It's 8:14 am on August 6, 1945, and you’re about to live through hell.
But for now, a brilliant, clear day is getting started.
Morning traffic and crowded streetcars go by, and you arrive at work--a large, modern
office building.
Earlier in the morning, there was an air raid alarm, but by now those are so common that
they hardly register as more than routine.
And besides, the all clear has come through.
Only a few planes were spotted, meaning this likely wasn't a bombing run.
There's no real reason to believe that this day would be any worse than the last.
Other Japanese cities, notably Tokyo, have taken serious hits from bombing.
But so far, your city, Hiroshima, has been comparatively fortunate--all but ignored by
the American B-29s.
The total warfare Japan has been waging for over a decade has affected everyone in the
country in some way--when you were younger, you'd served overseas yourself.
Now, all these years later, it's almost surprising that you've been spared the worst tragedies
of the home front.
Most of all, you pray that the war will end before your son is old enough to fight, or
daughter to be widowed.
For now, like the other teenagers, they've been occupied with civilian defense, helping
knock down old buildings to make way for military vehicles in the event of an invasion.
A minute later: 8:15 am.
You step into the lobby of the building.
And then the world changes.
An incredible yellow light like the flash from a camera blazes all around you, and everything
around you becomes an empty white.
You're sent flying, and you feel pieces of debris strike you, followed by the deafening
boom as the sound from the explosion catches up.
You slam against the floor and lose consciousness–probably just for a moment, you're not sure.
You know you need to get up.
Did you break any bones?
No time to consider the situation.
No one else is in the lobby with you, but all of the furniture has been blown to one
side of the room, along with your body.
You push yourself up and step back outside through the door that's now missing all of
its glass.
You check all around yourself, and see what you're up against.
In front of you is a wall of fire, and it seems to be growing.
You turn to run the other way, but now the wind is against you, and the glass shards
and pieces of rubble fly back toward the blaze in the most powerful storm you've ever felt.
You duck back into the doorway and watch as anything that can catch fire, does.
Somehow, you'll have to fight the tremendous windstorm.
As you push forward, you catch glimpses of people who'd been outside during the blast,
some lying dead in the street.
The fingertips are the first part of the body to catch fire.
Among the living, some are horribly burned.
The boiling wind blows strips of clothing off of them, along with strips of skin.
Everyone just wants to get away from the fire.
You feel like you might be getting burned yourself.
There's the river in front of you.
Along with the pack of people pressing against you, you jump into the water.
When you rise above the surface to catch your breath, more debris rains down.
How much time has passed?
Are more bombs falling?
You hear a child yelling, and help her get across to the other side of the river.
There are no more bombs, and although there are fires burning in all directions, the fireball
has stopped expanding, and the air isn't as hot.
You try to help people to their feet.
Some can manage, others can't.
A fire engine arrives, and the men start pulling anyone who can't walk onto the truck.
You help as best you can, and then follow in the direction that the truck heads, along
with a small cohort of other people who've escaped the worst of the blast.
Now, as you trek through piles of bricks, concrete, and metal, making your way back
toward your house, the cloud cover thickens, and heavy drops of rain fall.
They're black, apparently from soot.
Nothing is as important to you as finding out if your family is safe, but neither you
nor the other survivors can ignore the calls for help as you pass block upon block of leveled
buildings amid the smoke and fire.
For hours, as you press northward through the smoke and wreckage, and burning houses,
you hear the cries of people trapped below buildings.
When you can, you free them from the debris.
Others, you're powerless to help.
You pass countless stumbling, crawling, prostrate, or dead.
You bury your guilt, and try not to see the worst.
You press forward in what you're fairly sure is the direction of your neighborhood.
A little girl is wandering, clutching at a wound on her head.
You refuse to pass her by, and for a mile you carry her, until you reach a makeshift
clinic inside a school that, aside from its windows, is largely intact.
Later you'll learn that you were among the closest people to the atomic blast who didn't
die.
The building you were in shielded you from the full force of the blast and heat.
Anyone within a half mile who was exposed to the initial blast of heat didn't merely
burn to death: they were instantly incinerated.
Outside that radius, thousands more burned to death, or died from the flying debris and
falling buildings.
Here in the elementary school, people are already stretched out shoulder-to-shoulder
on the floor.
A few nurses scramble from person to person, cleaning the worst wounds, but apparently
already without enough bandages for everyone.
Some of the charred bodies have clearly already stopped breathing.
All of the emergency planning in the city, setting up emergency aid centers with supplies
in the various sectors of the city, had assumed there would actually be a city left after
an attack.
Most of the adults are stoical in their suffering, but from the cries of children, it's clear
that there's little medicine for the pain.
As you scan the unbelievable ranks of bodies on the mats, desperately hoping not to see
anyone familiar, you see the full extent of their injuries.
Many are so badly burned you can't imagine that they'll survive.
Apparently, people who were wearing dark colored clothing were sometimes burned more than those
wearing white, because of the difference in heat absorption.
With uncontrollable tears of relief, you learn that no one in your own family is among them.
Three miles from miles from the center of the city, your family's wooden house was destroyed,
but hadn't caught fire, at least not yet.
You're frightened when you realize that your wife has been bleeding, cut down her back
and sides by glass shards, but she assures you that the injuries are all on the surface,
and takes you by the hand, to your son and daughter, both of whom are trying to administer
some aid to the wounded.
There's no actual ointment left, and they're making due with cooking oil, which is better
than nothing, albeit disturbing, given what's happened.
They've both suffered bruises and cuts, but their greatest pain was waiting for you to
return.
They'd been certain that since you were in the city center, you must have been killed.
For your part, you're glad you've been able to keep your children healthy as they've grown
up.
Other young people at the clinic have become weak as the rationing has gotten worse, and
you can see that among the injured, malnutrition is going to make their chances of survival
much less likely.
Now that you've found your family, you can go back out and help with the rescue.
You can't see much organized effort beyond the continuing lines of evacuees, but along
with other individuals, you try to move as many of the injured as you can.
Some wounded people are stuck on a sandbar by the river, and you help to lift them to
higher ground before the tide rises.
In one particularly gruesome instance, the body of a victim slips from your hands as
the burned skin of the arm tears loose.
After several more hours, you begin feeling weak, and wander back to the aid station.
By the time you get there, you realize that, broken bones or no, you haven't escaped unharmed.
It can't just be exhaustion catching up with you.
You're lightheaded, and feel weak, like you've come down with the flu.
You sit down on a cot, just to catch your breath.
You feel feverish.
A nurse offers a cup of water, which you gratefully accept.
But as you pour the cool liquid past your lips, you can't swallow it.
Embarrassed, you cough and spit it out.
You feel much worse all of a sudden, and without hesitation begin to vomit on the floor.
Someone puts a wastebasket next to you to catch it.
You weren't the first with this symptom, nor will you be alone as you continue to retch
and suffer diarrhea for days on end.
Aid workers are distributing soft rice biscuits and bowls of rice porridge, but, like you,
many people have little appetite.
As days pass, insects find the necrotic tissue on the survivors.
Horrified family members do their best to clear the wounds of larvae.
You're embarrassed to have your wife and children caring for you.
It's supposed to be the other way around.
After a couple of days of misery, the nausea subsides.
How could it not?
You haven't eaten in days.
It takes courage, but you're able to take tiny sips of water, and then a bite or two
of porridge.
It's rare to get a moment with a doctor, but from what you can overhear, you've been hit
with sickness caused by an invisible kind of force called gamma rays that can fly right
through your body, ripping tissues apart.
As your strength recovers, you again try to make yourself useful aiding in the endless
recovery work.
Often that means helping to carry bodies to the perpetual funeral pyres.
Many of these unfortunates never got to say goodbye to their families, and their loved
ones will never know what became of their remains.
For some victims, the poisoning from radiation was much worse.
By the 24 hour mark, several had become incoherent from damage to the brain.
Others had a racing heart; some soon suffered a heart attack.
Some literally changed color, turning bright red as if sunburned.
Those who, unlike you, never recovered their appetite, were dead in a few days.
But then something especially worrying begins.
Several people who had been up and about are now again lying flat on the cots, and they
don't look good.
Their skin has become mottled with purple blotches as blood vessels break.
Again they feel weak and sick.
The pain already looks like too much to bear, but then it gets worse.
The dying vomit blood, and blood flows from their anus.
Even the eyes begin to bleed.
By now additional medical workers have come from the outskirts and outside the prefecture.
But those who hover over death tend to have shriveled veins, so they can't even receive
morphine.
You hope that you're not due to follow their downward slide.
A doctor examines you, and notices spots on your body that you'd overlooked.
It's happening.
But at least for now you don't feel it, and you're able to carry on a conversation.
The doctor has come from Tokyo.
He must be an expert on this kind of disease, although before the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, there were very few cases--mostly scientists doing research with radium or other
unusual substances.
He confirms that the atomic bomb blast dosed you with harmful radiation.
In that conversation, and many more that would follow over the years, you avidly learn details
about radiation.
The blast did emit gamma rays, and X-rays as well.
They're slightly different, but the main thing to know is that in a high enough strength,
they're both very bad for you, unlike the relatively weak X-rays that doctors use to
take pictures of your bones.
Both X-rays and gamma rays are made of photons, the same kind of wave-particle as regular
beams of light.
But they have a much shorter wavelength, and very different properties from visible light,
as far as people are concerned.
By comparison, some of the people who are recovering from serious burns to the skin
also received a very, very heavy amount of long wavelength, infrared radiation, which
causes matter to heat up--in this case, a great deal.
The temperature of the blast was thousands of degrees--enough to reduce people to dust
in an instant.
Although gamma rays don't cause surface burns, they're an example of what's called ionizing
radiation.
Non-ionizing radiation, like the signals that a radio antenna picks up, doesn't seem to
have much effect of living tissue at everyday doses.
But ionizing radiation is another story.
This class gets its name from its invisible effect, which is to cause an atom to lose
electrons, leaving positively charged ions.
Inside the cells of your body are complex molecules held together by electrons, and
if enough of the molecules are torn apart, the cell dies.
This is especially bad when it happens in bone marrow, which manufactures blood cells
for the body.
A deficiency of red blood cells deprives the body of oxygen.
Low white blood cell count leaves the body vulnerable to infection.
And too few platelets prevents blood from clotting, which causes the characteristic
blotches in addition to other ill effects.
In addition to gamma and X-rays, there are streams of particles called beta rays, which
are loose electrons.
Alpha rays, the charged nuclei of helium atoms, and loose neutrons, fly out of unstable elements
as they decay.
A few pounds of one such element, uranium, was the fuel for the atom bomb at Hiroshima.
Another, plutonium, powered the blast at Nagasaki.
Both elements proved terribly effective at creating a chain reaction.
Moreover, it's not safe to even handle much of these substances for any length of time
without protection.
Marie Curie, who had discovered many of the important properties of radioactivity had
herself later died of radiation poisoning.
So amid the smoke and dust from the nuclear explosion was a mass of radioactive particles
blasted into the air.
Some of that material fell right back down in the black rain.
If you have radioactive material on your skin or clothes you can spread it around.
Worse, if you ingest radioactive dust, it can stay in your system for some time, and
for awhile at least, your body could itself give off radiation.
You think about how you held your wife and children, and now wish you hadn't found them
so quickly.
Because the blast was so far above ground, there wouldn't be a dangerous concentration
at the center--one small comfort in the chaos.
For weeks, you do decline in health.
You're admitted to a real hospital this time.
All your hair falls out, and your skin becomes swollen.
The nausea comes back.
People continue to die.
By September, some of the burn victims are in better shape.
You assume that those with both heavy burns and radiation poisoning are dead by now.
But you do not die.
Over the years, your family builds a new life, utterly thankful that you didn't share the
fate of more than 200,000 in the two devastated cities.
You return to work for some time, and then retire on a pension.
Your son and daughter both marry, and each begins to build their own family.
You learn about a special kind of chemical in the body called DNA, which scientists have
found contains all the blueprints for the cells in your body, and that combines with
the DNA from your spouse to build a new person in a woman's womb.
You also learn that it's damage to DNA that causes cancer, and you know that cancer rates
are especially high for people exposed to radiation.
You're not worried so much for yourself as for your children.
Although they may not have displayed acute radiation sickness, they were certainly exposed
to gamma rays.
And if DNA is damaged, might their children not have inherited the mutated genes?
Certainly, some babies born soon after the bombing had a high rate of birth defects,
like underdeveloped brains.
So far, no one has seen any evidence of genetic damaged passed on to children of hibakusha--atom
bomb survivors--who weren't exposed in utero.
You make sure that your children and theirs get check-ups from the doctor, and the new,
more peaceful Japanese government is keeping tabs on their health, and yours of course.
You can't help but notice that people in your new neighborhood in Tokyo don't want to stand
close to anyone in your family, and although their fears are unfounded, you can understand
their wariness in such strange times.
And you follow the arms race, as nations build nuclear weapons that could somehow inflict
far more damage than the one you experienced.
Years later, you take your grandchildren to see a movie you've heard about.
In this movie, there's a reptile whose body is altered by radiation, turning it into a
monster that destroys the city of Tokyo.
It's a bit of dramatic license, you know, but that's what movies are for.
The kids are old enough that they try not to seem scared, although clearly the fire-breathing
beast makes quite an impression on them.
The allegory in the movie is not lost on you, although you decide not to share it with these
children of a new era.
They're aware of their country's bitter, foolish experience in making war, and the awful toll
that their parents witnessed when men tested the limits of human suffering.
But you hope with all your heart that they will themselves only ever see such horror
in a movie.
This story is a composite sketch based upon the firsthand accounts of survivors of Hiroshima.
Do you know anyone who’s had to deal with heavy radiation, either for work or for a
medical treatment--or through exposure to hazardous material?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video called “What To Do If There’s a Nuclear
Explosion.”
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See you next time!