Bomb switch tester: We felt Hiroshima 'would save lives’

70 years since the bombing of Hiroshima, 95-year-old US veteran Ben Bederson, who tested atomic bomb switches, says he still feels the bombing was “justified”.

Physics graduate Bederson was 22 when he applied to join the Manhattan Project: the top-secret operation tasked with creating nuclear weapons, based in the New Mexico desert.

In June 1944 he was shipped to the Pacific Island of Tinian, where his job was to test ignition switches for the atomic bomb “Fat Man”, which was later used on Nagasaki.

Despite “certainly” knew the damage the bomb could cause when it was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 June 1945, Bederson believed it was necessary to “end the war”.

“Everybody felt it would save lives,” he said. “It avoided the necessity of having to invade Japan which would have caused thousands of Allied deaths and probably hundreds of thousands of Japanese deaths.”

This clip is originally from 5 live’s coverage of the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, on Thursday 6 August 2015.