Content Warning: The source text contains graphic descriptions of the injuries and illness caused by the bombing of Hiroshima. Some of these descriptions are presented in this section to reflect the book’s content and intent.

Hersey set out to document and convey the horrors of the atomic bomb. He doesn’t do this by matching the enormity of the horror with purple, hyperbolic prose or reams of statistics. Rather, he focuses on the minutiae of individual life stories. He lets the facts of nuclear weapons and of individual experiences speak for themselves.

The nuclear bomb was brand new in 1945. It had never been used prior to Hiroshima, and the United States was the only country to possess one. People knew next to nothing about it. Publication of Hersey’s article—and shortly thereafter, his book—came just the following year. The U.S. government had kept a tight lid on the bomb and its effects, and many people first learned of them through Hersey’s work. Included in the original article, but not in the book, is an editor’s note. It explained that the entire issue of The New Yorker was devoted to the topic “in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.