Uncovering an Atomic Plague: Radiation Effects at Hiroshima and Beyond

Denial has often been the default mode of the atomic state. But there have always been individuals willing to push back against the self-serving narrative fed to the public.

The U.S. Army and the War Department went to extraordinary lengths to suppress images of death and illness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, preferring to highlight wrecked buildings. What reporters were allowed to report was scripted and controlled and newsreel footage was classified or disappeared altogether. Lifton and Mitchell note:

“From the very start, the visual record of the atomic bombings would be limited to structural effects, while the human dimension would be evaded or ignored.”

However, the occupying U.S. forces worked to obscure not simply images of acute death and injury but also the slow violence derived from gamma and neutron radiation surging through the bodies of those who survived the initial onslaught.

Japanese physicians were the first to confront lingering injuries. In trying to make sense of what they were seeing, they originally presumed the bomb released some kind of poisonous gas. They soon concluded they were cataloging radiation sickness. Their medical case notes, biopsy slides, and photographs were confiscated, and much of this evidentiary material was classified and therefore kept out of the public realm for decades.

Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett refused to comply with U.S. Army censorship and boarded a train from Tokyo to Hiroshima, alone. Burchett was the first Allied journalist to view the devastation, but he was equally astonished by a malady afflicting many who survived the initial detonation. He referred to an “atomic plague” in London’s Daily Express newspaper on September 5, 1945.

“In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects,” Burchett observed.

The story got him expelled from Japan.

A chemical explosion produces a blast wave, heat, and a flash of light, but an atomic detonation elicits all of the above in extravagant abundance and something more. Conventional destruction is bounded in geographic space and time, but the damage derived from the violent reshaping of matter is open-ended and difficult to define geographically or temporally. The distinction between the conventional and the nuclear, in turn, is more than simply increased scale but the character of the effects persisting in the aftermath.

Indeed, the atomic plague is unlike any other malevolence humanity has confronted.

In October of 1945, Charles H. Loeb highlighted the scale of destruction at Hiroshima and the question of radioactive injury in a front-page story in the Atlanta Daily World. A high-profile Black reporter whose stories were disseminated to papers across the country by the National Negro Publishers Association, Loeb’s was a distinctive viewpoint beyond simply that of the major daily newspapers. Reeling from his time in Hiroshima, he raised a troubling consideration:

“However, scientific considerations aside, the scene will forever remind all who visit it of the awe-inspiring challenge to humanity offered by this newest destructive force.”

(Charles Loeb surveying the ruins in Manila, Phillipines)

In 1946, in the pages of The New Yorker, John Hersey recounted the experiences of Japanese survivors of the bombings. Their testimonials served as a counterpoint to the official narrative. Now the public was presented with an accounting unconcerned with wrecked buildings but attentive to shattered lives. The human dimension at Hiroshima, and by extension Nagasaki, exploded onto the American psyche.

We have struggled to reconcile this history with our propensity to yield to confident ignorance ever since.

Of the six witnesses whose experiences are at the heart of Hiroshima, Hersey notes:

“A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto’s church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.”

(John Hersey)

Like a rushing, headlong locomotive, the decision to bomb Japan was less a verdict arrived at through deliberate debate than the weight of institutional momentum built up over nearly three years of frenzied research and development at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It would have taken particular resolve on behalf of President Harry Truman to halt this momentum.

The resolve to cover up the radiation effects of atomic weaponry was a more explicit decision. And it illustrated a fear of the public and contempt for democratic processes that was a consistent dynamic shaping the operational conduct of the U.S Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) during the era of open-air atomic weapons testing, between 1946-1962.

Limiting press coverage to the structural effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unsustainable strategy. Words and images were bound to get out. But it did set the tone, and in the years since “nuclear denial,” as Charles Perrow refers to it, has too often substituted for honest dialogue and debate.

However, those critiquing public discontent with nuclear technology in the United States rarely consider the long history of nuclear denial. Public reticence did not begin with the decimation of Hiroshima but the conviction, in the immediate aftermath, that the public’s perception of the bombings needed to be managed and contained.

Indeed, the Manhattan Project hired a New York Times reporter to parcel out information-in effect leveraging the status and prestige of the largest newspaper in the country. William L. Laurence was the only reporter to witness the Trinity detonation in south-central New Mexico and the dropping of the Nagasaki device weeks later.

Laurence is best regarded as a propagandist who sold his integrity for privileged access. It was the kind of access and renown that garners a Pulitzer Prize-which he received for his reporting of the Nagasaki mission.

Laurence published numerous stories in the Times in the days and weeks after the bombings that forcefully disputed reports of ground-level radioactivity, of which little was detected, but also the very idea that a pulse of gamma and neutron radiation had a significant deleterious effect.

Consistent with the favored narrative of the U.S. Army–where he was on the payroll–Laurence stressed the blast effects and downplayed the evidence of radiation sickness and death. And in conflating these two issues–Laurence spread misinformation far and wide that shaped public opinion in the United States and diminished the experiences of the Hibakusha or the “atomic bombed.”

It is the kind of self-serving denial that reporters such as Burchett, Loeb, and Hersey worked to counter.

For more information:

Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (NY: Harper Collins, 1995).

Burchett’s article is reprinted in Shadows of Hiroshima (London: Verso, 1983).

Janet Farrell Brodie, “Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 4 (2015): 842-864.

Robert A. Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale University Press, 2022).

William J. Broad, “The Black Reporter Who Exposed a Lie About the Atom,” New York Times, August 9, 2021.

Charles H. Loeb, “Loeb Reflects on Atomic Bombed Area,” Atlanta Daily World, October 5, 1945.

Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

John Hersey, Hiroshima (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).

Charles Perrow, “Nuclear Denial: From Hiroshima to Fukushima,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69, no. 5 (2013): 56-67.

William L. Laurence, “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales,” New York Times, September 9, 1945.

William L. Laurence, “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” New York Times, September 12, 1945.

Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021).