'A Thousand Suns' – Hiroshima: 6 August 1945

NARRATOR: (MUSIC) Only a few hours before it was wiped out, Hiroshima was efficiently preparing for an air-raid. It had had raids before, knew what to do. In surface shelters, the people calmly waited, all unaware that already descending upon them was the atom bomb. When it was all over, four-and-half square miles of Hiroshima was burned and blasted to extinction, the all- shattering devastation in which was born the atomic age. In its birth pangs, 75,000 people were killed, 70,000 injured. The city's three surviving hospitals were swamped by the myriad sufferers, their plight glimpsed in these official Japanese pictures, now shown for the first time. Radiation effects were fantastically imprinted on walls and furniture like frozen shadows: a ladder outlined on a building, the design of her dress left on the body of a woman who would die in a few days anyhow, not from her burns or visible wounds, but from radioactivity, the killer that invisibly turns the blood into lifeless water. In atom war, the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. Everybody living is in the age-group. The unborn in Hiroshima perished in the womb, and if we stand for it, indomitable generals, prime ministers, presidents, commissars deep underground will press their buttons and London, New York or Moscow will be Hiroshima.

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