After Hiroshima: Portraits of Survivors On July 16, 1945, the
Atomic Age was born when a device with an explosive “yield”
roughly equal to 20 kilotons of TNT was detonated in the desert
of southeastern New Mexico. The explosion was so inconceivably
violent, so fearsome, that one witness to the event, the
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, famously claimed that a line
from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, ran unbidden through
his head: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Less
than a month later, American forces dropped atomic bombs on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of
thousands of men, women and children in an instant; condemning
thousands more to slow, agonizing deaths from burns and
radiation sickness in the months and years to come; and, in the
eyes of most historians, both Western and Asian, hastening the
surrender of the Japanese and bringing about the end of the
Second World War. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of
photographs (most of which never appeared