bay doors yawned open and the bomb and its parachute plummeted
downward.
The plane turned and sped away at full power.
parachute opened,
city and,
and
The
the bomb drifted slowly down over the bustling
at about one quarter of a mile above liiroshina's
Industrial Promotion Hall, it exploded.
It is in the description of such events that
of
language are approached;
the
limits
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
.ere was once blue sky.
In the next instant
some 19,663 buildings within one kilometer of the hypocenter were
destroyed in the gigantic thunderclap.
“ore than 60,000 people
were immediately burned to death by the thermal wave or crushed
to death by the pressure wave.
Thousands of others were pene-
trated by powerful neutron and gamma rays.
The expanding fireball
then sped upward toward the heavens from whence it came, pulling
up behind it the ash and smoke of the incinerated people and
huildings 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 Iliroshima was the scene of a fiery holocaust:
the buildings ignited within a nile of the center began to burn as
air rushed in to follow the hot fireball's ascent.
Winds of. 39 to
40 miles per hour fanned the flames of the already blistered and
4:
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