Living Under the Cloud

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The very existence of the Bomb has made the sort of total war practiced 60 years ago morally unthinkable. For once, humans have not done what they are capable of doing. There have been some 525 nuclear explosions aboveground since Hiroshima; not one of them has been an act of war. We find it hard to celebrate that--we may think, as George Orwell wrote two months after Hiroshima, that the atom bomb ushered into being an indefinite "peace that is no peace"--but we should, perhaps, be thankful for small mercies. Since Aug. 6, 1945, we have lived uneasily with the Bomb, and uneasy with it we should always be. But we have lived. --Reported by Aravind Adiga/New Delhi, Michael Brunton and Roland Lloyd Parry/London, Coco Masters/New York, Tim McGirk/Islamabad, Yuki Oda/Tokyo, Simon Robinson/Johannesburg, Mark Thompson/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

For more photos, first-person recollections and a report on Hiroshima today, visit time.com