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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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In August 1945, a motion picture camera crew enters the city of Hiroshima, Japan to record startling images of the first city devastated by an atomic bomb.

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There were those who said that Hiroshima would remain uninhabitable, forever poisoned by radiation.

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And that those who were exposed to the bomb would all be dead within three years.

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What has become of the Hiroshima survivors?

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On July 16, 1945, a signal flare illuminates the barren New Mexico desert as scientists anxiously await the detonation of the world's first atomic weapon.

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The bomb is blown up by a rocket.

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For President Truman, the inevitable dilemma, should the weapon be used against Japan?

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Believing that it will bring a speedy end to World War II and the savings of millions of lives, the president issues the order.

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Drop the bomb.

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In the early morning of August 6, a B-29 named the Inola Gay departs the Pacific Island of Tinian and routes to Japan.

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For a payload, a single five-ton bomb nicknamed Little Boy.

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The mood in Hiroshima that morning was one of uneasy anticipation.

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While other Japanese cities were being leveled by American bombers, Hiroshima remained unchanged and no one in Japan could understand why.

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Some thought Hiroshima was being spared because it was too beautiful to bomb.

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They thought the Americans were saving it to build villas there.

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Others speculated that a relative of President Truman's, perhaps even his mother, was living in the city.

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And that's why the city was being spared.

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Yet there were those who foresaw the real reason.

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Hiroshima was being reserved for a special, highly destructive weapon.

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Many survivors remember seeing the B-29 over Hiroshima that morning, but painted little heat.

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And few could see a small, shiny object falling from the plane.

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Kaz Suishi was an American of Japanese descent living in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb.

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She was two miles from the bomb's hypocenter.

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It was a beautiful blue sky that morning.

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I heard the sound of the plane and I looked up and saw the B-29.

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I was not concerned because the B-29 used to come every single day, but it never dropped bombs.

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I thought it was beautiful. It looked like a silver angel.

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Then after the B-29 was gone, there was still a little dot, a tiny little dot falling to the ground.

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At first I thought it was a parachute, and I thought, how brave the American must be to parachute into the city.

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During the 43 seconds it took for the bomb to fall to Earth.

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Most of the inhabitants of Hiroshima weren't even aware they were in any danger.

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And none could imagine the devastation that was to follow.

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The bomb exploded.

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In an instant, the city of Hiroshima, Japan, was obliterated.

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Metal fused with stone. Sand turned to glass.

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It was as if the sun had come in contact with the Earth.

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Every structure within a two-mile radius of the bomb's hypocenter was destroyed.

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Another Hiroshima survivor is Florence Yamada Garnett.

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She was 13 years old at the time and lost most of her family in the explosion.

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It is only recently that she has been able to talk about her experiences.

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Next thing you do, you have to find a way to get to the city.

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You have to find a way to get to the city.

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The building was falling on top of you.

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There was a pressure.

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Somebody was just stepping out over you.

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It was...

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And then the heat. After the explosion of the bomb, you can feel the heat.

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You suck in the air and you think you're dying.

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I was rolled across the school.

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That's about all I remember at the time.

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The temperature near the center of the blast was so great, human beings literally evaporated.

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Leaving behind, in some cases, nothing but their shadows etched into stone and concrete.

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No one is certain how many were killed in the blast.

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Conservative estimates put the figure at 70,000, with many thousands more to die in the weeks and months to follow.

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The bomb was destroyed.

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Within days, medical personnel attempts to treat the tens of thousands of seriously injured.

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Severe burns and mutilations are so numerous, medical facilities so primitive,

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that most of the severely injured have little chance at all for survival.

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As one doctor puts it, erosima is a sea of dead and dying.

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You could see people running out of the city, skin hanging.

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Some burned to look like charred, but they were still moving.

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I remember seeing people just sitting, sitting or standing, charred to death.

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We call a man that was on a bicycle, that was still leaning a gun.

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And another person taking the body off the bike and then taking the bike away.

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I thought it was cruel at that time, but of course, it's survival for yourself.

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As horrible as their experiences have been, many of the survivors are soon to learn.

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More terror is to confront them.

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Within days and weeks, the survivors begin to notice in themselves a strange insidious form of illness.

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The survivors attribute the symptoms to A-bomb disease.

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They are actually the effects of acute atomic radiation never experienced before.

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One man who understands the terror of radiation poisoning is Dr. Robert J. Lifton,

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a psychiatrist who has spent several years in erosima and has interviewed numerous atomic bomb survivors.

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He is a very experienced person.

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He is a very experienced person.

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He is a very experienced person.

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He is a very experienced person.

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Dr. Lifton has interviewed numerous atomic bomb survivors.

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Well, with most wars and with the use of conventional weapons, you kill people.

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Then both sides bury their dead.

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They then return to life as usual.

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Oh, they grieve and there's pain, but life goes on in the old-fashioned way.

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In erosima, the bomb was dropped and that was the beginning of lifelong effects.

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For instance, days, weeks, months after the bomb was dropped,

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and sometimes people who seemed unaffected by the bomb to have no marks on their bodies,

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they would suddenly find themselves having weird symptoms, very grotesque symptoms,

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bleeding from all of their bodily openings, bleeding into the skin,

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severe diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, extreme weakness, high fever,

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and when white blood counts could be taken, very high white blood counts.

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Extreme weakness and in many cases death.

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If people lived a little longer, other grotesque symptoms would follow,

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such as their hair falling out.

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Now these were the symptoms of acute radiation effects.

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Nobody understood this at the time.

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They simply sensed that there was some kind of poison in the bomb,

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and the people in erosima began to feel that this is a weapon that leaves behind poison in your bones,

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and that poison may strike you down at any time.

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The first thing we would do is get up in the morning and look at your forearm,

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and if you didn't have any purple spots, that means you wouldn't live for a couple of days.

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With me, like I said, I went through the radiation sickness of a

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vomiting, nausea, dehydration, complete loss of hair.

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But I was one of the lucky ones to survive.

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This was the first thing you would do in the morning is look at your arm,

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comb your hair, and it starts falling out.

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You feel your time is coming very soon.

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There was no panic about it.

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It was just an everyday reality at the time.

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However, the people who were not exposed to the bomb directly were very hesitant in going back into the city.

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By that time, we had heard there was a different type of a bomb,

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that if you were exposed to the bomb, you may not live.

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Within weeks, the survivors of Hiroshima begin the lengthy and burdensome task of rebuilding.

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Unknown to them, the effects of the bomb would haunt them for years to come,

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in ways they could not imagine.

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In Search of, we'll continue in a moment, here on the History Channel.

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When an atomic bomb explodes, it produces heat, light, and blast effects.

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In addition, there is the emission of invisible rays of atomic matter,

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that bombard everything within the blast area.

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These invisible rays, referred to as radiation, have the capability of penetrating the human body.

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In small doses, certain types of radiation, like that used frequently in medical diagnosis,

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is believed to be harmless.

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But in massive amounts, like that experienced at Hiroshima, the results can be deadly.

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When penetrating the human body, radiation strikes deep within the cells our bodies are made of.

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When a damaged cell reproduces itself, instead of dividing to produce a new healthy cell,

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it manufactures an identically damaged cell.

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This type of growth, which frequently takes years to surface, leads to the disease we call cancer.

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Scientists had been aware of the harmful effects of radiation for some time,

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and wanted to determine how much of it had been received in Hiroshima.

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Human bone fragments, one of the materials that best retains radiation,

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were collected at various locations in the city for analysis later.

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The early findings revealed that a large amount of highly toxic beta and gamma radiation

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had been dispersed throughout the city at the time of the explosion.

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What effect this would have on the Hiroshima survivors was still unknown.

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All that was certain was that many of the survivors, even those who seemed unscathed by the bomb,

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were carrying within their bodies the potential for great harm that would not reveal itself for years to come.

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Dr. Stuart Finch has recently concluded a 34-year investigation into the delayed effects of radiation exposure.

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The other findings early were the occurrence of increased cataracts in the lenses of the eyes,

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and then the increased occurrence of leukemia, which in the heavily exposed population reached a peak rate of about 40 times the normal rate.

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Concomitantly, there's been an increased rise in cancer rates in Hiroshima,

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particularly cancer of the stomach, cancer of the thyroid, cancer of the lung, breast cancer,

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and most recently the occurrence of multiple myeloma, which is a form of bone cancer.

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I think it is safe to say that there has been a definite relationship established

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between the occurrence of exposure in these survivors and the occurrence of cancer.

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The effects of radiation can remain hidden for generations.

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When sex cells are radiated, the victims may remain in perfect health, but pass on genetic damage to their offspring.

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When hundreds of exposed women who were pregnant at the time of the explosion gave birth to defective children,

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it created widespread fears of permanent genetic damage.

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But the damage suffered by children in the womb was the result of direct exposure to radiation, not genetic inheritance.

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Nonetheless, fears of genetic damage continued for years until Hiroshima had been rebuilt,

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and thousands of healthy children were born to Hiroshima survivors.

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Today, most authorities conclude that the genetic threat from radiation in Hiroshima is much smaller than previously believed.

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One man who thinks differently is Dr. Gerald Hirsch of the Wadsworth Medical Center in Los Angeles.

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The most recent studies indicate little or few long-term genetic effects for radiation.

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One recent study indicated that only one child out of 12,000 children of radiation-exposed Japanese had a mutation.

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However, several years ago we developed a test that we thought would pick up a majority of mutations.

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The test uses just an ounce of blood and involves the purification of the oxygen-carrying protein of red cells.

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Many of the radiation-exposed people had an abnormal value in this test.

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These data indicate that the mutation rate for radiation may be much higher than we previously thought, perhaps as much as a thousand times higher.

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If Dr. Hirsch's findings are correct, it would mean that seemingly healthy children could be carrying genetic damage that might not reveal itself for generations.

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We're not sure, though, how many of the mutations measured by this test will have bad effects in future generations.

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A single bomb devastated a city and left its survivors with lifelong suffering. How deep are the scars of Hiroshima?

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Nuclear weapons are radically different from ordinary bombs.

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If you compare, for instance, the destruction of Tokyo to that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, well, Tokyo was completely destroyed.

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More people were killed in Tokyo than were killed in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

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But it took thousands of bombs over hours of saturation bombing to do that to Tokyo.

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In Hiroshima, a single bomb dropped from a single plane destroyed an entire city.

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Now, that created, in survivors, in Hiroshima, the sense of a sudden and absolute shift from normal existence to an overwhelming encounter with death.

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They suddenly found themselves in the midst of a sea of dead and dying, and they walked about in a daze, like people in a dream, as they described it.

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Not really knowing whether they were dead or alive.

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Now, one imagines that in the midst of disaster, people are panic-stricken, running around, screaming.

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That's not the way it was in Hiroshima. Rather, they walked around quietly as in a silent movie, very muted, very still.

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And when you see the films of those early days, that's the kind of faces that you see.

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That's also psych-economic. Their minds are shut down, they're muted.

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It's a defense against ordinary or normal degrees of feeling, because one simply couldn't permit oneself.

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Ordinary forms of feeling and suffering, ordinary psychological pain, to those influences and still remain sane.

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The psychological pain suffered in Hiroshima still exists today.

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I guess it was about ten years ago when I had a fire in the house. There was a time when, at that time, I couldn't separate Hiroshima and present.

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And that was, as weird as it sounds, it was very true. I became very hysterical, which I wasn't hysterical during the Hiroshima fire.

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I could not separate Hiroshima and present. I had to stay off of work for about a month.

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And the doctors did not know what to do with me. I didn't realize that it was a common, would you call it, enroses or whatever it was that happened.

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We're finding out more of those things now.

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Hundreds of Hiroshima survivors now live in the United States, in areas like Little Tokyo in Los Angeles.

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Most do not want to be identified. They feel a sense of shame and embarrassment in being a survivor.

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It has been through the efforts of people like Paul Tsunishi of the Japanese-American League that the plight of the Hiroshima survivor is now emerging into the open.

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Various Japanese groups have organized radiation seminars held in major American cities.

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We are bringing a program, a public forum, to you today.

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At this one held recently in Los Angeles, the public learns that the effects of Hiroshima are still being felt, more than 35 years after the bomb.

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I am a victim and a survivor of the atomic bomb.

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The specific problems are medical insurance. Their inability to get insurance or if they have insurance they don't want the carriers to know it.

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And they're not sure what will happen if it becomes known that they are survivors of radiation from before.

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Additionally, there's a question of getting and maintaining jobs because they might be ostracized because of that.

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And there's a social stigma of being ostracized from the larger group.

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For Kaz Tsubishi, the seminar reawakens tragic memories.

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The photograph images of a devastated Hiroshima will never be forgotten by those who see them.

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In a matter of seconds, a city was destroyed, yet its legacy may last forever.

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Perhaps making all of us Hiroshima survivors.

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If a bomb were dropped today, there would be no outside world, nobody there to help.

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There would be no recovery.

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Coming up next, the FBI behavioral unit creates the profile of a brutal killer and agents track him down on FBI The Untold Stories.

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Then history's crimes and trials chronicles the life and criminal career of bootlegger and extortionist Al Capone.

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And later tonight, history's mysteries journeys to the Southwest to investigate the strange disappearance of the Anasazi people.

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At 8 here on the History Channel, where the past comes alive.