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Censorship of radiation effects from atomic bombing of Nagasaki

Nagasaki was “forgotten” from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship…..the real reason for the censorship was the United States did not want the world to learn about the morally troubling radiation effects

Press Censorship: How the Truth Was Hidden About Nagasaki | The Nation, 9 Aug 2010, Greg Mitchell “………..many who support the first atomic bombing have expressed severe misgivings about number two because of the failure of United States to give the Japanese at least a few more days to consider surrender after the first blast (and the Soviets’ declaration of war). Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once said in an interview that the “nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.”

But Nagasaki was “forgotten” from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship.

One of the great mysteries of the nuclear age was solved just five years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on August 9, 1945.

The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur’s censorship office in Tokyo. I wrote about this cover-up in the book I co-authored with Robert Jay Lifton in 1995, Hiroshima in America.

Carbon copiesof the stories were found in 2003 when his son discovered them after the reporter’s death. Four of them were published in 2005 for the first time by the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, which purchased them from the son, Anthony Weller. I was first to report on this in the United States…….

the real reason for the censorship was the United States did not want the world to learn about the morally troubling radiation effects for two reasons: It aimed to avoid questions raised about the use of the weapon in 1945, or its wide scale development in the coming years. In fact, an official “coverup” of much of this information—involving print accounts, photographs and film footage—continued for years, even, in some cases, decades.

“Clearly,” Anthony Weller told me of his father’s reports, “they would have supplied an eyewitness account at a moment when the American people badly needed one.”

Press Censorship: How the Truth Was Hidden About Nagasaki | The Nation

August 10, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, secrets,lies and civil liberties | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear technology, nuclear weapons, radiation, radioactive