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315 the region of the Plain; and he beheld there smoke rising from the earth as the smoke of a furnace." He was witnessing a “'Hiroshima" and a "Nagasaki" —the de- struction of a fertile and populated plain by atomic weapons. The year was 2024 B.C. Where are the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah today? An- cient Greek and Roman geographers reported that the once- fertile valley of the five cities was inundated following the catastrophe. Modern scholars believe that the "upheavaling" described in the Bible caused a breach in the southern shore of the Dead Sea, letting its waters pour through to submerge the low-lying region to the south. The remaining portion of what was once the southern shore became the feature figuratively called by the natives el-Lissan ("The Tongue"), and the once- populated valley with its five cities became a new, southern part of the Dead Sea (Fig. 102) still bearing the local nickname "Lot's Sea." In the north the outpouring of the waters south- ward caused the shoreline to recede. The ancient reports have been confirmed in moder times by various researches, beginning with an exhaustive exploration of the area in the 1920s by a scientific mission sponsored by the Vati- can's Pontifical Biblical Institute (A. Mallon, Voyage d'Explora- tion au sud-est de la Mer Morte). Leading archaeologists, such as W. F. Albright and P. Harland, discovered that settlements in the mountains around the region were abruptly abandoned in the twenty-first century B.C. and were not reoccupied for several cen- turies thereafter. And to this very day. the water of springs sur- rounding the Dead Sea has been found to be contaminated with radioactivity, "enough to induce sterility and allied afflictions in any animals and humans that absorbed it over a number of years" (I. M. Blake, "Joshua's Curse and Elisha's Miracle" in The Palestine Exploration Quarterly). The cloud of death, rising in the skies from the cities of the plain, frightened not only Lot and his daughters but also Abraham, and he did not feel safe even in the Hebron mountains, some fifty miles away. We are told by the Bible that he pulled up his encamp- ment and moved farther away westward, to reside at Gerar. Also, at no time thereafter did he venture into the Sinai. Even years later, when Abraham's son Isaac wanted to go to Egypt on account of a famine in Canaan, "Yahweh appeared unto him and said: 'Go not down to Egypt; dwell in the land which I will show The Nuclear Holocaust