Word: bomb
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Here are four views of what occurred on and after Aug. 6, 1945. Not four sides of an argument, but four perspectives on a reality. The first view is that of a survivor of the bombing who is now the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. What he saw was the suffering of people and the destruction of a city. The second view is that of a physicist who witnessed the first successful nuclear chain-reaction experiment in Chicago in 1942, worked on the Bomb at the Los Alamos laboratory and flew in the yield-measuring instrument plane beside...
...third view is that of a U.S. President, one of eight Americans in history to have the power to wield nuclear weapons. What he saw after Hiroshima was a revolution in world politics and in the nature of the presidency. The fourth is a view of how the Bomb affected American thought and culture. What the people saw after Hiroshima was a fearful vision of the future...
...sometimes clash with one another, there are doubts and contradictions within each of them. Yet individual views are all that is left of this singular event, since the rubble of Hiroshima has long been bulldozed away, the dead cremated, the air blown clean. Today on streets over which the Bomb's cloud rose like a red-purple flower are coffeehouses where Mozart is played, gilded hotels with blazing chandeliers, COKE IS IT signs and the headquarters of the Mazda corporation. Everything faces forward, except that the name of the city can never be mentioned without invoking a past to which...
When Yoshitaka Kawamoto came to, the classroom was very dark, and he was lying under the debris of the crushed school building. In those days most Japanese buildings were made of wood; when the Bomb dropped, all but one or two of the structures that stood near the hypo-center of the explosion were flattened like paper hats. Kawamoto's school, the Hiroshima Prefectural First Middle School, stood only 800 meters, a mere half-mile, from the hypocenter. Two-thirds of his classmates were killed instantly where they sat at their desks. Some who survived were weeping and calling...
...area's most recognizable structure is what is now called the Atomic Bomb Dome, originally Hiroshima Prefecture's Industrial Promotion Hall, a sort of chamber of commerce building and exhibition hall in 1945. The remains stand just outside the point of the park, across the Aioi Bridge. This shell is Hiroshima's Eiffel Tower, its Statue of Liberty. Where the dome rose, only the supporting beams remain, a giant hairnet capping four floors of vacant gray walls, much of their outer skin peeled away, exposing patches of brick. The interior floors are also gone, making the entire structure an accidental...