August 6, 1945

Seventy years ago today the US Army Air Force B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" dropped, from an altitude so high as to be invisible to those on the ground, an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The detonation of the device meant the death, either instantly or somewhat later, of over 144,000 non-combatants, mostly the elderly and the young. Three days later another fission bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 80,000.