On August 6, 1945, 29-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima finishing a three-month business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Walking to the shipyard, he saw a bomber overhead drop a small object attached to a parachute. Suddenly, the sky flashed brilliantly, rupturing his eardrums, blinding him temporarily, and leaving severe burns over his upper body.
Yamaguchi was less than two miles from ground zero. Despite his agony, he spent a grueling night in an air-raid shelter, pulled himself together, and boarded a packed train back to his hometown the next day. That hometown was Nagasaki.
Arriving home on August 8, he received crude bandages for his burns and reported to work on the morning of August 9. At 11:00 AM, Yamaguchi was in the middle of explaining the incredible destruction of Hiroshima to his boss, who openly mocked him and claimed a single bomb could never flatten a city. At that precise moment, the sky erupted again.
Fat Man, the second nuclear weapon used in warfare, detonated directly overhead. Remarkably, Yamaguchi was once again roughly less than two miles from ground zero and survived the second initial blast without new major trauma, though he suffered extreme radiation sickness afterward. Even more miraculously, his wife and infant child survived in a makeshift shelter.
Yamaguchi went on to recover, father two more children, and live a long life as an outspoken champion for total nuclear disarmament, passing away in 2010 at the age of 93.