“Behold, there ariseth a Utile cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.”

Devastation by atomic bomb has been known only to our own generation, but on occasions past, nature unassisted has produced effects startlingly like it. Strangely enough, we have had—in this hemisphere and this century—a very real preview of the fate which man’s ingenuity may hold in store for him. The time was 1902; the plate was the Caribbean island of Martinique. St. Pierre, a handsome city of nearly 30,000 souls, was instantaneously obliterated in. a manner so similar to a nuclear explosion that it provides a chilling foretaste of what might, in a nuclear age, happen to other cities. And its destruction is perhaps the only historic example—certainly the only instance on a large scale—of the utter extinction, within the space of a few heartbeats, of a unique civilization, a way of life that was both singular and irreplaceable. The story of this lightning-quick extinction is not fantasy, not a thriller of science fiction, not an imaginary projection of scientific possibilities. This happened.

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