Those who’ve followed the history of World War II would probably know that after Hiroshima, the second city that had initially been marked out for nuclear devastation was not Nagasaki but the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto.
In their search for the ideal target, military planners had mapped out the city, at the time home to more than a million people and a major industrial centre. According to a BBC report in 2015, they determined that Kyoto’s people were “more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget”.
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