REMEMBERING HIROSHIMA

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"The greatest and most terrible of wars ended this week in the echoes of an enormous event -- an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance." With those words fifty years ago, TIME Magazine reported theexplosion of a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. On Sunday,Japan will solemnly commemorate the devastation. Hiroshima, then just a medium-sized city in southern Japan, wasdestroyed in seconds in one blinding flash. More than 100,000 people, nearly half of Hiroshima's population, perished immediately. Tens of thousands more died later of injuries sustained in the searing blast. But the real damage, as TIME wrote in 1945, was that this weapon "put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself."