On August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was walking through Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb detonated. He survived — burned, his eardrums ruptured, temporarily blind. Three days later, still bandaged, he reported to work in Nagasaki. At 11:02 AM on August 9, the sky lit up again. This episode of Sidequests tells the story of the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both atomic bombings: an ordinary marine engineer on a business trip who forgot an identification stamp and ended up at the center of the two most consequential moments of the nuclear age, then spent the rest of his long life bearing witness to what those weapons actually do to human beings.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad"}