Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

the prognosis for civilization’s survival is grim; as Einstein said after the Japan bombings: “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.

Yet the greatest tragedy of the twenty-first century may be that we have learned so little from the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Apparently catastrophe lessons need to be experienced firsthand by each generation. So, here are some refreshers: Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.

I covered it up, and John Hersey uncovered it,” [McCrary] stated. “That’s the difference between a P.R. man and a reporter.

Ross had long instructed Shawn that “we don’t cover the news; we parallel the news”;

hair-trigger mistake or misinterpretation between two nuclear powers that could lead to an immediate, irreversible nuclear confrontation. If such “slippage” occurred now, leaders could, in a matter of minutes, incite events that would wipe out all life on earth.

What private hopes had his conscription snatched from him?

I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been a deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory,” [Hersey] said in 1986, in a rare interview. “The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

Hiroshima had become the document of record about the true human cost of nuclear war, and was destined to remain so for decades.

War is ethically totally different from peace,” [Conant] later stated

History is history,” the Times concluded. “It cannot be undone. [But] [sic] the future is still ours to help make.

The disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork,” the Times editorial stated. “They were defended then, and are defended now, by the argument that they saved more lives than they took – more lives of Japanese as well as more lives of Americans. The argument may be sound or it may be unsound. One may think it sound when he recalls Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr. Hersey.

Every American who has permitted himself to make jokes about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one sensational phenomenon that can now be accepted as part of civilization, like the airplane and the gasoline engine… ought to read Mr. Hersey,” the editorial read.

After the war, the Germans had professed that they hadn’t known what happened in their concentration camps, the editorial pointed out; Americans were now in a comparable position and looked like “amoral fools.” Hiroshima had not been treated as a crime because it was a victor’s handiwork.

…Hiroshima terrified Hersey from the moment he arrived; the fact that a single bomb had caused this destruction would torment him throughout the duration of his assignment.

Summoned by Congress that November to testify about use of the bombs on Japan and their after-effects, the [General Groves] eventually conceded that radiation had been responsible for some of the deaths in the atomic cities, but informed the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy that doctors had assured him that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.

How simple it is to scoop the world, even if a flock of other journalists have the same facts and the same opportunities,” [Ross] told Flanner.

Hiroshima was a decimated “death laboratory” littered with the corpses of “human guinea pigs”…

Upon hearing the news about Hiroshima, Hersey was immediately overwhelmed by a sense of despair.

…Little Boy, was already considered primitive by the time Hersey wrote his 1946 story just months after the bomb’s detonation.

But as the document of record – read over years by millions around the world – graphically showing what nuclear warfare truly looks like, and what atomic bombs do to humans, “Hiroshima” has played a major role in preventing nuclear war since the end of World War II. In 1946, Hersey’s story was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilisation. It has since helped motivate generations of activists and leaders to prevent nuclear war, which would likely end the brief human experiment on earth. We know what atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us. Since the release of “Hiroshima,” no leader or party could threaten nuclear action without an absolute knowledge of the horrific results of such an attack.

The published images of Hiroshima’s demolished landscape gravely undersold the reality of atomic aftermath.

The few journalists attempting to report on the atomic cities in the weeks immediately following the bombings were threatened with expulsion from Japan, harassed by U.S. officials, and accused of spreading Japanese propaganda…

The United States – which had just won a painfully earned moral and military victory over the Axis powers – was not eager to “get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” as the country’s secretary of war put it.

(The Ross editing experience could be like “being stung to death by an army of gnats,” one New Yorker writer recalled.)

If our concept of… civilization was to mean anything,” he stated, “we had to acknowledge the humanity of even our misled and murderous enemies.” When he got into Japan, and then into Hiroshima—no small feat in an occupied country closely controlled by General Douglas MacArthur and his forces—Hersey managed to interview dozens of blast survivors.

The opportunity to learn from history's tragedies has not yet passed.

The figure of the journalist was becoming more important than what was being written about.