The Clouds of Hiroshima
a day ago
- #Hiroshima
- #Historical Analysis
- #Atomic Bomb Photography
- The iconic mushroom cloud over Hiroshima is primarily known through photographs taken from planes, with the most famous one being a cropped snapshot by tail gunner Bob Caron.
- Other aerial photographs include a wider shot by Caron that better conveys scale, reconnaissance images of pyrocumulus smoke clouds hours after the bombing, and 16mm film footage by physicist Harold Agnew.
- Japanese ground-level photographs, such as those by Mitsuo Matsushige taken minutes after detonation, provide a striking sense of immediacy and scale, showing the cloud's immense size from a human perspective.
- Several photographs, including one from Honkawa Elementary School and another by Seizo Yamada, offer unique angles, though some timings and identifications remain debated or unclear.
- The exact height of the Hiroshima mushroom and smoke clouds is hard to determine, but they were vastly taller than modern skyscrapers, exceeding the One World Trade Center by over ten times.