Nagasaki, Japan, under Atomic Bomb Attack

This aerial photograph of the atomic bomb blast over the Japanese city of Nagasaki was taken on August 9, 1945, documenting the event that led to the end of the war in the Pacific only days later. Paradoxically, the mushroom cloud, so widely understood as an emblem of death and destruction, took the shape of a living form, seeming to resemble the stem and flattened cap of a common toadstool.