Next to the museum is the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, built in 2003.

It portrays scenes of World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the reconstruction of Nagasaki, and present day.

The project was granted funding on December 6, 1941, with American leaders aiming for a new invention that would serve as a wartime weapon.

[7] The decision to drop an atomic bomb on Japan had been made by 1943, and a shortlist of candidate target cities was in place in 1945.

[8] At 11:02 A.M. local time on August 9, 1945, the atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man as its code name by Robert Serber in the United States (after Sydney Greenstreet's character in The Maltese Falcon)[9] was dropped on Nagasaki.

When the bomb was dropped at 11:02 A.M. on August 9, 1945, the 20 neighborhoods within a one-kilometer radius of the hypocenter were completely destroyed by the heat flash and blast winds generated by the explosion.

[12] The residents of Nagasaki consider it their duty to make sure the horrors which they experienced due to the atomic bombing are never repeated.

A clock which stopped at 11:02, the precise time the bomb hit the city, is also on display to demonstrate how so many people were killed in an instant.

Included in this room is a water tank with contorted legs which was located at Keiho Middle School, approximately 800 m away from the hypocenter of the bombing.

[12] The permanent exhibition rooms display large materials exposed to the blast, as well as a replica of a sidewall of the Urakami Cathedral which was hit by the bomb.

[14] After viewing the city scene, museum visitors are invited to think about issues related to war and nuclear non-proliferation.

It is there that the experience of militarism in Japan and the demands of war are juxtaposed with arguments for the end of nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, the museum was considered highly political, as it presented only one side of the story and did not promote the concept of peace.