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Hiroshima Ruins, Japan, 2005

The skeletal remains of a building in Hiroshima, Japan, stand as a reminder of the enduring injury from the U.S. atomic bomb attack there in 1945.

More than half of the city's buildings were destroyed by the bomb, which packed the equivalent of 15,000 tons (13,600 metric tons) of TNT. About 70,000 to 80,000 of Hiroshima's 350,000 residents were killed by the blast, and many suffered long-term illnesses from the radiation.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "12 Toxic Tales," May 2005, National Geographic magazine)

Photograph by Cary Wolinsky