📸The legacy of Hiroshima; from the ashes of 1945 to the shadow of today’s nuclear threats

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the city of Hiroshima in Japan was devastated by the first atomic bomb that was used as a war weapon.

The bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy," detonated at an altitude of about 1,800 feet (around 550 meters) above the city.

With a yield equivalent to about 12.5 kilotons of TNT, it leveled about 5 square miles from the center of the city to the ground, and caused an estimated 120,000 deaths within the first four days after the explosion. Many were vaporized in the moment, and others later died from burns and complications caused by radioactive radiation.

Three days later, just after 11 a.m. on August 9, the second atomic bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man," detonated over the city of Nagasaki.

Although this bomb was even more powerful than Little Boy, the destruction it caused was less than in Hiroshima. The initial target was the city of Kokura, but the bomb was diverted toward Nagasaki due to dense cloud cover. Even so, more than 2 square miles of the city was pulverized, and about 73,000 people were killed.