60 Years Since Hiroshima

60+ years of cover ups.
[Fair Use]

The Hiroshima Cover-Up

By Amy Goodman and David Goodman

08/05/05 "Baltimore Sun" -- --- A STORY THAT the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller's firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later, Nagasaki was hit. Gen. Douglas MacArthur promptly declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the news media. More than 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of the cities, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. Instead, the world's media obediently crowded onto the battleship USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the Japanese surrender.

A month after the bombings, two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.

Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Mr. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."

Mr. Burchett's article, headlined "The Atomic Plague," was published Sept. 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation and was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. The official U.S. narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed as "Japanese propaganda" reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.

So when Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller's 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, General MacArthur ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Mr. Weller later summarized his experience with General MacArthur's censors, "They won."

Recently, Mr. Weller's son, Anthony, discovered a carbon copy of the suppressed dispatches among his father's papers (George Weller died in 2002). Unable to find an interested American publisher, Anthony Weller sold the account to Mainichi Shimbun, a big Japanese newspaper. Now, on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings, Mr. Weller's account can finally be read.

"In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki," wrote Mr. Weller. A month after the bombs fell, he observed, "The atomic bomb's peculiar 'disease,' uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here."

After killing Mr. Weller's reports, U.S. authorities tried to counter Mr. Burchett's articles by attacking the messenger. General MacArthur ordered Mr. Burchett expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), his camera mysteriously vanished while he was in a Tokyo hospital and U.S. officials accused him of being influenced by Japanese propaganda.

Then the U.S. military unleashed a secret propaganda weapon: It deployed its own Times man. It turns out that William L. Laurence, the science reporter for The New York Times, was also on the payroll of the War Department.

For four months, while still reporting for the Times, Mr. Laurence had been writing press releases for the military explaining the atomic weapons program; he also wrote statements for President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. He was rewarded by being given a seat on the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, an experience that he described in the Times with religious awe.

Three days after publication of Mr. Burchett's shocking dispatch, Mr. Laurence had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people. His news story included this remarkable commentary: "The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. ... Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."

Mr. Laurence won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the atomic bomb, and his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb. It is time for the Pulitzer board to strip Hiroshima's apologist and his newspaper of this undeserved prize.

Sixty years late, Mr. Weller's censored account stands as a searing indictment not only of the inhumanity of the atomic bomb but also of the danger of journalists embedding with the government to deceive the world.

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and David Goodman, a contributing writer for Mother Jones, are co-authors of The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them.

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun

And here is a pile of declassified US armed forces and US administration documents of the play by play activities leading to, during and following the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilian populations by the USA. <p><a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm">fat little boy man</a>

Japan lucked out - if the Americans had not ended the war so quickly by using the Atom bomb the Imperial government would likely have continued the war for a long time, the Japanese weren't know for surrendering easily. Continued conventional war would have meant far greater damage and death to more cities and people in Japan. By making it patently obvious that they had no hope of winning, the Atom bomb spared countless lives and as a bonus the Japanese got a decent constitutional government and ally that has kept Japan peaceful for decades. If Japan wanted to be spared the effects of warfare they should never have attacked the United States in the first place.

don't eat any of that s***!
you will get sick (er)


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"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."

-Rene Descartes

Japan did indeed luck out with the relatively sanitary use of nuclear weapons by the United States. The Japanese government had trained and armed every civilian who could carry any kind of weapon, right down to schoolgirls with pikes and sticks, to resist an Allied invasion to the death. Given the overwhelming military resources of the Allies following the defeat of Nazi Germany, even without nuclear weapons, millions of Japanese would have been slaughtered in the effort to defeat the Imperial regime on its own ground. For example, the Americans would have certainly continued their area bombing with incendiaries against Japan's cities, some of which were already 70% destroyed by August 1945. Japan also lucked out with the American-Australian occupation... thanks to cynical American self-interestedness, virtually none of the folks who would have been tried and executed or jailed as war criminals in Germany were even arrested. A total of only 70 war criminals were jailed and less than half were executed. Hirohito, chief among the war criminals, was neither arrested nor charged and died in his bed. Germany was forced to admit its war guilt and compensate its victims. Japan has never admitted its war guilt (30 million Chinese and Korean dead, never mind the Allies) and will still not compensate Canadian prisoners of war used as slave labour. Japan is a dangerously forgetful country and it's a good thing for the world that China has become strong enough to keep Japan in its place.

Fine. Hysterically forgetful canadians like yourselves just cannot be bothered to compare it to the much more horrific bombing of Dresden.

We shouldn't be comparing bombings of cities. All bombings are horrific wherever it happens in the world. From the bombings of Dresden, Germany to Hiroshima, Japan, we should not compare which is more horrific. Other catastrophic bombings would be London, England and Berlin, Germany.

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"A person who walks in someone elses footprints leaves no footprints." Chinese Proverb

or the much, much, much, much more horrific bombing of Tokyo.

<br />
And I'm afraid we haven't seen the worst. With the launching of GWBush,WMD, onto the world in 2000 the future looks bleak for the nonproliferation treaties.<br />
<br />
The treaty wreckers <br />
<br />
In just a few months, Bush and Blair have destroyed global restraint on the development of nuclear weapons <br />
<br />
George Monbiot<br />
Tuesday August 2, 2005<br />
The Guardian <br />
<br />
Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated.<br />
As Robin Cook showed in his column last week, the British government appears to have decided to replace our Trident nuclear weapons, without consulting parliament or informing the public. It could be worse than he thinks. He pointed out that the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston has been re-equipped to build a new generation of bombs. But when this news was first leaked in 2002 a spokesman for the plant insisted the equipment was being installed not to replace Trident but to build either mini-nukes or warheads that could be used on cruise missiles.<br />
<br />
If this is true it means the government is replacing Trident and developing a new category of boil-in-the-bag weapons. As if to ensure we got the point, Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, announced before the leak that Britain would be prepared to use small nukes in a pre-emptive strike against a non-nuclear state. This put us in the hallowed company of North Korea.<br />
The Times, helpful as ever, explains why Trident should be replaced. "A decision to leave the club of nuclear powers," it says, "would diminish Britain's international standing and influence." This is true, and it accounts for why almost everyone wants the bomb. Two weeks ago, on concluding their new nuclear treaty, George Bush and the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh announced that "international institutions must fully reflect changes in the global scenario that have taken place since 1945. The president reiterated his view that international institutions are going to have to adapt to reflect India's central and growing role." This translates as follows: "Now that India has the bomb it should join the UN security council."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1540683,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1540683,00.html</a><p>---<br>"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche<br />

Fire bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, etc etc. Starvation of millions in China, Korea, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, etc. etc. Remember Nanking or a hundred other slaughters in Chinese cities?

Yes, the leaders of the human race are insane!

Got this from our friend SiamDave. (Don't know why you didn't post it here yourself!)

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I want to tell you I am very, very angry with you people. I know you will not print this letter, but I will tell you anyway.

Have you no shame at all? Is all sense of intelligence and decency gone from you since the corporate takeover last year? Have you become nothing more at all than blatant propagandists for the New World Order?

To even print a piece such as "No other event would have produced an enduring peace at less cost, says Richard B. Frank" as you did on Friday Aug 5/05 is to shout to the world that you have become serious historical revisionists, and will have nothing to do with the truth when it casts a bad light on your masters. You have often in the past scorned writers who even dared question things about the holacaust, for instance, things that might legitimately be questioned and debated, without even listening to what they had to say, yet here you print a piece that ignores substantial parts of the known historical record, in order to make what one can only assume are your American masters look a little less brutal and barbaric - which is, I might inform you, a pretty hopeless task anyway, given their record of the last 300 years or so.

It has long been established that the Japanese were desperately trying to surrender in July of 1945 (and before), as their German allies were militarily destroyed and defeated, leaving the great bear of Russia free to turn its weight to the east and its other enemy, their supplies and food were essentially gone along with their supply lines, they had suffered massive losses already as the Americans had battered them in battle after battle across the Pacific as they (the Americans) decisively won that aspect of the war - but Truman and the Pentagon were determined to show the Russians that they had the decisive weapon for the near future, and were anxious to give a demonstration of both its awesome power and their willingness to use it. Which they did. Murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians. Callously, willfully, needlessly. Murderously.

Your writer cannot even keep his "ideas" (I certainly shan't call anything he wrote a "fact") straight in a short article - first he says that "...Japanese military leaders did not regard Soviet entry as the end because the Soviets lacked the sea lift to deliver their massive armies and tactical air forces to the Home Islands..." - and then a few sentences later he says the almost exact opposite - "...the Soviet Union's initial intervention in the war against Japan ultimately cost the lives of between 340,000 and 500,000 Japanese, overwhelmingly non-combatants. Had the war not ended when it did, many more would have perished. The blockade would have killed millions..." (that is to say, if the death of some 300,000 following the atomic bombs caused the Japanese to surrender, then it is hard to imagine how the deaths of millions would not have, nor can one quite grasp how the Soviets could maintain a tight and effective blockade as he alludes to, but not have the ability to move troops and supplies ..... regardless, a mushroom cloud is a bad way to die, one must think, but it is very evident that so is prolonged starvation of large numbers of people over a long period of time - not that that sort of thing seems to bother Americans much, if we observe their reaction in much more modern times to the deaths of millions and then millions more by the most cruel starvation in Africa, and consider their pivotal role in these deaths through the policies of not only their own government, but their puppet organisations such as the World Bank and IMF, and their own arms dealers and drug companies and trade policies ...)

Your writer also rather conveniently forgets the firebombing of Tokyo in this piece, carried out earlier in the same year and on several occasions, which again murdered over 100,000 civilians, after which the Japanese were essentially finished, all the serious fight gone, and which again was entirely unnecessary (by this time the Americans and Russians could indeed have blockaded the small devastated island country as winter approached and waited for surrender) - and was, in reality, nothing more than a revengeful massacre, a demonstration of who was the new big dog in the world, done by those who could do it to those who had no defence.

Opinion and differing interpretations of things in history are one thing, and it is good to debate them to try to learn from what has gone before. Supposedly respectable newspapers passing off blatant lying by pathetic vassals in the service of Empire is quite another, particularly when the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians is involved, and the lying is nothing more than attempted revisionist whitewash of terrible atrocities - and at a time when that same empire is engaged in other atrocities around the world and many countries (unfortunately not ours included) are very rightly questioning its actions.

You have lost my respect forever for printing this piece of apologist garbage.

Dave Patterson
Prince of Songkla University
Hat Yai, Thailand
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"If you must kill a man, it costs you nothing to be polite about it." Winston Churchill

<p>SiamDave,</p> <blockquote>It has long been established that the Japanese were desperately trying to surrender in July of 1945 (and before) …</blockquote> <p>my understanding was that in June and July of 1945, the Japanese were seeking a <i>conditional</i> surrender — but the Allies insisted upon <i>unconditional</i> surrender (as they had with Germany), notably through the Potsdam Declaration of 26th July. Japan rejected this on 29th July, the Imperial Council being unaware of what the promised alternative of “prompt and utter destruction” would comprise …</p><p>---<br>[The people] will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.

You were being very silly Dave. You countered perceived lies with more lies. It is good that you can acknowledge it though, alot of people never do.