A survivor of the August 1945 atomic bombing of this city has found 14 photos of the bomb and the plane that dropped it at the National Archives in the United States.
The photos include one showing the interior of the bomb, called Little Boy, and others showing the bomb being loaded onto the Enola Gay and the plane taking off, Masaaki Tanabe, a 63-year-old film production company president said Friday.
He found the photos March 30 during a search at the facility in the state of Maryland for materials to use in a film he is making that will depict Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped. He took copies of the photos to Japan.
Officials at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum said the photos were a valuable discovery and added they were the first they had seen of the bomb's interior.
Tanabe said he was upset when he found the photos because his parents and brother were killed shortly after they were taken. The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later. By the end of 1945, around 135,000 people had died in Hiroshima and about 65,000 in Nagasaki as a result of the bombs.