Janet Farrell Brodie - The Little-Known History of Secrecy and Censorship in Wake of Atomic Bombings
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago,
is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant
aspects of that bombing are still not well known.
I recently published a social history of
US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based on.
The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in
archives around the US. I found that military and civilian officials in
the US sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the
blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the public’s understanding
of radiation from the bombings.
Heavy handed: Although everything related to the effects of the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bombs was defined at the time as a military secret, US officials
treated the three main effects – blast, fire, and radiation – very differently.
They publicized and celebrated the powerful blast but worked to suppress
information about the bombs’ radiation.
The world learned a month later a few details about that
radiation – that some type of “atomic plague” related to the atomic bomb was
causing death and illness in the two bombed cities. But for years radiation
remained the least publicized and least understood of the atomic bomb effects. To this day we have no fully accepted accounting of the atomic
bomb deaths in both cities; it has remained highly contested because of the
politics surrounding the bombing, because of problems with the wartime Japanese
census, and, importantly, because of the complexity of defining what
constituted radiation-caused deaths over decades.
In my research, I found US officials controlled information
about radiation from the atomic bombs dropped over Japan by censoring
newspapers, by silencing outspoken individuals, by limiting circulation of the
earliest official medical reports, by fomenting deliberately reassuring
publicity campaigns, and by outright lies and denial.
The censorship of the Japanese began quickly. As soon as
Japanese physicians and scientists reached Hiroshima after the bombing, they
collected evidence and studied the mysterious symptoms in the ill and dying.
American officials confiscated Japanese reports, medical case notes, biopsy
slides, medical photographs, and films and sent them to the US where much
remained classified for years (some for decades).
Historians note the irony of American Occupation officials
claiming to bring a new freedom of the press to Japan, but censoring what the
Japanese said in print about the atomic bombs. One month after the war ended,
Occupation authorities restricted public criticism of the US actions in Japan
and denied any radiation aftereffects from exposure to the nuclear bombs.
In the US, too, newspapers omitted or obscured anything
about radiation or ongoing radioactivity. Military officials encouraged editors
to continue some kind of wartime censorship especially about the bombs’
radiation. Four official US investigating teams sent to Japan in the months
immediately after the surrender wrote reports about the biomedical effects of
the two atomic bombs. Several of the reports minimised the radiation
effects and all received classifications as secret or top secret so the circulation
of the majority of their information remained constrained for years.
Traditional ‘combat’ bomb: The censorship has several explanations. Even Manhattan
Project scientists had only theoretical calculations about what to expect about
the bombs’ radiation. As scientists studied the complex effects in the next
years, the US government classified information from Japan as well as related
radiation information from medical research and the atomic bomb tests at the
Nevada Test Site.
American officials wanted reassurance that Allied troops
landing in Japan would not be endangered by any remaining radiation. Based on
pre-bomb calculations, US officials did not think that US troops would be
endangered by exposure to residual radiation but the concept of radiological
weapons and uncertainty created fear.
An additional explanation for the censorship of information
pertaining to radiation is that US officials did not want the new weapon to be
associated with radiological or chemical warfare, both of which were expanding
in scope and funding after the war. Those associated with the atomic bomb
wanted it to be viewed as a powerful but regular military weapon, a traditional
“combat bomb.” The results of the radiation censorship campaign have been
hard to pin down both because of the nature of the silencing itself (including
its incompleteness), and because knowledge leaked into public awareness in many
ways and forms. Historian Richard Miller observes that, “In the long run, the radiation from
the bomb was more significant than the blast or thermal effects.” Yet, for
years that radiation remained the least publicized and least understood of the
atomic bomb effects.
Legacy of secrecy
Censorship about the radiation deaths and sickness from the
atomic bombs in Japan was never, of course, entirely successful. American magazines featured fictional stories about cities
ravaged by radiation. John Hersey’s searing account, Hiroshima, became a
bestseller in 1946 just as the summer’s “Crossroads” atomic bomb tests in the Pacific received
massive publicity including reports about the disastrous radioactive spray that
contaminated eighty of the Navy’s unmanned test vessels. Campaigns from governmental officials as well as military,
scientific and industrial leaders sought to ease the public’s fears with the
alluring promises of miraculous medical cures and cheap energy from commercial
nuclear power.
Historians have described the American public’s reactions to
Hiroshima as “muted ambivalence” and “psychic numbing.” Historian John Dower
observes that although Americans demonstrated a long-term cyclical
interest in what happened “beneath the mushroom cloud,” the nation’s “more
persistent response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been “the averted gaze.” Secrecy, extraordinary levels of classification, lies,
denial, and deception became the chief legacy of the initial impulse to censor
radiation information from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
Additional reading:
- Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, translators. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (New York, 1981),
- Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America; a Half-Century of Denial (New York, 1995).
- Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud; the Decades of Nuclear Testing (New York, 1986).
- John Dower, Introduction in Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945. Fifty Years Later (Chapel Hill, 1955; 1995).
