“The city is/was situated in a valley- on one side the mountains, on the other the sea. As you stand in the middle of town, for miles on every side nothing rises above the level of your knees except for the shell of a building or the grotesque skeleton of a tree or perhaps a mound where the rubble has been pushed into a pile.
“We saw a fire station that seemed in relatively good condition. But inside, the two fire trucks were caricatures of twisted metal. Scattered through the ruins are cash registers, typewriters, bicycles, safes, all oxidized beyond recognition by the heat. Many bottles had been partially melted and twisted into fantastic forms.
“A couple of miles from Ground Zero, two trolleys lay on their sides, along with some cars that had been hurled off the street. Small concrete buildings were swollen out of shape–including a church whose walls bulged outwards and whose bell tower formed an S curve. In a residential district, someone’s clothes dangled from a blackened tree branch. By contrast, a nearby shrine appeared untouched by the blast.
“One big building near the center of town once [had] a large dome. The building was a shell, and nothing was left of the dome except the curved metal frames.
“How anybody was left alive, I do not know. But here and there, women and children were sitting on the rubble that was once their homes. We didn’t see many wounded-just a few on crutches or with bandages on their heads. Many people had sores on their faces. We stared at them, and they gazed blankly back at us.”
On that day half a century ago, we felt pity but no remorse. In our view, the atom bomb had saved many thousands of lives–quite possibly including our own.
