Godzilla, the King of Kaiju, died on Monday. The actual monster will likely live on in big screen iterations for generations to come, but we’ve lost Haruo Nakajima, the actor who played the massive dragon who became a symbol for the dawn on the nuclear age in the creature’s very first feature in 1954. It’s a bizarre coincidence that we’re remembering the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs this very week. Here’s the Associated Press with the word about the actor and his definitive take on that most magnificent movie monster…

He stomped over miniature bridges and buildings in a rubber suit and gave the world Godzilla, the fire-breathing, screeching monster that became Japan’s star cultural export and an enduring symbol of the pathos and destruction of the nuclear age.

Haruo Nakajima, who portrayed Godzilla in the original 1954 classic, died Monday of pneumonia, his daughter Sonoe Nakajima told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He was 88.

The film, which went on to become a mega-series and inspired Hollywood spinoffs, struck a chord with postwar Japan, the only nation in the world to suffer atomic bombing, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II.

Vivacious and energetic, Nakajima said he invented the character from scratch, and developed it by going to a zoo to study how elephants and bears moved. He said it was important to show the pathos of the creature, which could only smash everything in its way.

The theme of his Godzilla was grand and complex, he said, addressing universal human problems, as it spoke to a Japan that still remembered wartime suffering.

“If Godzilla can’t walk properly, it’s nothing but a freak show,” Nakajima said in a 2014 interview with the AP at his suburban Tokyo apartment, proudly sitting among sepia-toned photos of him as a young man and Godzilla figures.

“It’s not some cowboy movie,” he said.

Here’s the documentary Godzilla: King of the Monsters…

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On February 5, 1958, the United States military lost an armed hydrogen bomb off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. Why don’t you take a second to read that again — somewhere off the coast of Georgia, there is a massive bomb that’s 500 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Perhaps the most terrifying fact is that it’s only one of a number of nuclear bombs that have been lost by the U.S. since America entered the Atomic Age.

Here’s a chilling documentary about America’s record of lost bombs, focusing on the incident off of Georgia and the loss of the so-called Tybee bomb…

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The passing of August 6th will forever recall the U.S.’s first atomic bombing in Japan at the city of Hiroshima in 1945.

Most Americans are taught that President Harry Truman made a nail-biting decision to drop the bomb in order to avoid a land war in Japan that would result in the death of countless Japanese and American soldiers alike. But is that really the story?

The debunking of this myth is the centerpiece of Oliver Stone’s miniseries, Untold History of the United States. Here, in “Episode 3: The Bomb,” Stone sets the stage for the struggle that ensues in the lead-up to the attack, providing strong evidence that many politicians and military men in positions of command deemed the bomb to be unnecessary. We’re told that Truman was a good man who did the right thing even though it was hard. What if Truman was an opportunist who did the wrong thing, and what if he did it because it was easier than standing up to his colleagues who felt the war simply had to be ended by the bomb in order to send a message to the Soviet Union?

Here is “The Bomb…”

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