some in Nagasaki had been afraid that their city would be attacked by the new weapon. Hideo Matsuno, then 27, a reporter with the government's propaganda arm, had read an Aug. 7 intelligence report about Hiroshima. "We knew about the atomic bomb," he says. Fat Man released the equivalent of 22,000 tons of TNT, almost twice the power set forth by Little Boy. Trees had been knocked over in Hiroshima; in Nagasaki they were snapped in two. But the devastation in Nagasaki was limited, to an extent, by its topography; from the harbor, the city radiated northward in two valleys, separated by steep hills. The bomb exploded over the Urakami valley, Nagasaki's northwesterly fork, and the worst of the damage was contained there. The destruction, nevertheless, was infernal. About 74,000 were killed instantly. The Urakami Catholic church, which had the country's largest Christian congregation at the time, was destroyed; more than two-thirds of the congregation died as a result of the bombing. "It was as if a giant had crushed it," says Takako Yoshida, then 18, who saw one of the church's two mammoth bell towers lying in the river below as she was being carried out on a stretcher three days later.
Japan's Supreme War Council was meeting in a military building on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo at the moment of the Nagasaki bombing. A military aide entered the meeting at 11:30 a.m. with word that Nagasaki had been hit with the same sort of bomb as Hiroshima. This news was bad enough, but it only added to the council's bleak agenda, which was headed by the announcement, received in Tokyo the night before, that the U.S.S.R. had abruptly and unexpectedly declared war on Japan. Already, on the morning of Aug. 9, some of an estimated 1.6 million Soviet troops had attacked Japanese-held Manchuria.
As it had been since May, this six-member Supreme Council remained split down the middle on the questions of whether and how to end the war. One faction of three, headed by Prime Minister Suzuki and joined by Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, favored negotiating for peace on the most favorable terms still remaining; the other, led by War Minister Anami, argued that defeat and death would be more honorable than surrender and occupation and that Japan had no choice but to fight on. The debate continued in a Cabinet meeting that ran more than eight hours. At last, Suzuki told the deadlocked Cabinet that he would convene an Imperial Conference, a meeting at 11 p.m. that brought the Supreme Council before Emperor Hirohito.