Sixty years ago Saturday tens of thousands of Japanese civilians perished within an instant as America concluded more than four years of military participation in World War II. \nBesides modern worries about international nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks using nuclear weapons, a healthy debate has raged throughout the world during the last six decades about whether or not nuclear weapons possess practical wartime applications because they are designed to decimate civilian populations and to scorch the earth free of modern structures. The U.S.S. Indianapolis further propelled Hoosiers knee deep into the atomic bomb discourse at the conclusion of World War II, although the obliteration of two Japanese cities to end the war continues to spark international protest and perpetuate foreign fears of American diplomacy.
ATOMIC FAREWELL\n"Gadget," a plutonium implosion bomb, detonated during the early-morning hours of July 16, 1945, in the middle of the New Mexico desert with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, awaking the globe to the dawn of a nuclear era. Rejoicing in the recent Nazi surrender but still embroiled in bloody conflict with Japan, President Harry Truman ordered the deployment of two American atomic weapons upon Japanese soil to spare the presumed loss of an estimated 250,000 to 1 million American lives needed to conquer Japan's mainland.\n"The longer the war lasts, the greater will be the suffering and hardships which the people of Japan will undergo -- all in vain. Our blows will not cease until the Japanese military and naval forces lay down their arms in unconditional surrender," Truman said in a May 8, 1945, statement. "Just what does the unconditional surrender of the armed forces mean for the Japanese people? It means the end of the war."\nIn preparation for two solo atomic bomb attacks during the first few weeks of Aug. 1945, a handful of Japanese cities were excluded from day and night Allied summertime fire-bombing raids that decimated Japan's home island and killed more than one hundred thousand civilians. Similar to the inevitable decimation of Dresden, Germany, before the Nazi military collapsed, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were left unscathed to better compare and contrast the cityscape before and after the atomic blasts. \n"The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid manifold. And the end is not yet," Truman told the world Aug. 6, 1941, about 16 hours after the U.S. destroyed Hiroshima in a single blast that killed more than 100,000 Japanese civilians. "It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosened against those who brought war to the Far East."\nHiroshima was attacked with the "Little Boy" bomb, which cased a uranium explosion about 2,000 feet off the ground that engulfed most of the city within a two-mile fireball that reached more than 1 million degrees Fahrenheit. Violent shock waves blanketed most of the city infrastructure, radioactive "black rain" trickled upon the survivors and most injured Japanese died within a few days to a few months.\n"There are two narratives: an American narrative of what happened before the bomb was dropped that ends the war and a Japanese narrative of victims that begins when the bomb explodes," said IU History professor Jim Madison, who lived in Hiroshima for one year while he taught at the city's university. "In simple terms, Americans wanted this war to be over as soon as possible -- not the next year, not the next week -- with the fewest possible American casualties. As a result, there was horrendous suffering experienced by the Japanese. The lucky ones in Hiroshima died immediately but many more died horrible deaths."
MAN OVERBOARD\nAcute radiation syndrome symptoms experienced by many Hiroshima survivors included vomiting, diarrhea, reduction in the number of blood cells, bleeding, hair loss, temporary sterility in males and eye lens clouding among others ailments, according to the Atomic-bomb Survivor Research Program. An infected person often died due to bone marrow disorder in one to two months after exposure if the radiation dose was high or due to intestinal disorder in 10 to 20 days after radiation exposure if the dose was extremely high.\n"America spent an immense amount of money to build the atomic bomb. Once you make that investment and have the capability, it's hard not to want to use it," Madison said. "It's like a ball rolling down a hill -- once the test bomb was exploded successfully, it's all the more difficult to stop that ball from rolling down the hill toward Japan."\nNagasaki received an atomic wake-up call in the form of "Fat Man," a plutonium implosion bomb that also detonated about 2,000 feet above the city during the morning of Aug. 9, 1945, with the explosive force of 22,000 tons of TNT that killed an additional 100,000 Japanese civilians. According to a 1950 Japanese National Census, about 280,000 civilians survived of the estimated 600,000 Japanese exposed to Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.\nBetween 150,000 and 220,000 civilians were killed between the two cities and tens of thousands of other Japanese were injured from radiation poisoning and other atomic blast effects. \n"The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war if you realize how many people would have been killed. How many thousands, millions wouldn't be born today because their grandfathers would've been dead? Generations of people wouldn't have been born," said U.S.S. Indianapolis survivor James E. O'Donnell, who was resting in a military hospital at the time of the Hiroshima blast. "If we invaded Japan there would have been thousands of troops there waiting for us with suicide planes and children armed with darts to help repel the Allied invasion ... The U.S.S. Indianapolis played a very important role in ending the war -- we took components of the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima over to Japan ... We didn't know what we were carrying."\nAmerican military forces began collecting near the Japanese mainland for a potential fall invasion because Pres. Truman called for Japan's "unconditional surrender."\nO'Donnell is one of 317 survivors out of more than 900 U.S.S. Indianapolis servicemen who were attacked by a Japanese submarine a few days after delivering the "Little Boy" bomb to Tinian Island. \nHe worked in the ship's underbelly boiler room to help make steam for propulsion. After shipping the bomb components to their destination, the U.S.S. Indianapolis was ordered to Guam and then the Philippines to undergo gunnery practice with the U.S.S. Idaho. The unescorted Hoosier ship never arrived. \n"The captain didn't know what we were doing and we were part of his crew. We were ordered to get there as fast as we could so we did," O'Donnell said. "The only warning alarm that sounded was the explosion back by the ship's number three gun turret. We were asleep on the deck and the deck was full. When I woke up the ship was already on its side. I slid down the bottom into the water and swam a little ways. When I turned around I saw the ship going down. We held onto one another for five days with nothing to eat or drink. If you drifted out into the ocean by yourself the sharks had you"
