The first reports were met with disbelief.

A single bomb with the explosive force to level a city; a bomb, detonated with such intensity it burned as bright as — maybe, even brighter than — the sun.

Even newsman Walter Cronkite, then a young correspondent for United Press, was so dubious of the initial accounts of the atomic bomb that exploded the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, Japan, that he changed the mention of its capabilities from the equivalent of more than 20,000 tons of TNT to what he thought a more-believable figure: 20 tons.

He assumed those first reports were an error. He was wrong.

WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND

On Aug. 6, 1945 a uranium-based atomic bomb detonated 1,968 feet over Hiroshima, Japan, in a 7,000-degree Fahrenheit fireball that would vaporize all in its path:

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