Living Under the Cloud

The atom bombs dropped over Japan ended a terrible war and persuaded the world never to use nuclear weapons again. Why that legacy is now in peril--and what we should do about it

The 12 Americans who on Aug. 6, 1945, boarded the B-29 bomber with the name Enola Gay painted on its nose would forget little about that long day. They remembered staying up through the night and eating breakfast long before dawn. Theodore (Dutch) Van Kirk had pineapple fritters. "I love the damn things," Van Kirk, 84, says today from his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. "I'll never forget the pineapple damn fritters." The Enola Gay left Tinian, in the Marianas chain, at 2:45 a.m. and was scheduled to arrive over Hiroshima, a city at the south end of the Japanese island...

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