Injuries: Tens of thousands. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in western Japan on Aug 6, 1945 by the US bomber Enola Gay. The group had been hiding for several days. The weapon exploded about 2,000ft above the centre of the city, setting off a surge of heat reaching 7,200F (4,000C) and incinerating both people and buildings. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima wiped out 30 per cent of the city's population and flattened a 4.7 square mile area, leaving another 80,000 residents of the city injured when it exploded with the force of 16 kilotons of TNTA battered religious figure stands witness on a hill above a burn-razed valley at Nagasaki.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito (right), meets General Douglas MacArthur (left) at the US Embassy in Tokyo on September 27, 1945.

'By the time we mark the 80th or 85th anniversary, we need to come up with a new way of expressing (wartime memories).

The bomb flattened buildings within a one mile radius of the blast, more destruction being prevented by the walls of a valley.

Some photos take a few months to finish.For Watanave, Twitter has become a powerful platform to pursue the colourisation project.When he posted a picture of the Hiroshima atomic bomb mushroom cloud that the Al software had colorized as white, a film director suggested that it should be more orange.Watanave checked the testimonies of those who saw the mushroom cloud and also researched the components of the atomic bomb to see if it could actually make an orangish colour.After he confirmed that it could, Watanave added orange to the picture.While the accuracy of the colour is important, Niwata and Watanave said the most vital thing is that the colourised photos match the memories of the photo owners.This photo combination shows digital colourisation process of the above photo, carried out by Anju Niwata and Hidenori Watanave.

After the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, workers on Tinian island labored intensely to put the finishing touches on the Fat Man bomb and prepare it for use. President Harry Truman decided to use nuclear weapons rather than face a costly invasion of mainland Japan that would cost the lives of an estimated cost of 800,000 US servicemen. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an American five-star general and Field Marshal of the Philippine Army. The island was the venue for the first formal surrender of a Japanese Imperial Army garrison and the 24th Infantry Regiment which accepted the surrender remained on Okinawa until 1946 The first of 20 Japanese emerges from an Iwo Jima cave with his hands in the air on April 5, 1945.

'Little Boy,' the first nuclear weapon used in war, was dropped on the city, killing between between 90,000 and 146,000 people in the first of the two atomic attacks which ended World War II Two people walk on a cleared path through the destruction resulting from the August 6 detonation of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima, on September 8, 1945. Their project, 'Rebooting Memories,' features about 350 monochrome images taken before, during and after the war.

To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline?Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual.Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? That's why I feel like now is an opportunity for people to imagine (wartime life) as their own experience,' she said.Watanave hopes that using new technology will help younger Japanese feel more of an attachment to those who lived through the war. 'The power of a colourised photo to reignite lost memories was eye-opening for Anju Niwata, a student who gave Hamai the picture as a present three years ago.Niwata, 18, said she hopes it will bring attention to her project with a Tokyo University professor to painstakingly colourise photos using artificial intelligence Their research seeks to spark lost memories for the rapidly ageing generation who experienced the war. The first of 20 Japanese soldiers emerge from an Iwo Jima cave with their hands in the air on April 5, 1945. Colonel Paul W Tibbets Jr, pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, waves from his cockpit before take-off from Tinian Island in Northern Marianas, August 6, 1945. The pilot of the Enola Gay was Colonel Paul W. Tibbetts, who had served in Europe and North Africa earlier in the war and was assigned to the atomic bomb project in 1944. This was a plutonium implosion device of far greater complexity than the Little Boy bomb used at Hiroshima, which used uranium-235 in a fairly conventional explosive mechanism.

A second bomb, 'Fat Man,' dropped over Nagasaki three days later exploded with the force of 21 kilotons of TNT, killing another 70,000 people and finally prompting Japan's surrender.