Hiroshima and the Time Machine

One morning in Hiroshima, I watched as hundreds of Japanese schoolchildren -- a newly minted generation in their navy-and-white uniforms -- poured out of the Peace Memorial Museum. The Japanese authorities take children there every day, busload after busload, to see the evidence: the photographs taken on Aug. 6, 1945, and the days afterward; the drawings that the child survivors made to show what they had seen; the blinding thousand-sun light; the river choked with bodies; the melted clocks; the nuclear soot that fell upon the city -- "black rain." These sights are implanted in the minds of today's Japanese children...

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