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Ghosts of Hiroshima

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Charles Pellegrino
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You could not make these landscapes up and have people believe it. Even as fiction, no one would believe it. That is why, for over sixty years, I kept what I saw to myself… until the day others [who] spoke about it, were called liars, [supposedly] because the atom bombs could not have happened that way. For people underneath an A-bomb to have become shadows on the wall, and charcoals, before they could fall to the ground, no one wanted to believe it. But it happened.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 16 , Issue 21 , November 2018 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2018

References

Notes

1 Koi are colored mutations of the common brown carp – interbred for their colors.

2 The content of human blood is essentially seawater. At only 500 degrees C (as in the marina, AD 79, Pompeii's sister city of Herculaneum), people vaporize, essentially instantly. At this location in Hiroshima, it was closer to 1500 degrees C (15x the boiling point of water). These are temperatures at which the entire water content in one's body flashes to vapor in 1/20th of a second. Death occurs in 1/200th of a second, with no perception, at all, of pain.

3 Crumple zones (originally invented for the Lunar Module) are engineered into cars. They gradually absorb the force, compressing the entire impacting area of a vehicle – or, in this case, a building that serendipitously had crumple zones built into it, facing the blast.