Imagine if you can a time and place where in one split second life as you know it is changed forever. The date is August 6, 1945, and you are living in Hiroshima. Around 8:16 a.m., without a single warning, an A-bomb explodes 580 meters above the city that you are living in and four different types of radiation have just been released into the air. The first two, alpha and beta ray radiation, will be blocked by the atmosphere and thus won't reach you on the earth's surface. The other two, gamma ray and neutron radiation, did come through the atmosphere and are now affecting your body in ways that people would only think could happen in science fiction books.
             How this A-bomb affects you depends on where you live. If you were at ground zero when it hit, you would have absorbed 10, 300 rads of gamma radiation and 14, 100 rads of neutron radiation. This means that if you lived through the bomb's heat and blast you would die within a week or two from the radiation exposure; which could be more than 700 rads of gamma, or 70-350 rads of neutron radiation. On the other hand, if you were one kilometer away from the hypocenter, you would have absorbed "only" 255 rads of gamma radiation and 191 rads of neutron radiation.
             Even if you lived through all this there was still the "ashes of death" that could kill you. The "ashes of death" was the dirt and debris that was blasted back up into the air absorbing the radioactive rays as it did so.
             These actions will result in you having radiation sickness. This doesn't mean much to you until you realize that within two weeks of having this sickness your days will be filled with vomiting, hemorrleage spots, stomatitis, dizziness, diarrhea, and disturbances in the blood forming organs like bone marrow. Then within five weeks you will began to experience hair loss, anemia, and a decrease of the number of white blood cells. After forty...