The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

The author Susan Southard writes in her book Nagasaki that within a second of the bomb being dropped, the resulting fireball was 750 feet in diameter, and the temperature inside it was 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than at the center of the sun. “Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds; catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings.” And all of it happened in an instant. One Hiroshima survivor, Hiroshi Shibayama, saw the explosion and ran toward the city center where the bomb had gone off. He wrote, “The people were burned so badly that it was hard to distinguish feature from feature, and all were blackened as if covered with soot. Their clothes were in rags. Many were naked. Their hands hung limply in front of them. The skin of their hands and arms dangled from their fingertips. Their faces were not the faces of the living.” The survivors’ accounts leave a modern reader slack jawed.