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The cloud still over us all

In 1946 The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to an account of the bombing of Hiroshima. John Hersey’s classic reportage remains brutally relevant, says Eric Schlosser

At 8AM ON AUGUST 6, 1945, AIR raid wardens in Hiroshima gave the “all clear” signal. The three American planes flying above the Japanese city seemed to be on a reconnaissance mission. People emerged from basements, went outside, returned to work. Fifteen minutes later one of those planes, a B29 Superfortress, dropped the first atomic bomb used on a civilian population. The bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”, exploded above Hiroshima with a force equal to 20 million tons of TNT. Temperatures at the point of detonation reached more than 500,000C. Roughly half of the city’s population was killed or seriously wounded

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