The ashes of 55,000 victims buried in a small mound. The tricycle helmet. The story of a 15-year-old girl walking to her job making war planes at a factory in August of 1945. All three are memories floating around in Debbie Persell’s head after a summer trip to Hiroshima to study the long-term effects of radiation exposure from an atomic bomb. “By the time you go through all of that, you are just numb,” she says. “The horror of it is overwhelming.”

Along with Beth Fiske, also a student in the College of Nursing’s Homeland Security Nursing Program at the University of Tennessee, Persell traveled more than 7,000 miles to research and learn about the devastating effects of radiation. The program was coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), and the Hiroshima International Council for Health Care of the Radiation-exposed. While learning how to care for people in the future, Fiske and Persell also learned some tremendous lessons from the past.

“Number one, I was just overwhelmed with the devastation that occurred,” Persell says. “That mankind did this to each other.”

More than 52 years ago, on August 6, 1945, “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare, was dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb, however, never actually touched down. “The target was a bridge,” Persell says. “But it actually exploded in mid-air. Then, everything within a two-kilometer radius was just totally devastated, obliterated, gone.”

One building remains at the hypocenter (just like Ground Zero in New York City) as a reminder of the destruction from that day. It’s a structure of concrete and steel that was directly below the bomb, but managed to somewhat withstand the explosion. There are several memorials-for children, other countries, and others that perished-in the area. Several items inside a museum, including a tricycle helmet, and mannequins with their burned skin falling off, serve as painful memories of the past.

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