Nagasaki was targeted by the Fat Man atomic bomb before Japan’s 1945 surrender.
The United States dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, three days after Little Boy had been used against Hiroshima. Fat Man was a plutonium implosion-type weapon carried by the B-29 bomber Bockscar. Its intended primary target was Kokura, but cloud cover and smoke led the crew to attack Nagasaki instead.
Nagasaki was an important industrial and military center with shipyards, factories, and other wartime facilities. The city’s mountainous terrain affected the distribution of the blast, but the bombing still caused extensive destruction and mass casualties.
Japan announced its acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on 15 August. The relationship between the bombings, the Soviet declaration of war, and Japan’s surrender remains a major subject of historical study. Fat Man should not be confused with Little Boy, the uranium weapon used at Hiroshima.