Nagasaki - possibly deliberately off-target
Posted: 4th August 2025
Did the Nagasaki bomber ‘miss’ on purpose to save lives? Nagasaki was not the original target, and the bomb fell miles from its heavily populated centre. An investigation throws the official explanation into doubt Few people have heard of Captain Kermit Beahan. Beahan was the bomb-aimer on the B29 that dropped the plutonium bomb, known as Fat Man, on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, an act that ended possibly the cruellest war in history. Except that he didn’t drop Fat Man on Nagasaki: He dropped it to the north, 2.18 miles short of the city –— on tennis courts belonging to the managing director of Mitsubishi, next to what had been the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in Japan, in the hilly suburb of Urakami. Because of Beahan’s “near miss”, much of the blast went over the city or was absorbed by the hills, thereby preventing a much larger loss of life. Indeed, a centre-of-Nagasaki “bulls-eye” would have killed a hundred thousand — but the final count, six months later, was thirty-eight thousand. That is still a horrendously large number of deaths, but the story behind Beahan’s near-miss may be one of the most humane acts in the long history of warfare.