Shinichi Tetsutani loved to ride his beloved tricycle outside his house in Higashi-Hakushima-Cho, a neighborhood in the Japanese port city of Hiroshima.
Shin-chan, as his family affectionately called the three-year-old, was doing just that on the morning of August 6, 1945 when there was a brilliant flash in the sky.
The boy was about a quarter mile from the hypocenter of the detonation of the first nuclear weapon to be used in anger, the consequence of a frightening new technology that its creators were all too aware would change warfare — and civilization — forever by the omnipresent threat of unimaginable death and destruction.
Shin died that night, one of about 140,000 people to perish in the atomic bomb explosion and from associated effects, principally radiation poisoning. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, taking about 74,000 lives. Kyoto, the original target of the first bomb, was spared because the U.S. officials and generals who were so desperate to end the war remained sensitive of its cultural significance.
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