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Current Events Update

"Nuclear disarmament has gone viral", say Sergio Duarte, UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and Tibor Tóth, Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). Click here for more information.

About this site

In just one second, in early August, 1945, the world was changed forever. Since 1942, a secret U.S. weapons program, called the Manhattan Project, had been at work on two revolutionary bombs of such intense heat and explosive force that they would reduce the two target cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to vast scorched wastelands. But it was their radioactivity, which remained deadly long after the debris settled and the smoke cleared, that changed our world forever.

As citizens gradually recovered, they naturally began thinking of how to avoid such a horrible fate ever happening again, to anyone. This concern fueled personal efforts to record individual testimonies of the bombings, and on a larger public level, a fervent desire to develop means for peace education at home and on a global scale.

It is in the spirit of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we offer this web site as an educational resource for secondary and higher education students, teachers and others with an interest in the historical record of the atomic bombings.

It is our hope that the AtomicBombMuseum.org will serve as a springboard for you to personally discover the lessons of those unique historical events that took place in August of 1945.

“To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future. To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war. To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace. To remember what the people of this city suffered is to renew our faith in man, in his capacity to do what is good, in his freedom to choose what is right, in his determination to turn disaster into a new beginning. In the face of the man-made calamity that ever war is, one must affirm and reaffirm, again and again, that the waging of war is not inevitable or unchangeable. Humanity is not destined to self-destruction.”

Pope John Paul II, excerpt from his speech at Peace Memorial Hall, Hiroshima, 25 February 1981.