Hiroshima (BBC)

Hiroshima is a documentary by BBC that educates people about Hiroshima, how it came to be and what its effects were. I learned a lot of things about Hiroshima that I hadn't known before, and I thought the film was actually really interesting. It had a lot of different interviews with actual survivors of the bombs, which are called hibakushas in Japan, something I learned in this movie.    The bomb took three years to develop and cost 2 billion dollars to make. The first time they ever tested a nuclear bomb, the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project tested it in New Mexico. It was the first atomic bomb ever blasted. The bomb was so explosive that it made the desert glass and destroyed the tower holding it. Originally, the bomb was meant for Nazi Germany. But as time went on, Japan became the target.    So on August 6th, 1945, the allies decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and then three days later, Nagasaki. The bomb was dropped off from the air from a Boeing B-29 named the Enola Gay, named after the mother of the pilot, Paul Tibbets. In the documentary, it was interesting to see what Tibbets said about the bomb. "I was so relieved," he said. "I did my job." The bomb was nicknamed Little Boy. The bomb was dropped 580 feet above air. Another interesting thing I learned was how the bomb worked: at a certain point, a bullet was released in the bomb (made from uranium), setting off a chain of events, undoing solid matter, causing the explosion.   On impact, 60,000 to 80,000 people were killed instantly. The heat was so intense that some people simply vanished, leaving basic outlines of where they were on stone and metal. The first flash was 300 meters wide. Temperatures directly below the bomber were 4,000 degrees Celsius. After the first flash, a second shockwave came that moved faster than the speed of sound that turned windows and walls into shrapnel. The total death count was 135,000, though you can attribute many deaths later on from cancer that was caused by the massive radiation at the area from the infa-red radiation and gamma rays. The fires from the blast lasted three days.    Hiroshima was a really informative movie. It helped me understand better what happened that day, and it was really interesting. Would I watch it again? No. It was really sad. For obvious reasons.