bay doors yawned open and the bomb and its parachute plummeied
downward.
The plane turned and sped away at full power.
The
parachute opened, and the bomb drifted slowly down over the bustlin;
city and, at about one quarter of a mile above Iliroshina's
Industrial Promotion Hall, it exploded.
It is in the description of such events that the
linits
of language are approached; even pictures, while more descriptive,
ultimately must fail in conveying
the ultimate ferocity and horror
of an atomic explosion over a populated city.
In millionths of a second, a huge radioactive fireball
existed where there was once blue sky.
In the next instant
some 19,663 buildings within one kilometer of the hypocenter were
destroyed in the gigantic thunderclap.
More than 60,000 people
were immediately burned to death by the thermal wave or crushed
to death by the pressure wave.
trated by powerful
Thousands of others were pene-
neutron and gamma rays.
The expanding fireball
then sped upward toward the heavens from whence it cane, pulling
up behind it the ash and smoke of the incinerated people and
buildings until it finally slowed and peaked at the limits of the
troposphere, nudging the base of the stratosphere.
Thirty thousand
feet below, the city of Hiroshima was the scene of a fiery holocaust:
the buildings
ignited within a mile of the center beran
air rushed in to follow the hot fireball's ascent.
to burn as
“inds of 3% to
40 miles per hour fanned the flames of the already blistered and