The History Hour

Nagasaki bomb and Brazil’s biggest bank heist

Published: August 9, 2025

Duration: 50:52

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Simone Turchetti, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, at The University of Manchester in the UK.

It's 80 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender at the end of the Second World War. We hear from a British prisoner of war who was in Nagasaki at the time.

Then, the son of musician Dmitri Shostakovich tells of his famous father’s confrontation with Stalin in the 1930s. <...