On August 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima and dropped the atomic weapon called “Little Boy” onto the city. Little Boy exploded at about 8:15am at an altitude of 2,000 feet, above the building now called the “A-Bomb Dome.”

“A bright light filled the plane,” wrote Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. “We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud…boiling up, mushrooming.” For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis, pounding on Tibbets’s shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal. “My God,” he asked himself, “what have we done?” (special report, “Hiroshima: August 6, 1945”)

Source: A-Bomb WWW Museum

[The atomic bomb] directly killing an estimated 70,000 people. Approximately 69% of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6 percent severely damaged. In the following months, an estimated 60,000 more people died from injuries, and hundreds more from radiation.

After the nuclear attack, Hiroshima was rebuilt and the closest surviving building to the location of the bomb’s detonation was designated the Genbaku Dome (原爆ドーム) or “Atomic Dome”, a part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The city government continues to advocate the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

Source: wikipedia

Check out more New America Media content on atomic bombs:

The Lessons of Hiroshima by Ronald Takaki
NAM articles on "atomic bomb"