The Shadow Project is a remembrance of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945. These were the first cities where nuclear bombs were used against human beings.
When the survivors of those bombs returned to the city centers, they found the imprints of human beings vaporized by the heat of the blast. We commemorate those deaths with the Shadow Project, so that the world may never suffer that devastation again.
You, your neighbors, and citizens all over the world can help us remember, by drawing chalk silhouettes on the night before August 6, on this sixtieth year since those shadows were first cast. Use the tools here to find a Shadow Project near where you live, or to create a Shadow Project for your city.
By exploring this web site and understanding the effects of nuclear weapons, we hope you will gain the resolve to create a world where such weapons are abolished forever. But we know that chalked shadows alone cannot achieve this, so we also offer a means to control nuclear weapons and to prevent war: SMART Security, that you can advocate in your community and to your local and national political representatives.
SMART Security means following the rule of international law, returning to nuclear treaties that have proven effective in protecting us, addressing the root causes of terrorism around the world, and building real security here at home. SMART Security is a foreign-policy alternative to the war on terrorism. It costs less than our current policy, in lives and in money, and it works.
Use this site to learn how to advocate for a Sensible Multilateral American Response to Terrorism: SMART Security.
Effect of Nuclear Weapons In Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Blast
The temperature at the point of explosion was a million degrees Celsius. Within one second, the fireball reached a diameter of 280 meters. For ten seconds there was blinding light, ten times brighter than the sun. For a three-mile radius, the blast of the heat and the firestorms consumed the buildings and the people completely. Within one minute, half the city had vanished. The soot and smoke from the fireball and explosion rose into the stratosphere, forming a single, mushroom-shaped cloud, several kilometers wide.
Firestorms and Black Rain
Firestorms and whirlwinds raged throughout the city for hours after the blast. Black rain then fell to the north of the city, carrying an intense fallout of radiation. This drained into the streams and into the ocean, killing much of the life there immediately, and changing the genetic makeup of many plants and animals that survived.
This wall shows the radioactive soot and dirt that fell from the sky on that day.
Radiation
The bombs released radiation of various types. Gamma radiation and neutron effect caused acute radiation sickness that killed for months after the blast. First it affected the blood, then the organs that make the blood cells: bone marrow, spleen, and lymph nodes. Severe radiation exposure caused the solid organs and the intestines to die and become necrotic, bringing incredible pain, nausea, vomiting, and death within a few days. In less severe cases the immune system was destroyed, and death occurred from infection.
Because of the intense radiation, many pregnant women had immediate stillborn deliveries. Many of the pregnancies that came to full term produced microcephalic and mentally retarded children.
By December 1945, counting all the deaths from the blast, the fallout, the firestorms, and the radiation, about 140,000 souls in the city of 300,000 had perished.
Increase in Cancers
Ed. Hiroshima International Council for Medical Care of the Radiation-exposed, Bunkodo.
Other material from http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/peacesite/indexE.html and other sources.