Hiroshima and Nagasaki Trivia
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99 free Hiroshima and Nagasaki trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Hiroshima and Nagasaki trivia quiz covers the atomic bombings of 6 and 9 August 1945, the only uses of nuclear weapons in war. The early questions deal with the Manhattan Project, the two bomb designs, the 509th Composite Group and its Silverplate B-29s on Tinian, the Target Committee, why Kyoto was spared, the Trinity test, the Potsdam Declaration and the orders issued on 25 July. The middle section follows the missions: the Enola Gay named for a pilot's mother, the bomb armed in flight, the aiming point at the Aioi Bridge, the 44-second fall, the yield in kilotons, the troops on the castle parade ground, then Bockscar's faulty fuel pump, the clouds over Kokura, the break in the sky above the Urakami Valley, the letter dropped to a Japanese physicist and the unannounced landing on Okinawa. The last questions cover the aftermath: the death tolls, the Emperor's broadcast, the surrender, the hibakusha and the man who survived both bombs, Sadako Sasaki and her cranes, the Genbaku Dome's World Heritage listing, and where the two aircraft are displayed today. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the bombings, the bombs, the aircraft, the memorials and the survivors.
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Q 01Which city did B-29s firebomb on 9–10 March 1945, burning out sixteen square miles overnight?
Tokyo
Tokyo: General Curtis LeMay sent the bombers in low at night with incendiaries because so much of Japan's war production was scattered through small workshops and homes. The raid left a million people homeless.
Q 02What was the code name of the gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima?
Little Boy
Little Boy's gun design, which fired one piece of its nuclear fuel into another, was thought so sure to work that it was never fully tested before it was dropped on Hiroshima.
Q 03Announcing Hiroshima, Truman said the US had spent how much on 'the greatest scientific gamble in history'?
$2 billion
$2 billion, Truman said, 'and won'. He added that few of the workers knew what they had been producing: they saw great quantities of material going into the plants and nothing coming out.
Q 04Which US Army Air Forces unit under Colonel Paul Tibbets was created to deliver the bombs?
The 509th Composite Group
The 509th Composite Group was 'composite' because it had its own transports and support units, which kept outsiders away from its secret. Most of its own airmen were never told what they were training to drop.
Q 05From which island in the Marianas did the atomic missions take off?
Tinian
Tinian had been turned by Navy Seabees into the biggest air base in the world within months of its capture. Each atomic bomb was loaded from a pit, with the B-29 manoeuvred over the top of it.
Q 06Which city did Secretary of War Henry Stimson remove from the target list for its cultural significance?
Kyoto
Kyoto stayed off the list because Stimson, who had visited it in the 1920s, took his fight with General Groves to Truman, who backed him. The tale that he honeymooned there is probably a myth.
Q 07At which Allied conference did Truman tell Stalin of 'a new weapon of unusual destructive force'?
Potsdam
Potsdam: Stalin showed little interest, saying only that he hoped it would be put to good use against the Japanese. He could afford to stay calm, because his spies had told him about the bomb project long before.
Q 08Which test on 16 July 1945 proved the implosion bomb design in the New Mexico desert?
Trinity
Trinity was held up by rain, and while the scientists waited Enrico Fermi offered bets on whether the blast would set the atmosphere alight and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico or the whole world.
Q 09What is the literal meaning of 'mokusatsu', Prime Minister Suzuki's reply to the Allied ultimatum of July 1945?
Kill by silence
Kill by silence is the literal sense of its two characters. In use the word runs from 'ignore' to 'treat with silent contempt', and the Allies took Suzuki's remark as a rejection.
Q 10Leo Szilard helped draft a 1939 letter warning Roosevelt of a German atomic bomb; which famous physicist signed it?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein signed it, yet he played no part in building the bomb: the Army denied him a security clearance in 1940 because of his pacifism. He later said he regretted signing.
Q 11The B-29 Enola Gay was named after whom?
The pilot's mother
The pilot's mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, got her name on the bomber only hours before the mission: her son Paul took the plane over and had a maintenance man paint it beneath his window.
Q 12Why did William Parsons arm the Hiroshima bomb in mid-air?
Fear of an accidental detonation on takeoff
Fear of an accidental detonation on takeoff was well founded: Parsons had watched heavily loaded B-29s crash and burn on the runway. So he and an assistant finished assembling the bomb in the bomb bay once the plane was in the air.
Q 13Survivors called the Hiroshima bomb 'pikadon' after which two sensations?
Q 21Which aircraft dropped the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki?
Bockscar
Bockscar puns on the name of its usual commander, Frederick Bock, who was not aboard. Charles Sweeney's crew borrowed the bomber because their own was still fitted with scientific instruments from the Hiroshima mission.
Q 22Which city was the primary target on 9 August, escaping when it was obscured by cloud and smoke?
Kokura
Kokura lay under haze and smoke drifting from a fire raid on neighbouring Yahata the day before. The bomber made three runs over the city without once sighting its aiming point, then turned away.
Q 23Why did the Nagasaki bomber's crew fear having to ditch in the sea?
It was nearly out of fuel
Flash and boom
Flash and boom: 'pika' is the flash and 'don' the blast that followed. Sunao Tsuboi, who survived as a student and became a teacher, earned the nickname 'Mr. Pikadon' by telling his classes about the bombing.
Q 14What landmark was the aiming point for the Hiroshima bomb?
The Aioi Bridge
The Aioi Bridge, an unusual T-shaped crossing where two rivers meet, was the mark the bombardier lined up on. The bomb drifted wide of it and burst in the air above a surgical hospital instead.
Q 15The Hiroshima bomb equalled about four times the tonnage dropped on which German city in February 1945?
Dresden
Dresden's centre was burned out by Allied air raids. One atomic bomb matched their whole bomb load roughly four times over in an instant, though less than two percent of its nuclear fuel actually fissioned.
Q 16Who became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama laid a wreath in the Peace Park in 2016 and embraced an elderly survivor. As expected, he offered no apology for the bombing, which he described as the morning 'death fell from the sky'.
Q 17How soon after the atomic bomb were some of Hiroshima's streetcars running again?
Three days
Three days: the streetcars restarted on 9 August, even though the tram company had lost 185 employees and seen 108 of its 123 cars wrecked or damaged.
Q 18The Hiroshima Carp, founded four years after the bombing and rescued by fans' donations, play which sport?
Baseball
Baseball: when the cash-strapped Carp faced being disbanded or merged in 1951, people in the recovering city dropped money into donation barrels to keep their team alive.
Q 19Airmen of which nationality, held prisoner near the hypocenter, were among those killed by the Hiroshima bomb?
American
American airmen held at a military police headquarters died with the city. A Hiroshima survivor, Shigeaki Mori, later spent decades tracing their families and getting their deaths officially recognised.
Q 20Why did Hiroshima make the oleander its official flower?
It was among the first to bloom
It was among the first to bloom: it had been feared that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for decades, so the sight of oleanders in flower gave the survivors heart.
It was nearly out of fuel: a failed transfer pump had trapped 640 gallons in a reserve tank, and long waits at the rendezvous and over the first target burned much of the rest. One engine died of fuel starvation as it landed.
Q 24Why was the Nagasaki raid moved from 11 to 9 August?
To avoid five days of forecast bad weather
To avoid five days of forecast bad weather, the crews on the island had the bomb ready two days early. Nobody in Washington had to approve: the July order already allowed further bombs as soon as they were ready.
Q 25Which element, bred in nuclear reactors, formed the core of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki?
Plutonium
Plutonium made in reactors could not be used in the simple gun-type design, so the scientists had to invent the far trickier implosion bomb to make it work.
Q 26Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist was born in Nagasaki nine years after the atomic bomb fell?
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro left Nagasaki for England at five, yet when he began writing fiction he found himself drawn back to the city of his birth. His first novel is set there in the years of recovery after the bomb.
Q 27Fat Man was more powerful, yet which feature of Nagasaki kept its damage below Hiroshima's?
Its hills
Its hills walled in the blast. The bomb burst over an industrial valley north of the downtown it was meant for, and the ridges between shielded much of the rest of Nagasaki.
Q 28Which manga series follows a boy through the Hiroshima bombing, as its author Keiji Nakazawa lived it at six?
Barefoot Gen
Barefoot Gen came from anger: Nakazawa avoided the subject for years, until his mother's cremation in 1966 left only ash and almost no bones. He resolved then to put the bombing into his manga.
Q 29Where did the Nagasaki bomber make an emergency landing after the mission?
Okinawa
Okinawa had been fully in Allied hands for only a few weeks, and nobody there knew the bomber was coming. With the control tower silent, the crew fired flares to clear a way through the traffic.
Q 30Which organisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize?
Nihon Hidankyo
Nihon Hidankyo was formed in 1956, after a decade in which the survivors' suffering was largely hidden. The Nobel committee credited their testimony with helping to make any use of nuclear weapons a taboo.