Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 am, a massive chunk of metal known as "Little Boy" fell from an American plane, and the sky ignited and glowed for an instant. In that brief moment, however, it became as hot as the surface of the sun in Hiroshima, until then a rather ordinary workaday city in wartime Japan. Half the city was leveled by the resulting blast, and the rest was set ablaze. Rain impregnated with radioactive fallout then fell, killing many that the fire and 1,000- mph shock wave had not. By the end of this mind-boggling disaster, more than 140,000 people died.