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The Bombs Still Ticking

Eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the trauma of nuclear warfare lingers for thousands of survivors in Japan.

Progressive Magazine, by Jim Carrier ,August 6, 2025

n the cryogenic silence of frozen biological material stored in her radiation lab, Dr. Ayumi Hida hears a lesson for the nuclear age: “The atom bomb must not be used ever again.”

Hida is the Nagasaki chief of clinical studies for the longest continuous health survey in history, a remarkable effort begun days after the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her work has helped to establish that Japanese people still suffer—physically, mentally, and socially—from two atomic bombs dropped, as of August 2025, eighty years ago.

As Japan marks these anniversaries on August 6 and 9, decades of medical exams by Hida and her colleagues at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), along with evidence from its massive collection of preserved blood and tissue, have revealed that the nuclear genie unleashed in 1945 is still at work.

RERF has found in Japan’s bomb survivors new cancers, heart and immune problems, strokes, inflammation, leukemia, and even a form of cataracts—atop the usual maladies of old age. With a mean age of eighty-five, their ranks dropping by some 6,000 a year, 106,825 Japanese atomic bomb survivors—known as hibakusha, a term meaning “bomb-affected people”—also suffer from post-traumatic stress.

“They say, ‘I have an atomic bomb nest in my body,’ ” Dr. Masao Tomonaga tells The Progressive. Tomonaga, eighty-two, a hibakusha himself, cares for 400 survivors in a nursing home.

“The human consequences of the atomic bombs have not ceased,” he has written. “Many people are still dying of radiation-induced malignant disease. Therefore, it is too early to finalize the total death toll. Hibakusha have faced a never-ending struggle to regenerate their lives and families under the fear of disease.”

Honored for their anti-nuclear activism—the national Japanese hibakusha group known as Nihon Hidankyo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024—their unique stories describe what it was like to live through the only nuclear attacks in history. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where peace is a subject taught in schools, hibakusha speak regularly, so much so that students sometimes complain that they’ve heard it before.

Every living hibakusha is a walking laboratory, an experiment in the human effects of nuclear war. It is this story that is now emerging from long-term studies. “Fat Man,” the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killed 73,000 of the city’s 240,000 citizens, either instantaneously or by the end of 1945, with a combination of blast wind, thermal burns, and radiation—or, in some cases, all three. Fat Man’s twenty-one-kiloton yield surpassed the Hiroshima uranium bomb’s fifteen kilotons, but its effect was partially shielded by Nagasaki’s hilly Urakami River canyon over which it exploded.

Six hundred yards from ground zero on the day of the blast, Nagasaki’s medical college and hospital lost half of its staff and students, but the survivors set up first-aid stations within days. The injuries they saw ranged from embedded glass to ruptured intestines to carbonized skin flash-burned by the radiation. Tomonaga wrote that “according to the saddest memory of some survivors, the blast wind tore off the heads of babies who were being carried on their mothers’ backs in the traditional Japanese way. Most of the mothers also died.”

By that September, U.S. Army, Navy, and Manhattan District teams, with doctors, pathologists, and physicists, arrived together with occupying forces. Their mission was driven, largely, by a desire to understand the bomb’s effects and how the United States could protect itself from a nuclear bomb in the future. At the time, radiation was a new and mysterious force, and discoveries were mostly classified. Information about radiation and anything related to the bombings would be censored in the Japanese media until 1952.

Within weeks, however, the effects of the radiation began to show up in individuals—loss of hair, bloody diarrhea, peeling skin. Autopsies were performed and organs—such as hearts, lungs, eyes, brains—from hundreds of victims were taken to the U.S. military’s Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., where, in a secret, bomb-proof laboratory, the effects of high radiation were studied, analysis that helped create the guidelines and warnings for radiation exposure used worldwide today. The last organs, slides, and tissues were returned to Japan in 1973.

n October 12, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the merger of Japanese and American medical studies on the bombings under the leadership of sixty American and more than ninety Japanese physicians and scientists. The Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bombs evolved, in 1975, into RERF, with labs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is supported by the Japanese government and with $14 million annually from the U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security.

In 1950, Japan identified 94,000 bomb survivors and a control group of 27,000 people who were not exposed to the bomb, and began a lifetime epidemiological study of cancer and causes of death. Of that initial group of survivors, 25,000 adults are still being followed closely as they age for signs of any effects of radiation.

Every day at the RERF lab in Nagasaki, five of these patients arrive for their two-year screening. Blood is drawn, urine is collected, they are given a physical, and quizzed about their medical history and lifestyle. Living cells are stored in liquid nitrogen tanks—to date 2.3 million tubes of blood are stored there, Hida reports. Serum, plasma, and urine are put in freezers. The lab also holds half a million paraffin blocks of tissue and nearly one million autopsy and surgical slides, some dating back to 1945, she tells The Progressive. RERF is also following 77,000 children of bomb survivors and 3,600 people who were in their mothers’ wombs at the time when the bombs exploded. These efforts have helped RERF to identify three chronological phases of atomic bomb casualties.

By 1949, 210,000 survivors thought to be in relatively good health began to encounter the first signs of malignancy—leukemia, caused by radiation’s damage to blood cells. Cases in children and adults four-to-five times greater than those not exposed rose until 1955, and leveled out for a decade after that.

Around 1960, solid cancers began to appear, their numbers peaking in 2000 and remaining at that level since, Tomonaga reports. They included lung, breast, thyroid, stomach, colon, liver, skin, and bladder cancers. Some patients had three to five different cancers—all originating independently, rather than metastasizing from a source organ.

The third phase, evident now, includes a second wave of leukemia called myelodysplastic syndrome. This development, which occurs in the elderly at a rate of four times that of the general population, indicates that damaged cells in the bone marrow of children in 1945 have survived for more than seventy years in their bodies. Tomonaga’s hypothesis is that stem cells, which are designed to generate replacement cells in their host organ, “eventually transform to malignant cells” when gene abnormalities accumulate. In essence, they become tiny cancer factories, Tomonaga tells The Progressive. “It can be said that the atomic bomb is still killing some hibakusha.”

Statistically, 46 percent of leukemia deaths and 10 percent of solid cancer cases in Japan between 1950 and 2000 are attributable to the bomb’s radiation.

It is also known that Nagasaki’s plutonium bomb was inefficient—only one of the six kilograms of plutonium exploded—leaving most of its atoms intact. Plutonium particles, with a half-life of 24,000 years, have been discovered in lake bottoms, in spots where black rain fell ten to fifty miles from the hypocenter, and in the lungs and bones of people who died soon after the bombing. It’s possible, Tomonaga has written that the plutonium particles “continue to emit alpha rays intermittently and injure lung cells nearby, causing lung cancer.” This potential has yet to be studied.

As Japan recovered from World War II, hibakusha were shunned and discriminated against by non-bomb-affected families who feared that the hibakusha’s exposure to radiation would be harmful to them and their offspring. This belief arose from the many cases of miscarriage, deformities, and stillbirths of babies who were in utero when the bomb exploded, amid a long-held cultural embrace of purity and distaste for pollution.

This stigma remains today. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://progressive.org/magazine/the-bombs-still-ticking-carrier-20250806/

August 12, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Japan | Leave a comment