That’s how nearly every survivor experienced the fateful moment an atomic bomb detonated 600 meters over their heads on August 6, 1945. A bright flash of light, unaccompanied, as if the bomb nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ was actually just a giant strobe light. An instant of brilliant illumination- and silence.

I think that last part is more unnerving- the idea that the end of the world is accompanied not by a bang but with a hush. A noiseless flash.

One survivor said the vision was like pale lightning; another said it was ‘beautiful’ in many more words and complexity than the simple english translation conveyed. I keep thinking about this surreal flash as I walk from Hiroshima Station towards the center of the city on a cold autumn morning. I’ve spent the past two hours in a McDonald’s, a refuge made necessary when my bus arrived in the dark pre-dawn hours. I took advantage of free wifi and read through more material on the Manhattan Project, the bombing and John Hersey’s incredible work reporting on the victim’s stories in the aftermath of the blast. As with any major world event we all vaguely remember studying in school, there is far more to the story than we ever knew- and, somewhat miraculously, more information at our fingertips than ever before. The internet may still be ‘the worst’, but the fact that I can study a subject with a couple of hours of online research and come away with a (slightly) better grasp and wider perspective still amazes.

The more I read about Hiroshima, however, the colder I feel. The more I understand, the darker it seems. I walk through a large modern Japanese city stirring to life and I can only sense a chill inside. Surely it’s just a byproduct of an all-night bus ride, I tell myself. I can walk it out, energize myself into warmth. I keep pressing through a distinctly Japanese urban center- active without cacophony, logically ordered yet elegant. Bright lights. Need warmth. Of course, with that noiseless flash came a heat wave. Gamma rays and UV rays and temperatures of 3-7000 degrees celsius. Anyone who actually had a full view of the detonation would never see anything with those eyes ever again. One survivor remembered an encounter with a group of army men lying together in the aftermath of the strike; they asked for help, and he looked down to see they had no eyes. They were staring into the sky at the fateful moment and the light had literally melted their eyes away. It was so intense that shadows were imprinted on to stone, dress patterns seared into skin and steel beams warped. Only those who were shielded properly from the light survived that first luminous wave.

I walk a little bit faster as I think about this. Not in the correct direction, as it turns out. I retrace my steps, find my mistake and adjust. Step after step pads the ground, shock absorbed gently in the legs. The shockwave was next, for those still alive. It moved with ruthless ferocity- a bright light, a moment suspended in time, and then the world turned upside down. The force of the wave flattened every wooden building, shattered every pane of glass, and kicked up all matter indiscriminately. Every living thing was moved in its path, and in a matter of seconds all went from blinding light to utter darkness.

I look around at all the glass and random objects that could be turned into deadly weapons in an instant during such a shockwave. I’m oddly thankful for the fact that my feet are firmly on the ground at this moment. I turn a corner and gasp- the so-called ‘A-Dome’ is before me, a government building that somehow survived the strike despite being a mere 160 meters from the ‘hypocenter’ of the explosion. Not only survived…I’m not sure I was ready for how it would still look. It somehow looks too…perfect? How can it still be standing in such a way? It is torn apart, yes, with signs of the blast still etched onto its incomplete facades. Jagged edges are exposed, loose rebar snakes out into open air. Yet the very manner in which the building is damaged defies simple scientific answers- the irregularity feels almost sublime in the way it scattered, crafted by chaos into a hollow, stark image. It is powerful beyond words.

There was debate in the decades afterwards over whether to protect this scarred memorial or destroy it, move on and build something new. I can’t help but feel enormous gratitude that it was preserved for people like me to see and experience for ourselves, a message of destruction written in ruin for future generations. But for those who lived through the nightmare and don’t want to see another reminder, my heart breaks.

I’m sorry, nightmare isn’t fair. When religions create stories of ‘hell’, even they can’t come close to describing Hiroshima in the aftermath of the initial blast. For those who survived the heat wave and came to their senses under a pile of shockwave-induced debris, the worst was still to come. A firestorm quickly roared through the city and incinerated every living thing left in its path; it raged for most of the day, and when the clouds seemed to offer respite they instead spit out large, black radioactive raindrops. Precious few humans escaped serious injury, and many with injuries perished because there was simply no one to rescue them for hours if not days. This wasn’t one natural disaster- a great fire, or a flood, or an earthquake. This was a serious of natural of disasters that arrived instantaneously and on every level of life. There were no services, no professionals left, no one to turn to and no place to go. Everybody assumed their house or building had been at the epicenter of a large bomb strike, only to get outside and realize every square meter as far as they could see looked the same. The epicenter was everywhere. I’ll spare you stories of children helping each other as their skin dripped off the bone, or of mothers carrying dead babies for days in a stupor. The stories these survivors tell, on page and via video in a museum nearby, defy any attempt to grasp the magnitude of suffering. The fact that they appear at all on video, and recount their story with a clear, calm and collected tone is nothing short of heroic. This was the apocalypse.

The chill inside still refuses to leave my body, even with a blue sky and sunshine as backdrop. I walk over to a small monument that denotes the hypocenter and I look up. It was a sunny morning, just like this. An air raid had sounded earlier in the morning, but the all clear was given after it turned out to be one B-29 and two smaller planes. Nothing to worry about. One survivor who had been in elementary school remembered hearing the sound of the plane and talking about it with his friends in class. A couple boys got up and went to the window to look up. They probably glimpsed a glint of light somewhere up in the blue sky. And then a noiseless flash…

That phrase repeats endlessly in my head. It’s amazing what a flash of light can do, what manipulation of the tiniest particles can do. We can take an electron smaller and more erratically-behaved than practically anything else in the universe, manipulate it and combine it to make beautiful expressions of light, rich color, of moving images that can dazzle the eye and stir the soul. An entire world can now watch the same story on a screen and mourn together when a bunch of their favorite movie characters seemingly perish at the snap of the finger from a giant space alien- all because we can manipulate a tiny, fundamental particle.

On August 6, 73 years ago, we manipulated another fundamental particle. A burst of energy, a noiseless flash, and out of 245,000 men, women and children in the city over 200,000 would die. Not all in an instant like that mercifully fake movie. No, this fate was much crueler for many victims; after an experience of hell-on-earth in the days afterwards, they were then met with an insidious disease inside. Hair fell out, gums bled, sicknesses lingered and the very cells that make up ‘homo sapien’ began to deteriorate. Radiation sickness developed at a sinister pace; people would exhibit just a few symptoms and then suddenly pass away, quietly. Others would suffer terribly, with wild swings between recovery and regression. There wasn’t a clear name, a known treatment for what was happening. It was a phantom. This was both the literal and moral fallout of a scientific process pumped up to a headstrong military pace, a process that reached implementation without any awareness of the full magnitude of just what this device would do once activated.

From the night before I arrived- when I re-watched my favorite opera, Doctor Atomic, a dark depiction of those scientists responsible and present at the first nuclear test in New Mexico- all the way through my first steps in Hiroshima a question lay at the back of my head. Was this the site of America’s fatal sin? Was this the act, the Faustian bargain we made just as we assumed the mantle of ‘leader’, ‘superpower?’

Very few people alive today know what life was truly like in August, 1945, after nearly a full century of war across the globe driven by breakneck technological development and at the tail end of a world war even more depraved than the first. It is not fair for us to look back and condemn decision-making processes when we only have secondhand knowledge of conditions at the time and decades of hindsight to rely upon. But whichever side of the debate you may find yourself, it is inarguable that among a variety of options and possible courses of action available to the United States, the decision was made to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians without warning and to utilize a weapon of mass destruction that no one fully understood. I believe in American ideals, and I am constantly inspired by our scientific endeavors; I even greatly admire Presidents Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt. I think that America has done some great good in the world in the last 7 decades. But alongside every great act- or atrocity- and with every proclamation, criticism and suggestion from the ‘leader of the free world’ we must also see this shadow, imprinted on the world just as they were imprinted on stone in Hiroshima. It is our radioactive past, the fallout we will never fully escape.

This chill may not leave my body. I accept it. In fact, I’ve grown accustomed to its presence. I can still feel the muscles inside contracted in defense, but I am no longer anxious. A fountain nearby continues its soothing serenade. The river below implacably reflects the light of the scene above, splashed by willow yellows and maple reds. Children’s laughter bounces across the large peace park, carried effortlessly into pine-scented air. The Children’s Peace Monument is nearby, with its thousands of cranes replenished daily. On a path that leads to the A-Dome, a number of men work together to plant flowers in neat lines, each placed with care and attention. An elderly man pauses and looks up at me; I bow to him, he bows to me. The dome itself I notice is surrounded by life, from grass and leaves scattered about the grounds to beautifully shaped trees that fill in those hollowed-out spaces all the way up to pigeons perched safely atop the dome.

Another old man approaches me and hands me a flyer. I start to read, half-expecting a call to donate…an instinct I immediately regret. He is a survivor of the blast who has spent the better part of his life driven by the recollection from his mother that helpless victims called out for water to little avail in the hours and days afterwards; he cleans the monument and memorial tower because of those voices. His flyer does not ask for money, only that we support his mission and message that this can never happen again. When I finish reading, I look up. He offers his hand and says “Japan and US, friends”. We shake, and with tears in my eyes I choke out a terribly-pronounced “Ogenkide”. He smiles and leaves. It all happens too fast…I want to say more, to tell him that the ending to my favorite opera is the haunting sound of a young japanese girl asking for water, to offer my thanks and my sympathy and my support and my love. But he’s out of sight, and I stand still next to the dome. Today, a smile and a small word was enough.

In this last moment, I thought back to a story from one month after bombing; one of the survivors was carried back into the city, still nursing a wounded leg that had kept her in a makeshift medical area outside the city. As she looked out on the ruined city, she was shocked to see that exuberant wildflowers and vegetation covered nearly every surface. What had been a landscape dominated strictly by red, black and brown since the blast now absolutely teemed with life. She was certain it was even more vivid and lush than before the blast.

This chill may not leave my body. The memory of what happened here may never vanish.

But we can still plant something new.