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