H iroshima, Japan : Sunday, Aug. 6, 1945, 8:15 am. A 12-year-old girl was walking to her seijinshiki ceremony, a traditional Japanese rite of passage, dressed in her first kimono. In a millisecond, the atomic bomb "Little Boy" vaporized her in white, 7,000-degree heat, an unholy conflagration weaponizing the sun's fierce fire and incinerating Hiroshima. All that remained was her shadow and the soft red blush from her irradiated sash on a wall. Robert Lewis, who co-piloted the plane from which the bomb was dropped, wrote, "My God! What have we done?" By December 1945, more than 140,000 were killed by this inferno.

Then a searing black rain of the radioactive ash lashed the living, "their faces burned, their eye sockets hollow, and fluid from their melting eyes running down their cheeks

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