​By dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States of America aspired to kill two birds with one stone – to end the fighting in the Pacific, and to demonstrate to its enemies (and, to current allies, just to be on a safe side) the power of their new weapon, which had previously been applied only at test sites. Hiroshima, an industrial city relatively safe untouched by conventional bombing, was an ideal target for the first live action test. On Hiroshima's example, the contrast between "before" and "after" was expected to look especially striking.

Indeed, striking it was.

The first thing that Hiroshima residents saw was a blinding flash with "the power of a thousand suns". The first thing they felt was a wave of heat so strong that those who were closer to the epicenter of the explosion instantly turned into ashes. The heat evaporated people's bodies in the immediate proximity, burned dark patterns into the skin of those farthest away. The birds in the air caught fire like matches.

After the heat wave, it was the shock wave that followed. Its power knocked people off their feet, threw them across the street. All the windows were shattered, their glass shards turning into deadly weapons. Almost all buildings – fragile as they are in Japan – collapsed, except for the few durable ones. Everyone less than 800 meters from the epicenter died within a few minutes.

Those who managed to survive were in for a new suffering – it turned out that radiation can destroy human body at the cellular level. The American scientists who developed the bomb chose to hold this information back, and people continued to live on contaminated land, drink contaminated water, and dismantle the rubble with their bare hands. The number of radiation victims grew rapidly. Local residents, the relatives who came to help them, foreign journalists, and Red Cross medics were infected and died.

In the 77 years that have followed since then, no incumbent US president has ever participated in a Peace Ceremony held in Hiroshima in memory of the A-bomb victims. Perhaps, precisely in the hope that this will change one day, Japan officials still never mention publicly which exactly country it was that dropped the first atomic bomb.

However, the memory of that tragedy lives on even now. The truth about it will be revealed in the books and magazines at the exhibition in the Gorky Library.