NHK Documentary

Beneath the Mushroom Cloud

The program explores the reality people faced beneath the mushroom cloud in Hiroshima Prefecture on August 6, 1945. Digital technology restores and enhances scenes captured in the 2 extant photographs taken near the epicenter of the atomic explosion while the mushroom cloud remained in the sky over Hiroshima. The still images are brought to life with sound and motion, based on the testimony of survivors who appeared in the photographs, to reveal the nature of that experience 70 years after the bomb was dropped. New light is shed on how the victims behaved after the blast and about the intense thermal radiation that caused excruciating flash burns.