Carl Robichaud

He's in Tokyo.

And at this time, Tokyo is under the occupation, the US occupation, and General MacArthur is the administrator.

And Hersey actually slips out.

He pretends to have a stomach bug.

And he goes and records the story of these six survivors of the Hiroshima bomb.

And he tells a different story than the official one.

The official story is focused very much on the size of the explosion, and that's where the emphasis is.

And he tells the human story of these survivors, and also for the first time reveals that there was this radiation sickness that affected people really terribly.

And I think this changes the way that the weapon is viewed.

It ends up being a 30,000-word piece that's released in The New Yorker.

It actually is like a full issue of The New Yorker, this one story.

And when it hits the newsstands, it's all anyone's talking about.

And I think that's an example of a reporter, someone in civil society, not in government, who had a really powerful effect

on the nuclear age because our relationship to the bomb changed once we understood its full consequences.

I also want to say that the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not taken in isolation, and it's sort of this culmination of a series of atrocities.

And it's something of a coincidence that the ability to create nuclear weapons emerged during World War II.

It didn't need to be that way.

There's this world of physics and sort of the breakthroughs in atomic physics in the 1920s and 30s is just an incredibly exciting period of discovery.

And by coincidence, they realize the potential for building a bomb at the exact time that Europe is descending into war.

And not just any war, but this war in which atrocities are being committed on all sides, the genocide of the Jews and later the firebombing of the German cities and the Japanese cities.