Remembering Hiroshima: Of the flash, a fireball and the mushroom cloud

The truth about the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once concealed, is now known to the world. Based on historical records of the Hiroshima bombing and journal entries of people from August 6 to 15, 1945, Masuji Ibuse serialised it in the magazine Shincho in 1965, keeping radiation sickness as one of the main causes of concern throughout the story with two main characters, Shizuma Shigematsu and his wife Shigeko, who fail to find a match for their niece due to health concerns caused by the firestorm-generated soot-filled rain. Yet another poignant account of the physical and psychological impact of nuclear bombs and how they can wreak destruction is American non-fiction writer Susan Southard’s Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic, Oppenheimer, which was released last month in the 78th year of the Hiroshima bombing, drew inspiration from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Fission and the Manhattan Project Books have the power to guide, comfort, and heal as in Australian historian Paul Ham’s Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath.