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August 18 - September 7, 2025
Had Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe been born into the mid-twentieth century, they would never have had to invent horror. For the Japanese and American scientists who first ventured into the still-radioactive hypocenters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki trying to understand what had occurred, the most fearsome deaths were the quickest.
former Pearl Harbor squadron commander Mitsuo Fuchida (saved by a new assignment that had called him away from Hiroshima, hours ahead of the flash)
The rain was black because it had coalesced around the stratospheric soot of Hiroshima and around the fission products of the cloud itself. Even with half-lives that lasted only a few minutes, any mouthfuls of black rain ingested between 8:30 and 8:45 that morning were capable of delivering, during the next seven hours, at least half the DNA-scattering dose necessary to kill.
“Among humankind’s abilities, it is said imagination is the weakest and forgetfulness the strongest. We cannot by any means, however, forget Hiroshima, and we cannot lose the ability to abolish war. Hiroshima is not just a historical fact. It is a warning and a lesson for the future.”
The first soldiers to reach the hypocenter came only an hour ahead of sunrise. The War Ministry had sent them in with stretchers—for what purpose, they could not understand. “There was not a living thing in sight,” one of them would later recall. “It was as if the people who lived in this uncanny city had been reduced to ashes with their houses.”
Whatever happened tomorrow or the day after really had very little to do with American behavior or with Japanese behavior. What it all came down to was that most of human history was fated to be forged by primal instincts, and not by civilized thought. The dawn of atomic death was a distinctly human story,
As exhaustion, thirst—and now hunger—began to compete with the first mild signs of radiation sickness,
Tibbets’s co-pilot came to an altogether different thought, and wrote in his log: “My God, what have we done?”
The night of August 7 came and went, and still no response came from Tokyo.
