IN TOKYO, NEWS OF THE CATASTROPHE in Hiroshima arrived in fits and starts. At 8:30 a.m., fifteen minutes after the explosion, the Kure Navy Yard reported that the neighboring city had been struck by “a new weapon of unprecedented destructiveness.”31 An hour and a half later, an airbase 80 miles outside Hiroshima reported that “a violent, large, special type bomb, giving the appearance of magnesium,” had exploded in a blinding flash, and the blast wave had flattened everything within a 2-mile radius.
