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At this point in the piece, we enter Yuen’s dissection of the actual bomb and mission. Once again, as we saw in the “grave” link at the beginning of the piece, the reader is asked to click on a link, “Understand the weapon,” and is taken through a systematic and clinical accounting of what Little Boy was and how it worked. We can see here that Yuen is beginning to establish a pattern of formal/historical information segueing into personal and symbolic-educating the reader then drawing him back into the text via the human aspects. Here too we also see the reader taking control of vast swathes of history, namely the atomic bomb, and distilling it to two self-controlled windows.
Only if the reader at this point scrolls to the very bottom of the page will he see the link “of Light and Darkness/Fission.” Invited to “witness the explosion” we are taken to a box where one sees stills from a movie on the effects of a nuclear blast on a typical family home. Yuen indulges us in the spectacle
of a home blowing up, but accompanying each still frame is a single sentence of survivor testimony from Hiroshima.
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