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Hiroshima: Before and After the Atomic Bombing (25 photos)

Later this month, Barack Obama will become the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, Japan, 51 years after the United States dropped the first atomic weapon used in warfare on the city in 1945, killing tens of thousands. President Obama plans to tour the site with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but will reportedly not be offering any apologies or revisiting the decision by the U.S. to drop the bomb. On my last visit to the National Archives, I found a number of pre-war and post-war images of Hiroshima, and have gathered them here, a stark reminder of what happened when a thermonuclear device was detonated over a densely-populated area.