Reaping the Whirlwind: Radio 4FM, Saturday, August 5, 7.50pm-12.00pm. An evening of programmes to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb, beginning with a montage of memories of an event that has become one of the key moments in modern history, including the thoughts of the pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb.
Witness The Shadow of Hiroshima: Channel 4, Sunday, August 6, 9.40pm. Poet Tony Harrison presents a “film poem” based on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The starting point of the poem is the “shadow” burned into the stone in Hiroshima of a man who had been sitting on steps outside a bank on the morning the bomb fell.
The Bomb Hiroshima, The Decision to Drop the Bomb: BBC1, Sunday, August 6, 10.10pm. Was the bomb dropped to bring the war to a swift conclusion? Or was it intended as a warning to the Soviets, blocking Stalin’s planned invasion of the north of Japan? Historians and eye-witnesses debate the decision.
The Bomb Heart of the Matter Special: BBC1, Sunday, August 6, 11.10pm. A programme debating the morality of nuclear war, with the participation of two of the original scientists involved in the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb.
Return to Nagasaki: Channel 4, Tuesday, August 8, 9.00pm. The single atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed 70,000 people, leaving many more burned or poisoned by radiation. Among the survivors were two British prisoners of war who were being held in the city. In this documentary they return to Nagasaki to recall the destruction that they witnessed in the aftermath of the explosion.
