At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a minister who presided over a Methodist church in Hiroshima, was two miles outside the city, when a tremendous flash occurred in the sky. Uninjured by the blast, he rushed toward his home and his family, passing hordes of the dead and the gravely wounded—people severely burnt, some holding their eyeballs in their hands—and scenes of horrific devastation, as an immense conflagration consumed his city. He didn’t know what had happened. No one did. This level of destruction was incomprehensible. Tanimoto also couldn’t know at that moment, as he feared for his wife, young daughter, and his parishioners, that he would become one of the best-known survivors of this first act of nuclear warfare and devote the rest of his life to preventing a recurrence of such a hellish catastrophe.

Though I never met Tanimoto, I feel as if I know him. That’s because about two years ago, I was asked to edit his poignant and gripping memoir of that horrible day and the weeks and months that followed, an account that had been lost for decades. Today, the book is being published by Random House’s Modern Library under the title Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir. It’s a harrowing tale of the atomic bombing from ground zero and details the heroic action—though Tanimoto never called it that—he took to ferry the wounded across a river, using a small boat he found and only a pole to push it along, so these victims might find medical attention. As the city burned and he tended to survivors who had lost much of their flesh—many would not live long—he kept repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” The horror was numbing. An eyewitness later called Tanimoto a “rescuing angel.”

Kai Bird, a co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, praises Tanimoto’s work as a “stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony of human suffering.” Tanimoto bore witness to one of the most significant days in human history, and his remembrances—as gruesome and disturbing as they are—ought to be read by all.

My involvement in bringing his memoir to the public began with a trip I took to Japan two years ago. Early in my journalism career, I focused on arms control and nuclear proliferation issues—and then moved on to other topics after a year or two of having nightmares about nuclear attacks. In Japan, I felt compelled to visit Hiroshima, where I was moved by how the city had rebuilt, creating a Peace Park at its center, and dedicating itself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The memorials to the estimated 140,000 killed by the atomic bomb were........

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