Hiroshima Survivor To Accept Nobel Peace Prize For Nuclear Watchdog

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Hiroshima survivor to accept Nobel Peace Prize for nuclear watchdog

Setsuko Thurlow was 13 years old and standing only a mile away from ground zero when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945

Ottawa, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Oct, 2017 ) :Setsuko Thurlow was 13 years old and standing only a mile away from ground zero when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

More than 62 years after that horrific day, she will jointly accept the Nobel Peace prize on behalf of this year's laureate, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), an organization in which she has played a major role.

"I remember a bluish-white flash. My body was flung into the air, and I remember a sensation of floating," she said in an interview with AFP, describing the day of the bombing. Thurlow suddenly found herself pinned under a collapsed building with dozens of others people.

A stranger eventually pulled her out. "The city I saw was almost indescribable," she said. It was 8:15 am in Hiroshima and the sun had been up for nearly two hours, yet darkness covered the ruins.

"It was like the morning had turned to night," Thurlow said. "The dirt and particles from the mushroom cloud had prevented the sun's rays from getting through." It was eerily quiet: "Nobody was yelling, nobody was running.

Survivors didn't have the physical or psychological strength. All they could muster was a faint whisper, begging for water." Thurlow said she looked around and saw thousands of people who were "badly burned and swollen.

They no longer looked human. That image burned into my retina." "As a 13-year-old high school student, I witnessed my city destroyed. It had become a city of death." An estimated 140,000 people were killed in the atomic blast on August 6, 1945. Another 80,000 would die in the bombing of Nagasaki three days later.