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exhaustive though still incomplete study of this wasteland of war.
    Nagasaki is an island roughly resembling Manhattan in size and shape, running in a north-south direction with ocean inlets on three sides. What would be the New Jersey and Manhattan sides of the Hudson River are lined with huge war plants owned by the Mitsubishi and Kawanami families. The Kawanami shipbuilding plants, employing about 20,000 workmen, lie on both sides of the harbor mouth on what corresponds to Battery Park and Ellis Island. That is about five nautical miles from the scene of the explosion’s main blow. B-29 raids before the atomic bomb failed to damage them and they are still hardly scarred.
    Proceeding up the Nagasaki harbor, which is lined with docks on both sides like the Hudson, one perceives the shores narrowing toward a bottleneck. The beautiful green hills are nearer at hand, standing beyond the long rows of industrial plants, which are all Mitsubishi on both sides of the river. On the left or Jersey side, two miles beyond the Kawanami yards, are Mitsubishi’s shipbuilding and electrical engine plants, employing 20,000 and 8,000 respectively. The shipbuilding plant was damaged by a raid before the atomic bomb, but not badly. The electrical plant is undamaged. It is three miles from the epicenter of the atomic bomb and repairable.
    It is about two miles from the scene of the bomb’s 1,500 foot high explosion, where the harbor has narrowed to the 250 foot wide Urakame River, that the atomic bomb’s force begins to be discernible. This area is north of downtown Nagasaki, whose buildings suffered some freakish destruction but are generally still sound.
    The railroad station—destroyed except for the platforms, yet already operating normally—is a sort of gate to the destroyed part of the Urakame valley. Here in parallel north-south lines run the Urakame River with Mitsubishi plants on both sides, the railroad line, and the main road from town. For two miles stretches this line of congested steel and some concrete factories with the residential district “across the tracks.” The atomic bomb landed between and totally destroyed both, along with perhaps half the living persons in them. The known dead number 20,000, and Japanese police tell me they estimate about 4,000 remain to be found.
    The reason the deaths were so high—the wounded being about twice as many, according to Japanese official figures—was twofold: that Mitsubishi air raid shelters were totally inadequate and the civilian shelters remote and limited, and that the Japanese air warning system was a total failure.
    Today I inspected half a dozen crude short tunnels in the rock wall valley, which the Mitsubishi Company considered shelters. I also picked my way through the tangled iron girders and curling roofs of the main factories to see concrete shelters four inches thick but totally inadequate in number. Only a grey concrete building topped by a siren, where clerical staff worked, had passable cellar shelters, but nothing resembling provision had been made.
    A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning, four hours before the two B-29s appeared, but it was ignored by the workmen and most of the population. The police insist that the air raid warning was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they heard none.
    As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign of burns or debilitation. Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in the broader extent of its flash and a more powerful knockout.
    All around the Mitsubishi plant are ruins which one would gladly have