On August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing significant death and destruction in both areas. To this day, the bombings remain history's only acts of nuclear warfare.
Many things are known about the sequence of events leading up to the dropping of the bombs, known as "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," which were loaded onto airplanes on the North Field airbase on Tinian Island, part of the Northern Mariana Islands to the south of Japan.
Until recently, though, few photographs were available documenting the final preparations before the bombings. But newly declassified pictures shed additional light on the hours leading up to the nuclear attacks, showing how and where the bombs were loaded.
These chilling photos show us what it was like to prepare for one of the most important moments in modern history.
(First seen on AlternativeWars.com)
Soldiers check the casings on the "Fat Man" atomic bomb. Multiple test bombs were created on Tinian Island. All were roughly identical to an operational bomb, even though they lacked the necessary equipment to detonate.
On the left, geophysicist and Manhattan Project participant Francis Birch marks the bomb unit that would become "Little Boy" while Norman Ramsey, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, looks on.
A technician applies sealant and putty to the crevices of "Fat Man," a final preparation to make sure the environment inside the bomb would be stable enough to create a full impact once it detonated.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider