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If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor
of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.- The Bhagavad-Gita
In other words, it seems likely that two small-scale nuclear weapons killed about a third of a million people. Nor should we forget that the number of dead is still increasing.
- Taeko Midorikawa, Widows of Hiroshima, The Life Stories of Nineteen Peasant Wives, Edited by Mikio Kanda, 1982
How can one allow hindsight 50 years later to question the righteousness of a decision to quickly end this unspeakable chapter in world history?
- Jessie Brown, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, September 6, 1994
[On July 12, 1945, Japan gave] an offer to surrender. Stalin asked Truman whether it merited a reply and Truman's response was negative. One might well ask what had happened to the dedication to `save American lives'?
- Wilfred Burchett, Shadows of Hiroshima, 1983
In May 1945, the Japanese were planning to draft 10 million male citizens to fight off an expected U.S. invasion of Japanese soil.
- Intelligence papers shown to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet
The Japs had to be killed anyway because of how they fought; there was no other way. But what made you want to do it was your friends. When you saw their corpses day after day, your hatred-oh god, hatred-built day after day. By June, I had no mercy for a single Jap who was trying to surrender .
- Evan Regal, a U.S. Marine Corps flame-thrower operator on Okinawa, 1945
On the morning of the 7th, I took Akio with me and we set off for Hiroshima to look for my husband. We walked along peering at the dead bodies, covered with blisters, on the roadside and the river bank. We peered into the air-raid shelters too. They were full of dead bodies piled up. They were all charred, you know...
Because they were all charred, I couldn't tell which was my husband. Then I had an idea. He had a lot of gold teeth, so I thought that if I could find them, I'd know.
After that, I walked on and whenever I came across someone who looked like my husband, I would open the mouth of the charred body and look for gold teeth. I wonder how many dozens, or even hundreds, of dead mouths I opened and looked in. I was desperate, so I didn't even think that it was scary. I just did it, thinking to myself, `Isn't this him?' as I searched for his gold teeth.
For two days, on the 8th and the 9th of August, I went out looking for him. By the 8th, the dead bodies were already covered in maggots and flies, and the smell was awful. It was a really peculiar smell, you know. There were dead bodies that had been pulled out of the river. So I walked on, peering into mouths, looking for his gold teeth. As time went by, you couldn't tell whether they were gold teeth or maggots.
- Setsuko Nishimoto, Widows of Hiroshima, The Life Stories of Nineteen Peasant Wives, Edited by Mikio Kanda, 1982