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A Hollow Triumph
Five months previous to Lyman Quigley’s return home, the President of the United States was contemplating the
new vistas of atomic energy. "We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world," President
Harry S. Truman wrote in his diary two weeks before the United States exploded nuclear weapons over the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I have told the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives
and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children." The atomic bomb, President Truman noted,
"seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."9
Truman was weighing options left in the wake of an experimental detonation of the first atom bomb on July 16,
1945. A nuclear blast named Trinity, set off in the New Mexico desert, had been a spectacular triumph for
participants in the supersecret Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb.
But some Manhattan Project researchers were uneasy about the new weapon. Warnings, like the confidential
Franck Report, which scientists presented to War Secretary Stimson, urged demonstration of an A-bomb at a sparsely
populated spot. However, as a chief drafter of the Franck Report, Dr. Eugene Rabinowitch, remarked later, ". . . the
American war machine was in full swing and no appeals to reason could stop it."10
At the U.S. War Department, senior officers believed "it was very important to prove the bomb a successful
weapon, justifying its great cost," observed David H. Frisch, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Frisch remembered that America’s military strategists were eager "to use the bomb first where its effects would be
not only politically effective but technically measurable."11
Manhattan Project director General Leslie R. Groves recalled that it was "desirable that the first target be of such
size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb."
For the same reason criteria for targeted cities included absence of previous bombardments.12 Thirty-five years after
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. Government was listing them as "Announced United
States Nuclear Tests."13
"Nobody really knows how many people were killed in Hiroshima: anywhere from around 60,000 to 300,000,"
comments Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, whose study of A-bomb survivors won the National Book Award. "The city of
Hiroshima estimates 200,000. It depends upon how you count, which groups you count, whether you count deaths
over time. And it depends on emotional influences on the counters. It is of some significance that American
estimates have tended to be lower than Japanese."14
Japan’s dazed hierarchy in Tokyo had little time to assess the unprecedented, catastrophic chaos of Hiroshima.
Three days later another searing flash—this one fueled with plutonium instead of uranium and detonated with a more
sophisticated implosion apparatus—devastated Nagasaki. In both cities, despite Truman’s diary vow, women and
children were among the primary sufferers. Included were several thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry,
stranded in Japan when the war began.15 And at least eleven American POWs being held in Hiroshima died from the
bombing.16
"All concerned should feel a deep satisfaction at the success of the operations," Brigadier General Thomas F.
Farrell reported about the Nagasaki bombing in a memorandum to General Groves.17 But when the war ended a few
days later at the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory in New Mexico, according to journalist Lansing Lamont,
"more than one scientist walked cold sober into the dark of that August night and retched."18
United States policymakers certainly were anxious to convey the image of a return to normality as soon as
possible in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When U.S. occupation troops reached Nagasaki in late September 1945, they
were there to help calm a jittery world.
Entering Nagasaki six weeks after the nuclear bombing, about one thousand Marines and a smaller detachment of
Navy Seabees were billeted in the demolished core area around the blast center. Assigned cleanup duties, they
arrived as U.S. military-command press releases announced that scientists had found no lingering radiation worth
worrying about in Nagasaki. Two weeks later, in less extensive operations, U.S. Army troops moved into the
Hiroshima area.19
What they endured in ensuing decades closely resembles the ordeals of a wide range of American radiation
victims, consistently ignored and denied at every turn by the very institutions responsible for causing their problems.
Accorded no place in official histories, many of these U.S. veterans suffered privately, with debilitating and often
rare health afflictions as they reached middle age. Some developed terminal illnesses affecting bone marrow and
blood production—the kind of biological problems long associated with radiation exposure. Others found that at
unusually early ages they were plagued by heart attacks, severe lung difficulties, pain in their bones and joints,
chronic fatigue, and odd skin disorders.
The ultimate question of the controversy about these veterans is whether they later suffered significantly higher
rates of diseases compared with average occurrences among other American males of their age. Were serious
illnesses among those veterans merely random—or were they part of a pattern of extraordinarily high ratios of
particular diseases linked to their stints in postbomb radioactive rubble?
Normally among American men in their late fifties one would find multiple myeloma bone-marrow cancer at an
average rate of about one-half case per one thousand, according to standard medical incidence tables.20 So ordinarily
perhaps one case of multiple myeloma might be expected to develop later among the one thousand U.S. Marines
routinely present within about a mile of the atomic blast center point of Nagasaki during the last week of September
1945. We have found five cases of multiple myeloma among those particular Marines—an extremely high incidence
of the terminal bone-marrow disease.
Additional blood-related afflictions—such as Hodgkin’s disease, myelofibrosis, and leukemia—have been
documented by the veterans, and their widows. And other painfully insidious illnesses became common.
8. Ibid.
9. Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); diary entry July 25, 1945, published in
The Oregonian (Portland), October 12, 1980.
10. Richard S. Lewis and Jane Wilson, eds., Alamogordo Plus Twenty-Five Years (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), p. 4.
11. Ibid., p. 254.
12. Ibid.
13. U.S. DOE, Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979 (Las Vegas: DOE Office of Public Affairs, 1980), p. 5 (hereafter
cited as Announced U.S. Nuclear Tests).
14. Robert Jay Lifton, "The Prevention of Nuclear War," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1980, p. 38.
15. Approximately six hundred survived and returned home, mostly to California and Hawaii. Although U.S. citizens, none were able to gain medical assistance
from their government for persistent health effects of being subjected to nuclear attack. See San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 1979, p. 30; also, American
Atomic Bomb Survivors. A Plea for Medical Assistance (San Francisco: National Committee for Atomic Bomb Survivors in the United States, 1979),
available from Japanese American Citizens League, 1765 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA 94115.
16. "Government documents and the testimony of former servicemen indicate that the United States has been concealing information about the deaths of these
men for 34 years," historian Barton J. Bernstein concluded in 1979. The American government maintained its long silence about the POW deaths, the
Stanford University professor contended, "so as not to weaken, impair or damage the reputation of U.S. leaders and to block any moral doubts at home about
combat use of the atomic bomb." (United Press International, dateline San Francisco, reporting on July 23, 1979, press conference by Barton Bernstein.) See
also New York Times, August 21, 1979.
17. Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald, eds., The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Dial Press, 1977), p. 534.
18. Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 268.
19. Interviews with several dozen American veterans of Nagasaki cleanup. Also, U.S. DOD, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces (Washington, D.C.:
Defense Nuclear Agency, 1980); U.S. DOD, Radiation Dose Reconstruction U.S. Occupation Forces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan 1945-1946
(Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1981).
In some respects the U.S. servicemen’s atomic cleanup experiences in Japan resembled events more than thirty years later in the South Pacific. In the late
1970s, about three thousand American GIs—some wearing surgical protective masks—obeyed orders to clean up Eniwetok atoll radioactivity left by scores of
nuclear tests at those islands. The three-year, $100 million cleanup project was backed by Defense Nuclear Agency officials eager to show that islands in the
radiation-covered atoll could be made habitable. (See Steve Rees, "84th Eng Bn Exposed to Cancer Causing Elements on Clean-up Mission: But Why?"
Enlisted Times, August 1979, pp. 5, 19.)
20. White House Domestic Policy Staff Assistant Director Ellen L. Goldstein to Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, December 18, 1979;
available from Committee, P.O. Box 14424, Portland, OR 97214.
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