May 11, 2009

Ground Zero

I'd been going back through my old, unfinished drafts here on Macroscope when I came across this old article I'd saved from The Atlantic. It's a letter from a woman who was in Hiroshima on the only day that most of us in the rest of the world know anything about Hiroshima, and how, as Wayne Gale would put it, she lived to tell the tale.

Choice quote:

I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a tenugui (a kind of towel) I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel.


This, my friends, is pure, unadulterated horror.

But worth a read when we consider the modern state of nuclear proliferation.

The Atlantic | August 1980 | 'I Thought My Last Hour Had Come...' | Guillain