A Continuing Dispute
For the most part federal officials responded to the emerging controversy as they always had—by denying the
danger of the radiation exposure. A December 1979 White House letter to veterans and widows maintained that
maximum doses "received by any U.S. serviceman in either city, in an absolute worst case, is less than one rem. The
estimate assumes the man arrived with the first unit in September 1945, remained until the last unit left in July 1946,
and worked eight hours a day, seven days a week, for nine and a half months, in the highest-intensity portion of the
very small fallout field (a few hundred meters in diameter). Since, in the actual situation, no one approximated this
worst-case pattern, DNA believes the maximum dose any individual received was markedly less than one rem." The
letter added that this dose was far below that allowed for radiation workers, and lower than common medical X
rays.128
By the middle of 1980 the Department of the Navy was sending out a new batch of letters designed to soothe
veterans of Hiroshima or Nagasaki who had contacted a wide range of federal agencies with their concerns. "The
Department of Defense and the U.S. Government continue to be deeply interested in the welfare of veterans and
determined to insure that issues such as these are fully investigated, with wide dissemination of the results," Navy
Captain J. R. Buckley wrote. Furthermore, Captain Buckley informed veterans receiving his letter, "It is reassuring
to note that the likelihood of exposure to any radiation was quite low, that there was no possibility of any occupation
force member having received a significant dose, and there is no cause whatsoever for concern over an increased risk
of adverse health effects."129
The Defense Nuclear Agency prepared a lengthy "fact sheet" titled Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces,
releasing it to the media on August 11, 1980. The thirty-page Pentagon report did not stray from any previous
positions. "The maximum radiation dose any member of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan could have received—
considering his external dose, his inhaled dose, and his ingested dose—was less than one rem. . . . the health risk
from a dose such as this is negligible—so small statistically that it cannot be expressed in meaningful terms."130
The hot-off-the-press Defense Department document clearly impressed the Associated Press reporter on the
Pentagon beat, Fred S. Hoffman, who promptly turned the DNA "Public Affairs Office" handout into article form131
without seeking any contrary points of view.132
While conceding that "unquestionably there would have been occasions during the Nagasaki occupation on which
patrols or other groups entered the areas of residual contamination to carry out specific missions,"133 the Pentagon
report stated that the troops closest to ground zero generally remained out of the blast center area.134 Many Nagasaki
cleanup veterans and widows found the depiction infuriating.
Virginia Ralph responded by pointing out that "no mention is made of the school building where Lyman Quigley
was quartered, nor the bombed-out waterfront hotel where Jack McDaniel stayed nor the bombed-out warehouse
where Joe [Ralph] was billeted."135
The Defense Department’s description of the Marines as aloof from cleanup activities in the ground zero area did
not jibe with remembrances of the ex-Marines themselves. Nor was it consistent with the results of a painstaking
search of U.S. military archives, in 1979 and 1980, by a Hollywood-based independent documentary filmmaker,
Trell W. Yocum.
Sifting through scene-by-scene descriptive logs accompanying thirty-two reels of footage lodged in the U.S.
Marine Corps Histories Division, Yocum cross-referenced the information with interviews of ex-Marines who
participated in the Nagasaki occupation. Yocum confirmed that a few companies of U.S. Marines totaling several
hundred of the men who arrived in Nagasaki on September 23, 1945, were billeted in the immediate area of the
atomic blast hypocenter—in direct contradiction to the claims made by the Defense Nuclear Agency thirty-five years
afterward.136
The Pentagon’s retrospective report, complete with tidy hand-drawn maps, portrayed the 2nd Marine Division
occupation troops closest to the hypocenter as members of the 2nd and 6th Regiments billeting at Kamigo Barracks
seventy-five hundred yards south of the hypocenter, and at Oura Barracks five thousand yards southwest of the
hypocenter.137
But by matching up official maps, Marine Corps archival footage records, and independently conducted
interviews, Yocum confirmed that at least three Marine companies from those regiments were actually billeted
within a mile of the hypocenter. The partially destroyed schoolhouse occupied by Lyman Quigley and other Marines
in the 2nd Pioneer Battalion’s Company C "engineers" unit was approximately one thousand yards from the atomic
blast’s ground zero, according to Yocum’s research for his film The Other Victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.138
(In a scientific consultant’s report distributed in 1981, DNA quietly acknowledged the 2nd Pioneer Battalion’s
constant involvement in hypocenter-zone cleanup, and noted the battalion was used "to rehabilitate two athletic fields
in the ‘bombed’ area of the city.")139
Throughout, the well-publicized 1980 "fact sheet" from the Pentagon strove to assert that scientific research had
found insignificant levels of residual radiation at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.140 Thus, the official story went, troops
were ordered into an area where no threat to health existed.
But four months before the DNA released its report, The Washington Post had unearthed a declassified survey141
from the National Archives on residual radiation levels in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had been completed in 1946.
In an article published April 13, 1980, the Post stated, "The once-secret reports are bound to increase the controversy
that has developed over whether U.S. troops sent to Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 absorbed enough radiation to
cause cancers that appeared after 20 years or more." The Post noted that two teams of U.S. Government researchers,
surveying the outskirts of Nagasaki two months after the atomic bombing, found radiation "that was twice the level
now considered safe for nuclear workers and over 10 times the radiation safety standard for the general
population."142
Left unacknowledged were the lethal qualities of minute alpha particles capable of lodging in human bone
marrow, lungs, and other organs. The Defense Nuclear Agency preferred to focus attention on gamma—external—
radiation doses left in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, while parenthetically claiming that
plutonium and other forms of alpha-particle radiation were virtually nonexistent. It was not a bad assumption—if
those veterans hadn’t been breathing.
"The U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency estimate of the radiation dose received by these Marines is not accurate,"
concluded Dr. Ikuro Anzai, a Tokyo University professor and secretary general of the ten-thousand-member Japanese
Scientists Association, who conducted a detailed study of the issue. Anzai was concerned with alpha-radioactivity
intake: "Though, by my calculations, the external exposure would have been relatively small, the internal radiation
dose received by the bone marrow of these men could have been exceedingly high. This was due to plutonium
deposited in the water and soil of Nagasaki."143
Dramatic substantiation of that view came on October 10, 1980, at a medical symposium held in Tokyo. Not only
was plutonium released at the time of the bombing; it is still there.
"Thirty-five years after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, large amounts of deadly plutonium still lie buried under
the city, a professor of medicine says," United Press International reported. "Professor Shunzo Okajima, a specialist
in the effects of the atomic bombings in Japan, told a radiotherapeutics conference . . . that unusually large amounts
of the radioactive substance were detected 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) east of the blast’s center in the city’s Nishiyama
district."144
"Radioactivity levels in the Nishiyama district were far higher than I had expected," said Professor Okajima, who
had just completed a study of radioactivity in Nagasaki’s soil. "I don’t expect immediate effects on human beings,"
he added.145
But, UPI recounted, Okajima "cautioned that extreme care must be taken with plutonium, which is believed to
cause lung cancer. . . . The professor said he was alarmed because 76 percent of the plutonium was concentrated
within 10 centimeters (4 inches) of the surface."146
All but two paragraphs of the nine-thousand-word Defense Nuclear Agency report issued August 6, 1980, skirted
the specific health problems among United States veterans of Japan atomic bomb cleanup. As had been government
policy before, the DNA report—dated precisely thirty-five years after the day in history when the atomic age was
introduced to the world—still espoused the U.S. Government’s theoretical conclusion that no appreciable health risks
were involved.
The report’s few sentences commenting on actual subsequent health ills among Nagasaki cleanup Marines
illustrate how far down the road of misinformation the Pentagon had gone.
"One specific health risk deserves mention because it has received some recent publicity. This concerns a type of
bone marrow cancer known as ‘multiple myeloma.’" Conceding that "four veterans of the Nagasaki occupation have
been diagnosed as having multiple myeloma," the report claimed, "This does not appear to represent an abnormal
incidence of this disease. The following statistics from the National Cancer Institute are pertinent. If you start with
10,000 males age 25, in 1945 (which approximates the Nagasaki Marines); then today, in 1980, about 7.7 deaths
from multiple myeloma should have already occurred, based on normal statistics." The report concluded, then, that
"the four multiple myeloma cases that are known are less than the number that would have been expected for a
normal, non-radiation-exposed group of this age and size."147
In those few sentences the Pentagon had thoroughly distorted the situation. Use of the ten thousand Marines
figure was misleading in the extreme, grossly inflating the statistical "data base" against which the multiple myeloma
cases would be compared. By the Defense Department’s own account the vast majority of those ten thousand Marine
occupation troops remained several miles from ground zero in Nagasaki. But the five—not four—cases of multiple
myeloma were all among the approximately one thousand Marines billeted in the immediate central area, within a
mile of the hypocenter in late September 1945. In effect the Pentagon’s DNA report was multiplying the
epidemiological data base ten-fold by including the Marines stationed at the 6th Regiment’s Oura Barracks three
miles to the southwest and the 2nd Regiment’s Kamigo Barracks more than four miles to the south of the hypocenter.
With the correct data base of one thousand, according to medical incidence tables cited by all sources in the
dispute, the occurrence of multiple myeloma among the five Marine veterans was between 6.5 and 10 times higher
than normal. And for all we know, Harry Coppola, Harold Joseph Ralph, Alvin Lasky, Richard Bonebrake, and
George Proctor were not the only ones among the Marines at the blast core area that first occupation week who later
developed multiple myeloma. The five of them represented the minimum, not the maximum of actual incidences of
the rare bone-marrow disease.
Federal officials have refused to make detailed records available for systematic research on the cleanup veterans.
Thanks to government intransigence, the full dimensions of the health toll probably will never be known.
U.S. servicemen sent into Nagasaki and Hiroshima amid residual radiation were the first Americans to confront
the specter of invisible radiation from atomic weaponry. They were by no means the last. After 1945 nuclear bomb
explosions proliferated—and so did their victims, in uniform and out.
128. Ellen Goldstein to Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, December 18, 1979.
129. Captain J. R. Buckley, USN, to Maurice E. Wilson, Portland, Oregon, October 22, 1980.
130. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces, pp. 25, 29-30.
131. San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, August 12, 1980.
132. Fred Hoffman, interview, August 1980.
133. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces, p. 22.
134. Ibid., p. 21.
135. Virginia Ralph, interview, August 1980.
136. Trell Yocum interviews and correspondence (7471 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, CA 90028), December 1979 to February 1981.
137. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces, pp. 16, 21.
138. Documents were obtained by Yocum from Motion Picture Film Video Tape Depository, Quantico, Virginia, aided by Support Branch, History and
Museums Division.
139. Radiation Dose Reconstruction, p. 23.
140. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces, pp. 25, 29-30.
141. Naval Medical Research Institute, Measurement of the Residual Radiation Intensity at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Sites, NMRI-160A
(Bethesda: National Naval Medical Center, 1946).
142. Washington Post, April 13, 1980.
143. Trell Yocum interviewed Dr. Ikuro Anzai in March 1980.
144. 144. United Press International, dateline Tokyo, October 10, 1980.
145. Ibid.
146. Ibid.
147. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces, p 28.