The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls.

He subsequently was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge as a Mellon Fellow. The ABC Radio Network preempted regular programming to broadcast readings of the complete text by well-known actors in four half-hour programs. Later he attended the Hotchkiss School followed by Yale University where he was a member of Skull and Bones Society.

John Richard Hersey (June 17 1914 – March 24 1993) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima Japan was adjudged the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.