A pure, limpid sun, still young, contemplated from afar the colorful streets of the city. How much life was greening the avenues, the houses, the prominent gardens! As if blessed, at 8:15 a.m. another sun appeared in the sky. A mere 600 meters separated it from the people, which, in a matter of seconds, became nothing.
They did not know how or when, or what overshadowed the joy of living. The epitaph of Hiroshima was engraved with fire and blood. The clocks stopped, and never ran their hands again. Colors fled, almost everything alive was annihilated.
They were cursed in the name of peace. It was not another sun. Like the mechanism of a gun, someone pulled the trigger; two pieces of uranium were fired and, after the fission of their nuclei, exploded right on top of them. A heat wave of more than 4,000ºc spread over about 4.5 kilometers. Little Boy was the name given in Washington to the atomic bomb with which they intended to flood Japan.
Small? The universe was small for the victims when that 64-kilogram charge of uranium-235 detonated with a force equivalent to 15,000 tons of tnt.
The survivors - naked, with their clothes burned - those who were not charred or disintegrated, had burning strips of flesh hanging from their bodies. Even with their eyes bulging out of their sockets, they saw the road with no future that had exploded above them. Had the gods -of the West or the East- turned their gaze away, while the empire of the North was "showing off" its might?
Three days later, the cruelty of the nuclear bomb apocalypse also reached the city of Nagasaki. Fat Man was the projectile in charge of unloading the hatred of the White House on another part of the Japanese territory.
Nothing, or almost nothing, resisted the only nuclear attacks that humanity has experienced so far. The throats of those cities could not speak in the face of misfortune. And it was not necessary: the smoke of the remains that burned to the bone and the high levels of radiation screamed.
No scars remain from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the wound still exudes the horror of one of the greatest manifestations of cowardice in world history. It smells of blood, cancer, rubble and misery; of generations damaged indefinitely by the weight of what seemed to be "boiling" punishment from the very bowels of hell. "Swift and utter destruction," as then US President Harry Truman said in his threat before the fact.
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons - Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 - there are currently some 12,300 nuclear warheads. However, countries that have not experienced the effects of an atomic bombing, but do know about wars and victims, insist on putting us on the brink of a third world conflict.
And just on the eve of the 80th anniversary of that massacre, the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, was walking on the roof of the White House, and to journalists who questioned him, he replied - with the smile of one who feels no remorse - that he is going to build "nuclear missiles" there. He accompanied his words with a gesture that imitates the launching. He does not know about pain, it is known that he is insensitive, so much so that he believes he is infallible on landing.
