hen I was twenty, I visited Hiroshima when I worked in an organic chemistry lab in Japan. Being in Hiroshima gave me a lot of chills — and one of the places I visited was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I felt a lot of the pain and anguish surrounding the nuclear bomb and its legacy.
I didn’t expect to learn that Nagasaki was not the original target for the second nuclear bomb. As a matter of chance, the original target was another city in Japan, known for its military arsenal: Kokura.
Today, people in Japan still refer to “the luck of Kokura” on how the city was spared. So why did the U.S. target Kokura? And why did it bomb Nagasaki instead?
