Hiroshima
Cover-up
By Amy Goodman
and David Goodman
10 August , 2004
CommonDreams.org
Governments lie.
-- I. F. Stone, Journalist
At
the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named
Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur
had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000
people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no
Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world's
media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan
to cover the surrender of the Japanese.
Wilfred Burchett
decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself
what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new
weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty
hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur's orders.
Burchett emerged
from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted
him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima,
with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were
reduced to charred posts. He saw people's shadows seared into walls
and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital,
he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid
hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation
sickness.
Burchett sat down
on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began:
"In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed
the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and
horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown
something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."
He continued, tapping
out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not
look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed
over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately
as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."
Burchett's article,
headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in
the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett's
candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. "In this first testing
ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening
desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem
like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
"When you arrive
in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty
square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling
in the stomach to see such man-made destruction."
Burchett's searing
independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military.
General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists' access
to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even
killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative
of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically
dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters
whose dispatches convicted with this version of events found themselves
silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki
and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there.
Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors.
His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized
his experience with MacArthur's censors, "They won."
U.S. authorities
responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett's revelations: They attacked
the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the
order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima
mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused
Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at
the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release
right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties,
instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial
and military targets.
Four days after
Burchett's story splashed across front pages around the world, Major
General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited
a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this
group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter
for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the
first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation
lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military's
line; the general was not disappointed.
Laurence's front-page
story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE
CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12,
1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. "This
historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on
earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective
answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible
for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons
entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent
radioactivity," the article began.3 Laurence said unapologetically
that the Army tour was intended "to give the lie to these claims."
Laurence quoted
General Groves: "The Japanese claim that people died from radiation.
If this is true, the number was very small."
Laurence then went
on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: "The
Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the
impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create
sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning,
the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."
But Laurence knew
better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945,
and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern
desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about
the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.
William L. Laurence
went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served
as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of
the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed
and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer
Prize for his reporting.
It turns out that
William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York
Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945,
General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times
with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan
Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according
to the Times, was "to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb's
operating principles in laymen's language." Laurence also helped
write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War
Henry Stimson.
Laurence eagerly
accepted the offer, "his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal
perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising
his journalistic independence," as essayist Harold Evans wrote
in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: "After the bombing,
the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted
the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as
'hoax or propaganda.' The Times' Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett's
reports, and parroted the government line." Indeed, numerous press
releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing-which in
the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by
U.S. newspapers-were written by none other than Laurence.
"Mine has been
the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War
Department's official press release for worldwide distribution,"
boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. "No greater honor
could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter."
"Atomic Bill"
Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American
nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as
government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access
to American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of planes
that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic
bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that
conveyed almost religious awe.
In Laurence's article
about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until
a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki
that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: "Awe-struck, we
watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead
of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward
through the white clouds. . . . It was a living thing, a new species
of being, born right before our incredulous eyes."
Laurence later recounted
his impressions of the atomic bomb: "Being close to it and watching
it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped
that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt
oneself in the presence of the supranatural."
Laurence was good
at keeping his master's secrets-from suppressing the reports of deadly
radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was
also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence's dual status
as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the
Hiroshima bombing-and four months after Laurence began working for the
Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent
book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, "Here was the
nation's leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable
but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of
the most important scientific discovery of his time."
Radiation: Now You
See It, Now You Don't
A curious twist
to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported
on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his
byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L.
Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs
and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department's
Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima
on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the
squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back
to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)
W.H. Lawrence's
original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945.
He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation,
and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that "all who had been
in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb's lingering
effects." He described how "persons who had been only slightly
injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood
corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their
hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and
finally died."
Oddly enough, W.H.
Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined
NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon's
spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett's horrifying
account of "atomic plague." W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier
General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department's atomic bomb mission
to Hiroshima, "denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a
dangerous, lingering radioactivity." Lawrence's dispatch quotes
only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of
people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.
The conflicting
accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient
history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New
York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer
Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent
in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that
had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. The Pulitzer Board
had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize.
The Times "regretted the lapses" of its reporter and had published
a signed editorial saying that Duranty's work was "some of the
worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Current Times executive
editor Bill Keller decried Duranty's "credulous, uncritical parroting
of propaganda."
On November 21,
2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty's award,
concluding that there was "no clear and convincing evidence of
deliberate deception" in the articles that won the prize.
As an apologist
for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the "deliberate
deception" of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects
of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly
awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon's paid publicist, who
denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board
and the Times approve of "uncritical parroting of propaganda"-as
long as it is from the United States?
It is long overdue
that the prize for Hiroshima's apologist be stripped.
Amy Goodman is host
of the national radio and TV show "Democracy Now!." This is
an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The
Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers,
and the Media that Love Them, written with her brother journalist David,
exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence
Democracy
Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than
240 stations.