The Aftermath

From a distant view, the scene unfolded as nothing more than an enormous mushroom cloud. Close up, only the eyes of those who survived can describe exactly what happened.

People who still stood, not heavily injured, were quite distracted by the beaming light. So distracted, that the US Air Force’s plane, the Enola Gay, after dropping the first atomic bomb, flew by unnoticed.

Hiroshi Sawachika, 28, was an army doctor stationed at headquarters in Ujina, another city of Japan. When the bomb exploded, he was 4.1 km from the hypocenter, the eye of the disaster. When he entered his office, the windows had already been shattered and the frames were blown off. He realized nobody was standing, the doctors were spread out on one side of the floor. He recalled that. “After a while, I realized that my white shirt was red all over. I thought it was funny because I was not injured at all. I looked around and then realized that the girl lying nearby was heavily injured, with lots of broken glass stuck all over her body.”

Sawachika treated thousands of patients that night, but felt miserable for one in particular. A pregnant woman looked at him with pleading eyes, telling the doctor she was going to die, but needed one last favour. “I don't mind if I die. But if the baby is delivered now, it does not have to die with me. Please help my baby live,” she pleaded. There was no delivery room; everything had been swept away like dust. All he could say was that he’d come back later, after treating patients in more immediate need..

Sawachika came back later to check up on the lady. She looked life-less, a view that had come very familiar in the last few hours. The person lying next to her mentioned that she had become silent a while ago. “I still recalled this incident partly because I was not able to fulfill the last wish of this dying young woman.”

The rain had fallen in contact with the mushroom cloud, causing remnants of both, the bomb and radiation to fall all over the land. “When it fell on trees and leaves, it stayed and turned everything black,” described Isao Kita, 33, working for Hiroshima District Weather Bureau, was 3.7 km away from the scene, and he witnessed the repulsive: “The smoke was so thick that it covered the entire town. And it’s not an easy death, it’s a very cruel and very painful way to die,” by radiation, heat and poisoning.

Meanwhile, the spark of the flashing light remained in the eyes and mind of every witness, some even lost their sight as they looked upon it.

“It was so bright, a ten or hundred or thousand times brighter than a camera flash bulb. The flash was piercing my eyes and my mind went blank,” sobbed Ms. Kinue Tomoyasu, 44. She was at home, 5 kilometers from the bombing. She then entered Hiroshima City to search for her daughter, but the little girl was dead.

“It was like a white magnesium flash,” said Ms. Akiko Takakura, 20, who was 300 meters away from the incident. “The whirlpool of fire that was covering the entire street approached us…the rain drops were so big that we even felt the pain when they dropped onto us.”

A catastrophe as inexpressible as this caused many citizens to lose their minds.

Ms. Toshiko Saeki, lost thirteen members of her family in the A-bomb attack. A man who had nothing covering his body passed by her, and not knowing why, she ran back to him asking, “Which part of Hiroshima was attacked?”

He replied, “You’re Toshiko aren’t you? Toshiko! Toshiko!” She couldn’t recognize him at first. “Toshiko! It’s me! You can’t tell?” Then she realized who it was; it was her second eldest brother, and he barely recognizable.

In those mere seconds, approximately 80 000 people, struck by a wave of intense heat, died like flies. Others lay writhing like worms, atrociously burned. Many pulled burning clothes from their flesh as they ran screaming and naked down the streets. Every house close to the heart of the blast disappeared as if swept away by a supernatural power. Streetcars were picked up and hurled yards away, and trains were flung off the rails, like everything was weightless.

No single individual could really claim to be "the inventor" of the bomb, since the possibility sprang naturally from a physical process, and required the efforts of many thousands to create the a-bomb, named Little Boy. Overall, it was a simple mistake. The team of inventors wanted to use it as a clean power source, but the government used it to kill 80% of Hiroshima’s population in less than 3 minutes, to stop the Second World War. It was originally generated to attack Germany, but no matter where it was essentially supposed to be dropped, it caused a lot more damage than what we thought it was capable of.

While human beings master new possibilities in scientific development, moral standards must be carefully recognized to protect the innocent children and families.

A bomb now exits that could potentially end the world, and humanity. Will humans eventually cause their own demise? In the name of what “power”? Is this not an extreme way of ending a war, not to mention that it punishes the innocent – those not involved?