Mayor Kazumi Matsui called on leaders to heed the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and warned of the consequences of the global trend towards a military buildup.

Nichols: “The most important military effect was that it required only two atomic bombs to end the war. The Planned invasion of Japan was not necessary."

The first series of thermonuclear tests took place on Nov. 1, 1952, on the small Pacific island of Elugelab at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosion yielded an energy equivalent of 10 megatons of TNT, an amount roughly 1,000 times as large as that released by the Hiroshima bomb.