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Will Mankind Destroy Itself?Awake!—1980 | June 8
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Eyewitness Account
“Someone shouted, ‘A parachute is coming down!’ I responded by turning in the direction she pointed,” began one woman who was in Hiroshima. She continued: “Just at that moment, the sky I was facing flashed. I do not know how to describe that light. I wondered if a fire had been set in my eyes.
“I don’t remember which came first—the flash of light or the sound of an explosion that roared down to my belly. Anyhow, the next moment I was knocked down flat on the ground.
“Soon I noticed that the air smelled terrible. Then I was shocked by the feeling that the skin of my face had come off. Then, the hands and arms, too. . . . all the skin of my right hand came off and hung down grotesquely. . . . What I saw under the bridge was shocking: Hundreds of people were squirming in the stream. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They looked all alike. Their faces were swollen and gray, their hair was standing up. Holding their hands high, groaning, people were rushing to the river.”
This woman saw the first use in warfare of what newspapers called “the most terrifying engine of destruction ever devised by man”—the atomic bomb.
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Will Mankind Destroy Itself?Awake!—1980 | June 8
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IT WAS clear and sunny over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on that fateful day—August 6, 1945. As the city awakened, no one in his wildest imagination could have foreseen the devastation that broke out at 8:15 that morning.
What happened was described as a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth.”
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