LINK FOR MY NEW BOOK, "Atomic Cover-Up" here.
Nagasaki, which lost over 70,000 civilians (and a few military personnel) to a new weapon 65 years ago today, has always been The Forgotten A-Bomb City. No one ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. Yet in some ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete. In fact, if it had not exploded off-target, the death toll in the city would have easily topped the Hiroshima total.
Hiroshima has always drawn the vast majority of press, public and historical interest, even though many who support the first atomic bombing have expressed severe misgivings about number two because of the failure of United States to give the Japanese at least a few days to consider surrender after the first blast (and the Soviets' shocking declaration of war). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once said in an interview that the "nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki." Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, called it a "war crime."
But Nagasaki was "forgotten" from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship.
One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved just five years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945.
The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. I wrote about this cover-up in the book I co-authored with Robert Jay Lifton in 1995, Hiroshima in America.
Carbon copies of the stories were found in 2003 when his son discovered them after the reporter's death. Four of them were published in 2005 for the first time by the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, which purchased them from the son, Anthony Weller. I was first to report on this in the United States.
The articles published in Japan (and later included in a book assembled by Anthony Weller, First Into Nagasaki) revealed a remarkable and wrenching turn in Weller's view of the aftermath of the bombing, which anticipates the profound unease in our nuclear experience ever since. "It was remarkable to see that shifting perspective," Anthony Weller told me.
An early article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8, 1945 -- two days after he reached the city, before any other journalist -- hailed the "effectiveness of the bomb as a military device," as his son describes it, and made no mention of the bomb's special, radiation-producing properties.
But later that day, after visiting two hospitals and shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease X" that was killing people who had seemed to survive the bombing in relatively good shape. A month after the atomic inferno, they were passing away pitifully, some with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots in patches."
The following day he again described the atomic bomb's "peculiar disease" and reported that the leading local X-ray specialist was convinced that "these people are simply suffering" from the bomb's unknown radiation effects.
Anthony Weller, a novelist, told me that it was one of great disappointments of his father's life that these stories, "a real coup," were killed by MacArthur who, George Weller felt, "wanted all the credit for winning the war, not some scientists back in New Mexico."
Others have suggested that the real reason for the censorship was the United States did not want the world to learn about the morally troubling radiation effects for two reasons: It aimed to avoid questions raised about the use of the weapon in 1945, or its wide scale development in the coming years. In fact, an official "coverup" of much of this information--involving print accounts, photographs and film footage--continued for years, even, in some cases, decades.
"Clearly," Anthony Weller told me of his father's reports, "they would have supplied an eyewitness account at a moment when the American people badly needed one."
The Scoop That Wasn't
How did George Weller get the scoop-that-wasn't?
After years of covering the Pacific war, Weller (left) arrived in Japan with the first wave of reporters and military in early September. He had already won a Pulitzer for his reporting in 1943. Appalled by MacArthur's censors, and "the conformists" in his profession who went along with strict press restrictions, he made his way, with permission, to the distant island of Kyushu to visit a former kamikaze base. But he noted that it was connected by railroad to Nagasaki. Pretending he was "a major or colonel," as his son put it, he slipped into the city (perhaps by boat) about three days before any of his colleagues, and just after Wilfred Burchett had filed his first report from Hiroshima.
Once arrived, Weller toured the city, the aid stations, the former POW camps (by some counts, more American POWs died from the A-bomb in Nagasaki than Japanese military personnel) and wrote numerous stories within days. According to his son, he managed to send the articles to Tokyo, not by wire, but by hand, and felt "that the sheer volume and importance of the stories would mean they would be respected" by MacArthur and his censors.
Although Weller did not express any outward disapproval of the use of the bomb, these stories -- and others he filed in the following two weeks from the vicinity -- would never see the light of the day, and the reporter lost track of his carbons. He would later summarize the experience with the censorship office in two words: "They won."
In the years that followed, Weller continued his journalism career, winning a George Polk award and other honors and covering many other conflicts. Neither the carbons nor the originals ever surfaced, before he passed away in 2002 at the age of 95. It was then that his son made a full search of the wildly disorganized "archives" at his father's home in Italy, and in 2003 found the carbons just 30 feet from his dad's desk.
And what a find: roughly 75 pages of stories, on fading brownish paper, that covered not only his first atomic dispatches but gripping accounts by prisoners of war, some of whom described watching the bomb go off on that fateful morning.
A 'Peculiar Weapon'
In the first article published by the Japanese paper, the first words from Weller were: "The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be." Weller described himself as "the first visitor to inspect the ruins."
He suggested about 24,000 may have died but he attributed the high numbers to "inadequate" air raid shelters and the "total failure" of the air warning system. He declared that the bomb was "a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon," and said he spent hours in the ruins without apparent ill effects. He did note, with some regret, that a hospital and an American mission college were destroyed, but pointed out that to spare them would have also meant sparing munitions plants.
In his second story that day, however, following his hospital visits, he would describe "Disease X," and victims, who have "neither a burn or a broken limb," wasting away with "blackish" mouths and red spots, and small children who "have lost some hair."
A third piece, sent to MacArthur the following day, reported the disease "still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.
"The doctors ... candidly confessed ... that the answer to the malady is beyond them." At one hospital, 200 of 343 admitted had died: "They are dead -- dead of atomic bomb -- and nobody knows why."
He closed this account with: "Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive Sept. 11 to study the Nagasaki bomb site. Japanese hope they will bring a solution for Disease X." To this day, that solution for the disease--and the threat of nuclear weapons--has still not arrived.
[See my pieces on Hiroshima here from a few days ago, including story of how Truman edited the first Hollywood movie about the bombings.]
Greg Mitchell is co-author of "Hiroshima in America" and writes the popular Media Fix blog for The Nation. He is the former editor of Nuclear Times and Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com Twitter: @GregMitch
Follow Greg Mitchell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GregMitch
The Atrocities that the Japanese committed during WWII were immoral.
Japan was completely unclear what they wanted to achieve with their Soviet mediation gambit, but the best guess was they wanted to end the war with a lasting ceasefire (like the way the Korean War later ended). No one in America was even remotely interested in that.
We did not "have" to use the bomb. Had Japan surrendered earlier, we wouldn't have used it.
And the bombs were meant to intimidate Japan, not Russia. The idea was to shock them into surrendering.
Nagasaki was selected as a target mainly because of the Mitsubishi Shipyards, which was a massive warship-building facility.
Yes, the Japanese were guilty of horrible attrocities. We've heard and read about them and seen them in the movies. A few still survive who experienced some of these attrocieits.
We've also heard much about the Nazi attrocities and the hollocust they unleashed against Jews, Gypsies, Atheists, and Homosexuals. We've heard about the bombings of the citizens of London and other British cities.
What we don't hear about so much are attrocities which the USA perpetrated in this war as well. Tokyo and other Japanese cities also experienced terrifying firebombings repeatedly. These bombings were not pinpointed on munitions or other military targets. They killed and maimed thousands of citizens in their homes and on the streets.
The debate on the atomic bombings will continue without clear resolution. We know that the Japanese surrender soon followed. Whether it would have happened without the bombings can be debated, but even the partially lifted veil of censorship reveals that there is a high probability that use of atomic weapons was more of a show and less of a necessity.
The probability that they were for show is very low. They were dropped because Japan hadn't surrendered yet.
A few years ago I wrote and directed the PBS documentary "Dr. Teller's Very Large Bomb", which dealt primarily with post-WWII weapons research but also looked at the reasons behind the bombing of Nagasaki. The general consensus was that once President Truman issued orders for the atomic bombing of Japan the bureaucracy took over. Three bombs were delivered to the 509th Composite Group on Tinian - the uranium weapon used against Hiroshima and two "Fat Man"-style plutonium bombs. We were told more than once that it was only the Japanese surrender that prevented the third bomb - the last one in the U.S. arsenal for some time thereafter - from being deployed. One of our interview subjects, Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, went into great detail about the options then available, both military and political. He expressed the same thought even more eloquently in another venue, where he observed that the Nagasaki mission happened because "They'd already paved the runways at Tinian."
Justifying this attack by mentioning the other crimes the Japanese military committed is to admit to justifying collective punishment. Those actually guilty of those crimes were put on trial and punished after the surrender. That was one of the terms Japan was willing to agree to in January 1945.
Remember, the targets for these atomic bombs were selected not for their military value, but for their lack of conventional bombing damage in order to assess their effectiveness. These bombings were experiments.
If Americans can't see past sixty-five-year-old U.S. military propaganda, what chance do we have at seeing through modern military propaganda?
the japanese junta refused repeatedly any terms of surrender. your use of january is typical of apologists.
granted the effects and the fallout were disproportionate upon civilians, that needs to be tempered by the fact of those slaughtered and raped by an unrepentant society.
If one makes a point, others clamor for a link.
If you provide a link, then it is discredited because it is from the internet.
There have been deliberate efforts to cover up the effects of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation for the past eighty years. Both these technologies are used widely in our economy and military, and public knowledge of their harmful effects could place a strong damper on their acceptance. Nuclear and fusion power, medical diagnostics and treatment, and other applications have been big money-makers for ionizing radiation, and cell phones, wireless internet, residential and commercial wiring, and other applications have been even bigger money-makers for non-ionizing radiation. No one wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, even if it results in tens or hundreds of thousands of premature deaths per year.
Did anyone suppress Marie Curie's 1934 death from radiation injuries?
People will be arguing for generations over the use of those weapons. I have my own opinion which has been know to shift. But there are some things that are beyond debate, and one of those things is who was right and who was wrong in that war. It might sound unfeeling, but neither the Japanese nor the Germans can expect sympathy for anything that befell them due to that war. I'm glad both countries and both peoples have moved on to greater things, but that war will always be a blight on their histories...far more than our use of those two bombs.
As will be the Neo Con War of Aggression, which killed a million innocents.
Weather over the target area was forecast to be unsuitable for an extended period starting on August 10, and he moved the schedule forward to accomplish the mission before the bad weather set in. One of the mission requirements was visual identification of the target aiming point, which could not be accomplished if the weather was overcast.
The timing of the second attack was a tactical decision made by the commander "on the ground".
Nagasaki was not the primary target. The primary, Kokura, was overcast.
The mission went on to the secondary target, Nagasaki, which was also overcast, but just at the point where they would have had to abort and dump the weapon into the ocean, the weather broke and they were able to identify the target visually.
1) Undermining the severity of a regime which slaughtered, among others, at least 30 million Chinese civilians (after all, it wasn't like they killed 12 million predominantly white Europeans, right?) and....
2) Regarding the Japanese with a condescending attitude that portrays them as a pitiful assortment of helpless and naive "children", incapable of knowing any better, beyond the pale of the "cruel and unusual punishment" of being held accountable for their own conduct and, finally, worth sparing the rules of total war in favor of nuturing approach capable of encouraging through sympathy and understanding, the rules by which the human race ought to behave.
While I don't condone the use of Atomic Weapons I believe that President Truman made the right choice in ordering the deployment and use of the atomic bomb. I don't feel that they US should hang it's head in shame for it uses it was a decision made during a war that was seen as a way for the US the ovoid high casualties from and invasion and it help to preserve the Japanese way of life.
SO would you like to see another nation or other nations make a similar decision so that "the USA way of life can be preserved??
That being said, in these circumstances, the bomb was the best course of action that could've been taken. It wasn't the right thing to do. There is no right thing to do. But having gone this far, this was the best thing to do. You realize that the estimated casualties for a traditional invasion of Japan went up to the millions? That not only military personnel would be affected, but civilians as well on an enormous scale? Yes, the physical effects of the bomb were devastating. Yes, they have lasted to this very day. But it could have been worse.
Back to this article, it was a despicable act on the part of the government to censor something of this scale. It's one of the things that are absolutely unforgivable: to demand the sacrifice of so many innocents and then to refuse to acknowledge the sheer magnitude of this sacrifice.