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The second A-bomb used in war, much less publicized but far more powerful than the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, fell on Nagasaki (pop. 250,000). Last week, 3½ years after the city's fiery ordeal, TIME Correspondent Sam Welles paid it a visit. His report:
Nagasaki is surprisingly full of smiles and surprisingly empty of hate. The A-bomb epicenter is a small park of less than an acre around a low, earthen mound topped by a plain wooden shaft. Seven young arborvitae trees circle the mound. A sign in English and Japanese states that 18,409 homes were destroyed, 29,739 people killed and 91,081 injured when a compact mass of plutonium "exploded in the air just above here" on Aug. 9, 1945.
Mixed Feelings. Of many new houses near the park, the closest belongs to straggle-bearded Akira Yamamoto, 37, a sewing-machine merchant whose back stoop is only 80 feet from the shaft. During the war Yamamoto worked in a munitions plant ten miles away, while his wife and older children were in the country, but his parents lived in the target area and were killed.
