Time was running out for the two B-29 bombers as they reached Nagasaki.

The lead bomber, Bock's Car, piloted by 25-year-old Charles Sweeney, was running out of fuel 30,000 feet above enemy territory.

Clouds covered Nagasaki, hiding the target, but Bock's Car and the other B-29, the Great Artiste, began their bombing run anyway. Maybe there would be a break in the clouds.

There was.

"I got it! I got it!," shouted Bock's Car bombardier Kermit Beahan.

With that, he dropped a huge pumpkin-shaped slab of metal.

Nearby, the Great Artiste released three parachutes carrying scientific equipment.

Thirteen-year-old Katsuji Yoshida looked up and saw a parachute with a strange tube floating to the ground.

He could not know it held sensors to measure Nagasaki's doom.

It was 11:02 a.m. Aug. 9, 1945.

Fat Man, a 10,000-pound atomic bomb nicknamed for the rotund Winston Churchill, exploded 1,650 feet over Nagasaki.

Blast. Heat. Radiation. Death.

Those four horsemen of the atomic apocalypse engulfed Nagasaki in a split second.

It is estimated 73,884 people died and another 74,909 were injured. The city of 240,000 was virtually leveled.

In Richland, some 10,000 miles away, the workers who had come to help build a mysterious wartime industrial complex were just realizing their role in building that bomb. "It's Atomic Bombs!" declared the Richland Villager of Aug. 6, 1945, in a story about the bombing of Hiroshima.

The deadly plutonium core of Fat Man was made at Hanford, where 50,000 workers accomplished in just two years a scientific and engineering feat that couldn't be duplicated today.

It was all done with only a handful of workers really knowing what they were making. And none of them could possibly know how the building of the bomb would change the face of their windswept Eastern Washington community.

Nagasaki's was the world's third atomic bomb explosion, coming 24 days after a test bomb with a core of Hanford-made plutonium was secretly exploded July 16 at Alamagordo, N.M.

It was the second and last atomic bomb dropped as an act of war. Three days before Nagasaki was hit, the Little Boy bomb, made with uranium produced at Oak Ridge, Tenn., destroyed Hiroshima.

The weapons brought an end to the last world war, and they abruptly pushed the world into an uncertain time when mankind flirted with its annihilation.

Even 50 years later, debate continues over wartime use of the weapons. And the identities and souls of Nagasaki and the Tri-Cities still are tied to Fat Man's plutonium core.

Despite that link, residents of the two communities know little about each other. There is a vast gulf between their perspectives on the Fat Man dropped from Bock's Car.

In the Tri-Cities, it was the moment that ended the war, a triumph of science that saved hundreds of thousands from dying in a bloody invasion of Japan. The carnage in Nagasaki was largely overlooked.

But in Nagasaki, that carnage and the years of suffering it caused are seen as an indiscriminate attack that went beyond what should be allowed in war. Japan's aggression, its fight-to-the-death tactics and the unwillingness of its leaders to surrender seem forgotten there.

Today's Herald looks at these two cities whose fates were forged in the heat of an atomic blast.

It is a tale of a cosmopolitan Japanese port founded by Portuguese missionaries and traders in 1571, and the story of a secret city carved out of isolated sagebrush by atomic scientists in 1943.

Herald reporters Wanda Briggs, John Stang and Les Blumenthal examine how these two cities crossed paths for a moment in 1945, as Hanford plutonium set fire to the air over Nagasaki.

They also tell how the two cities continue to deal with the legacy of 1945, how their identities today and forever are linked in the birth of the Atomic Age.