Word: blasted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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People farther away from the source of the thermal wave were destined for longer agonies. The intense heat melted the eyeballs of some who had stared in wonder at the blast; it burned off facial features and seared skin all over the body into peeling, draping strips. The survivors who first emerged out of the roiling inferno that the center of Hiroshima had become walked like automatons, their arms held forward, hands dangling. In shock, they instinctively tried to keep their burned skin from touching anything, including themselves...
...heat from Little Boy singed more than 4 sq mi. of Hiroshima reddish-brown. In the process, it left a bizarre photographic negative of the instant of destruction. Objects, human or inanimate, that came between the blast and other objects cast their shadows as unburned patterns on the protected space: a spiral ladder was imprinted on the surface of a storage plant behind it. Survivors foraging for food in vegetable gardens later that day dug up potatoes and found that they had been baked in the ground...
After the thermal heat came the blast, spreading out from the explosion center at an initial speed of 2 m.p.s. and then subsiding toward the speed of sound. Shock waves were the principal threat of conventional bombs, but Little Boy achieved a new order of destructive power. Unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT, it essentially flattened Hiroshima in one blow: only 6,000 of the city's 76,000 buildings were undamaged; 48,000 of them were entirely destroyed. Practically every window and mirror in the city splintered, hurling shards of glass into the bodies of anyone...
...that morning in Hiroshima. All the usual functions of municipal government simply stopped when the bomb exploded. Hospitals and medical centers, to which the tens of thousands of grievously wounded people swarmed, were part of the general ruin. Of the city's 150 doctors, 65 had died in the blast and most of the rest had been seriously hurt. More than 90% of the nurses were either dead or incapacitated...
...Sunday,Japan will solemnly commemorate the devastation. Hiroshima, then just a medium-sized city in southern Japan, wasdestroyed in seconds in one blinding flash. More than 100,000 people, nearly half of Hiroshima's population, perished immediately. Tens of thousands more died later of injuries sustained in the searing blast. But the real damage, as TIME wrote in 1945, was that this weapon "put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself...