"The Mahabharata clearly describes a catastrophic blast that rocked the continent. "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe...An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor...it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race.

"The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out, pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white.

"After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves into the river." "

Actually, I tried to look this up on sacred-texts.com, and while I found a SOMEWHAT similar passage with exact phrasing for some parts of this paragraph, the overall paragraph is fabricated or misinterpreted. There was no such description in the Mahabharata actually.