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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
'A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when ...'
... when there was a flash of white light in the blue sky above Hiroshima. This was at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945. Then followed a new kind of thunder and a new kind of hellfire. A minute later those who were still alive, those whose flesh was not falling off their bodies, blinked into a changed world, like a traveller waking and finding himself on a different planet. Through the glare of flames and the darkness of smoke, they saw that their city had vanished and been replaced by a blackened desert, empty of everything except fire, charcoal, corpses and the concrete skeletons of buildings. Some of the dead had become small: shrivelled lumps of charred meat sticking to pavements and bridges. Some of the living had become big: swollen red monsters with pits in their faces where their eyes and mouths had been. A man without feet walked on his ankles; a woman without a jaw stood with her tongue hanging out of her head; a naked man sat holding his eyeball in his hand. One of the crew of the bomber, describing what he had seen below, said, 'Did you ever go to the beach and stir up the sand in shallow water and see it all billow up? That's what it looked like to me.' Sixty-six thousand people died instantly, 120 thousand by the end of the year.
I visited Hiroshima last month. I was in Kyoto to attend an energy conference where, somewhat ironically I suppose, I gave a talk on South Africa's new nuclear power reactor, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. (It was well received.) After the conference I took the train to Hiroshima, swishing through the Japanese countryside at...
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