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"A blinding flash of light followed by a cloud of complete darkness. A city in shambles. A face peeks out from beneath heavy wooden beams, eyes dart left and right, trapped as fires begin to consume everything. These memories of the atomic bomb decimating Hiroshima haunt Takashi Teramoto. Sixty-five years later, he recounts the story to about 40 Mill Pond students and their parents during a live video conference organized by sixth-grade teacher, Rebecca Kline and the Executive Director of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, Steve Leeper. While it was early in the morning in Hiroshima when the live video conference took place, it was 7:30 p.m. for the audience in the Mill Pond auditorium. The live image of Teramoto, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and his interpreter, Elizabeth Baldwin, were projected on a large screen while pictures were displayed in am accompanying slideshow. This video conference was organized as part of a campaign by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation to abolish all nuclear weapons in the world. Leeper explained that they are not doing this campaign to attack America or complain about what happened. Their concern is preventing mass destruction by nuclear weapons from ever happening again. "

I got back last Saturday evening after my short, but hectic trip to Japan, which is now starting its winter season. It's so cold in certain places that going outdoors is no longer funny. It's always good to be back. As always, whenever I return from a foreign trip I must say my piece, that the reason why I hate going on trips abroad is due to the reality that I must return home. While there's nothing that can beat "Home Sweet Home" the nagging question always ringing on my head is, "Why can't we make things the way they do in countries like Japan?" I was in the City of Hiroshima the whole day of Friday, taking the "Nozomi" Shinkansen from Tokyo to Hiroshima (that's the distance from Manila to Cagayan de Oro) in just 4 hours. All we wanted to do is visit the ruins of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbacku Dome) and museum. We also had 4 hours to do this, so we could rush back to Tokyo by 10:00pm on the same day.

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb fueled by enriched uranium on the city of Hiroshima. 70,000 people died instantly. Another 70,000 died by the end of 1945 as a result of exposure to radiation and other related injuries. Scores of thousands would continue to die from the effects of the bomb over subsequent decades. Despite the fact that the U.S. is the only nation to have used atomic weapons against another nation, Americans have had little access to the visual record of those attacks. For decades the U.S. suppressed images of the bomb's effects on the residents of Hiroshima, and as recently as 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing, the Smithsonian Institution cancelled its exhibition that would have revealed those effects and settled for the presentation of a single exhibit: the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

I once shared an office for a time with a Japanese scientist from Hiroshima. It was a strange setting for such an association: we were working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where the atomic bomb that obliterated my colleague's city -- 63 years ago today -- was fashioned.

In 1946, just after the first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, "The New Yorker" magazine's Aug. 31 issue published the complete text of John Hersey's portrait of the atom bomb and its effects on the Japanese city. At the end of the war, in 1945, Hersey was in Japan writing about the reconstruction of the devastated country when he happened across an account written by a Jesuit priest who had survived the Hiroshima destruction. It was he who introduced the reporter to other survivors. From these, Hersey chose six individuals: two doctors, a minister, a widowed seamstress, a young woman who worked in a factory, and the priest himself. These became the principal characters in an account that melded nonfiction reportage with the stylistic devices of the novel, all expressed through the plainest of styles.

Victims killed by the atomic bombs which exploded in Japan more than 60 years ago have been remembered at a ceremony in Leeds. More than 200,000 people died in the US attacks, which took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, 1945. A wreath was laid at the city's Park Square followed a by a two-minute silence to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the bombings. The Lord Mayor of Leeds, Judith Elliott, is leading the service.

Victims killed by the atomic bombs which exploded in Japan more than 60 years ago have been remembered at a ceremony in Leeds. More than 200,000 people died in the US attacks, which took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, 1945. A wreath was laid at the city's Park Square followed a by a two-minute silence to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the bombings. The Lord Mayor of Leeds, Judith Elliott, is leading the service.

Victims killed by the atomic bombs which exploded in Japan more than 60 years ago have been remembered at a ceremony in Leeds. More than 200,000 people died in the US attacks, which took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, 1945. A wreath was laid at the city's Park Square followed a by a two-minute silence to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the bombings. The Lord Mayor of Leeds, Judith Elliott, is leading the service.

August 6 and 9 mark the anniversaries of the atomic bombs launched on the two Japanese cities. It marked the beginning of the era of nuclear terror. The testimonies of Jesuit Fr Arrupe, in Hiroshima at the time, and a Catholic doctor from Nagasaki. In 1945 political designs prevailed over the scientists and humanists who refused the use of atomic power. And now? Tokyo (AsiaNews) - Every year in the early morning hours of 6 August in Hiroshima in Peace Memorial Park (Peace Memorial Park) thousands of Japanese citizens and a few hundreds of tourists sit in meditation in front of the cenotaph to remember the victims of the first atomic explosion. At 8:15 the rhythmic sound of a gong calls the assembly to silent prayer.

The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man.

Sixty-three years ago this month, the United States was the first (and last, so far) nation to use nuclear weapons in war, detonating two warheads in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Tens of thousands were killed instantly, and by the end of 1945 another 200,000 had died from radiation-related ailments. This somber anniversary provides an opportunity to assess the range of nuclear threats bedeviling international relations and threatening the future, and a chance to recommit to the work of nuclear disarmament.

Radiation from the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, likely rearranged chromosomes in some survivors who later developed papillary thyroid cancer as adults, according to Japanese researchers. Newswise - Radiation from the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, likely rearranged chromosomes in some survivors who later developed papillary thyroid cancer as adults, according to Japanese researchers. In the September 1, 2008, issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the scientists report that subjects who lived close to the blast sites, were comparably young at the time, and developed the cancer quickly once they reached adulthood, were likely to have a chromosomal rearrangement known as RET/PTC that is not very frequent in adults who develop the disease.

The profound shock felt in Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August rippled outward to the rest of the world, less destructive but hardly less psychologically powerful for its distance from its source. Two days after the bombing, an editorial writer for the Australian Courier-Mail was dumbstruck:

When the Israeli ambassador to Japan attended the peace memorial ceremony in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, the United States, Britain and France became the only nuclear powers never to have participated in the annual event marking the atomic bombing of the city. The city of Hiroshima has issued invitations to the peace ceremony to the world's nuclear powers every year since 1998. In the first year, India and Pakistan sent their ambassadors to the ceremony, followed by the Russian ambassador in 2000 and a Chinese consul in 2008. However, the U.S., France and Britain have never dispatched a representative to the solemn occasion.

This article appeared in the November 29, 1952 edition of The Nation. Now that the US has exploded its first hydrogen bomb, a negotiated peace with the Soviet Union is more important than ever. Hiroshima, a month after the first atomic bomb was dropped by the US to hasten Japan's surrender. AP Images
AP Images Hiroshima, a month after the first atomic bomb was dropped by the US to hasten Japan's surrender. The announcement that the atomic age has now given birth to the H-bomb, said to be a thousand times more destructive than the 1945 A-bomb, must be considered in the light of several major realizations. On October 26, 1952, John Foster Dulles, President-elect Eisenhower's new Secretary of State, and Dr. Arthur H. Compton, in interviews with Richard G. Baumhoff of the St. Louis Port-Dispatch, agreed that it is now too late to outlaw or abandon the use of atomic weapons.

"While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked-or mourned, if you will-this Friday, July 16. Entire books have been written about the test, so I'll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there's much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It's related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era. In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren't sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, "The Father of the Bomb," worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain."

"While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked -- or mourned, if you will -- tomorrow, July 16. Entire books have been written about the test, so I'll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there's much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It's related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era."

For more than 25 years a ship known as the peace boat has sailed around the world, promoting the cause of nuclear disarmament. Today it docked in Sydney, with some special passengers on board - survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of the Second World War. Transcript SCOTT BEVAN, PRESENTER: Well, for more than 25 years a ship known as the the Peace Boat has sailed around the world promoting the cause of nuclear disarmament. Today the Peace Boat docked in Sydney with some special passengers on board, survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of the Second World War. Ross Bray examines the peace message and continuing controversy over the dropping of the atomic bombs.

In a unique move to propagate the message of nuclear weapon free world, 102 Hiroshima-Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors have reached Kochi. With India making the right moves to strike the nuke deal, the Japanese Hibakushas or the atomic attack survivors are worried about the safety of the world.

Shigeko Sasamori was 13 years old when America dropped "Little Boy" on her hometown of Hiroshima. "My face was an all black ball, like a basketball," she said, adding that she could not open her eyes or walk.

WHEN the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 63 years ago today, it paved the way for a cancer time bomb inside Toowoomba man John Collins. Mr Collins served in the Australian Army as part of the clean-up crew at Hiroshima 23 months after the infamous bomb wiped out the city.

Sixty-three years ago this week war became obsolete in man's quest to resolve conflict. On August 6, 1945 and three days later August 9, 1945 the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan were destroyed by the first atomic weapons used in war. The weapons, small and crude weapons by todays standards killed 90,000 and 40,000 people instantly and caused the deaths of 200,000 by the end of 1945 and an additional tens of thousands more over the next years.