Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

by Susan Southard

For Japan, the impact of what nonproliferation advocates call “the worst radiological disaster in the United States’ testing history” began on March 14, when a Japanese fishing vessel called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) pulled into its home port at Yaizu, 90 miles south of Tokyo. Two weeks earlier, on the morning of the hydrogen bomb test, the boat had been trawling for tuna about a hundred miles east of Bikini Atoll, outside the authorized exclusion zone. Most of the twenty-three-man crew were on deck and saw the bomb’s flash, followed by a huge explosion. Afraid of what they couldn’t understand, they quickly reeled in their nets to escape the area. Within three hours, a white radioactive powder—what the Japanese later called shi no hai (ashes of death)—began falling from the sky. Within two hours, the white ash covered the boat and the men on board. The deck, they remembered, was covered “thickly enough to show footprints.”