Radiation killed many more over the next half-dozen years. Nearly 70,000 men, women, and children flashed out of existence, and nearly 70,000 others were injured. The Little Boy explosion was equal to about 18,000 tons of TNT. 'I saw so many dead people,' she says, 'so many walking with the skin dropping off of their faces and hands, so many with their faces terribly bloated. The bombing and its immediate aftermath stamped Walker’s memory with indelible images of horror. At one point after the blast, she recounts, a roof tile broke loose and hit her on the head, but neither she nor her sister was seriously injured. Now 77, she lives as Sue Walker with her husband, Glenn Walker. Much of it blew into the house,' Koide says over the telephone from her home in Rawlings, West Virginia. The Koide family lived about 20 minutes by car from downtown Hiroshima. At 8:15 a.m., the bomb nicknamed Little Boy exploded just less than 2,000 feet above the city. Seventeen-year-old Sumiko Koide was carrying her baby sister in the alley next to her parents’ house on August 6, 1945, when the world changed forever. Today, people who helped build them and people who felt their deadly power still grapple with the bombs’ grim realities. Sixty years ago, a pair of atomic bombs scorched Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
