The Hiroshima Cover-Up

The Hiroshima Cover-Up should be a lesson for today. It concerns the suppression of reporter George Weller's account of post-bomb Nagasaki.

"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."

But his reports were squashed by the military. Another reporter's camera was confiscated. And then the government sent their own reporter in.

...Mr. Laurence (a science reporter from the NY Times who was on the payroll of the War Department) 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."

So the lesson...

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.

Something to think about as we read the filtered news out of Iraq...as we see the build-up of a new nuclear arms race...