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: ud LO14bSI