ShockwaveTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read At 8: 15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the citys population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare: radiation.