The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have had to live through several stages of trauma. First came the horrors of August 6th and August 9th 1945: the blinding flash, the ferocious force, the flesh-melting heat; plus the black rain, the flattened buildings, the charred corpses. “It was a real hell,” recalls Tanaka Shigemitsu, who was just four years old in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped there. Then came decades of quiet suffering, as radiation ate away at victims’ bodies and stigma at their souls. Finally there have been the frustrations of recent years, as the hope of a world without nuclear weapons has receded ever farther into the distance.