Nagasaki (place)

At 11:02 a.m., August 9, 1945, 500 meters removed from the surface of the land, a fire erupted in the sky above Nagasaki. 73,884 people passed through that light into death. 18,409 homes were wholly consumed by the fire. 6.7 million square meters of land became at once eerily flat, and the wind whipped the ash about the grey plain. What trees remained were bent and bare.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/journey/journey3.html

Because much of the housing in Japanese society was constructed of wood, one might have assumed, at first, that the storm of ash was merely the smoke of the fires of the burning field that Nagasaki had become; but one had not far to walk before one stumbled upon, perhaps, a child, laying on the ground with her hands on her throat, and no longer consisting of flesh and bone, but rather a ghost, and reduced entirely to an ash that some merciful wind would soon carry away. This sort of dead held its form until some living being stumbled upon it and listened to its pain, and only then would it submit to the wind and pass into the next world, with its burning, indignant question.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/journey/journey16.html

Some ghosts were more stubborn than others, and they would remain long after that sad wind had tugged away and scattered their ashes. Singed into the land and into the rock were the standing images of these obstinate dead, who would not disappear as they were told, so that their dark features glowered with an unbecoming permanence, scarring the earth. Or perhaps these were only the shadows of those quick-gone dead, and forgotten for haste.

http://burn.ucsd.edu/images/atomphoto/nshadow10.gif

For days, weeks, months, and years, people continued to die. One conservative end figure places the estimate around 200,000. Children were born malformed, "genetic problems" were rampant, and many people became infertile. Nagasaki had been the site of two arms factories, a steel works, a torpedo factory, the "massive" Mitsubishi shipyards, and it had been the home of tens of thousands of children.

"A bright light filled the plane," wrote Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up, mushrooming." For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. "Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!" exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis, pounding on Tibbets's shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal. "My God," he asked himself, "what have we done?"

Nagasaki was bombed 3 days later.