And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centres
of that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the
surrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown impatient
at last at man's blindness, had with the deliberate intention of a
rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world.
The great industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the
bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in almost as
tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side was disordered
by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts of the
world famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plains
of north India, which had become more and more dependent for the general
welfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which
the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a state of
peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding, and
the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated survivors
crawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China
were a prey to brigand bands....
It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of
the explosion of the atomic bombs survives.
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