nuclear-news

We knew her as Aunt Reggie, a nun with Montreal’s order of the Sacred Heart. She was teaching in Japan when war broke out. She was imprisoned in an internment camp outside Nagasaki.

Boasting some beautiful churches, Nagasaki was home to Japan’s biggest colony of Christians. Thus far, the city had been spared the U.S. Army Air Force campaign of annihilation. Under General Curtis LeMay, armadas of B-29s were systematically bombing Japan “back to the stone age.”………

……….Fat Man was released, flying like an angel of death toward an unsuspecting population. The bomb exploded at 500 metres at precisely 11:02 a.m.

“It seemed as though the sun had burst and I was lost in its midst. I threw myself at once into a clump of young bamboo trees. I was lying on a big bag of grass. My face only felt hot.”

She was spared the worst of the physical blast, shielded by the tall hills encircling Nagasaki. She ran back to the camp. All the windows had imploded. The shattering glass inflicted minor wounds. Downtown Nagasaki was another story.

The city burned for days. Almost all of the churches were destroyed. The survivors wrote of unspeakable suffering, 70,000 dead within 90 days, and everywhere a stench of death and corruption.

Sister McKenna wrote that the medical system is overwhelmed. “Two-thirds of the population of Nagasaki are dead. The city itself is a mass of ruins. They are still burning the dead. The hospitals having been destroyed, the wounded are not being cared for.”

In 1945, the medical world knew little of radiation poisoning, so her next line resonates. “Some patients apparently recover, then suddenly die from hemorrhages.”

All reporting from Nagasaki was censored.

A Japanese and American film crew rushed to the site. But their footage was suppressed for more than 50 years. When footage finally aired, the impact on public policy (“why two bombs?”) that the nuclear attack should have triggered was diminished by the passage of time.

For Sister McKenna, the imprint of that explosion was like a gigantic X-ray, searing her body and mind for a lifetime. Her fellow teaching sisters said “she was never quite right” after experiencing that cataclysm. And in the end she succumbed to a cancer brought on by radiation poisoning……http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/the-day-the-bomb-fell-on-nagasaki/article19959476/