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<\/picture>\nEvery year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945.\u00a0\u00a0 In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.”\u00a0 As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, thousands of posts,\u00a0 and in three books, since 1984:\u00a0 Hiroshima in America <\/a><\/em>(with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-up<\/a><\/em> and my recent award-winner on the first atomic movie, The Beginning or the End<\/a><\/em>. \u00a0 Now I’ve directed an award-winning documentary<\/a>. Here’s today’s entry. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.<\/a><\/p>\n While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 79rd anniversary will be marked \u2013 or mourned today.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Entire books have been written about the test, so I\u2019ll just touch on one key issue here briefly.\u00a0 It\u2019s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.<\/p>\n In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren\u2019t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, \u201cThe Father of the Bomb,\u201d worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.<\/p>\n Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer\u2019s staff (though not Oppie himself) proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, \u201cWhat are you, Hearst propagandists?\u201d<\/p>\n Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman\u2019s chief of staff \u2013 who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan \u2013 placed the bomb in the same category as \u201cpoison gas.\u201d And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.<\/p>\n Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. \u201cWe were just damn lucky,\u201d the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.<\/p>\n The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves\u2019 first words were: \u201cWe must keep the whole thing quiet.\u201d This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for \u201cdownwinders\u201d and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, \u201catomic soldiers,\u201d those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.<\/p>\n Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from the New York Times<\/em> and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.<\/p>\n In the weeks that followed, ranchers discovered dozens of cattle had odd burns or were losing hair. Oppenheimer ordered post-test health reports held in the strictest secrecy. (Of course, you did not see this, or anything related, in Nolan\u2019s \u201cOppenheimer.\u201d) When W.L. Laurence\u2019s famous report on the Trinity test was published just after the Hiroshima bombing he made no mention of radiation at all.<\/p>\n Even as the scientists celebrated their success at Alamagordo on July 16, the first radioactive cloud was drifting eastward over America, depositing fallout along its path. When Americans found out about this, three months later, the word came not from the government but from the president of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, who wondered why some of his film was fogging and suspected radioactivity as the cause.<\/p>\n Fallout was absent in early press accounts of the Hiroshima bombing as the media joined in the triumphalist backing of The Bomb and the bombings. When reports of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki afflicted with a strange and horrible new disease emerged, General Groves, at first, called it all a \u201choax\u201d and \u201cpropaganda\u201d and speculated that the Japanese had different \u201cblood.\u201d Then the military kept reporters from the West from arriving in the atomic cities, until more than a month after the blasts, when it controlled access in an early version of today\u2019s \u201cembedded reporters\u201d program.<\/p>\n When some of the truth about radiation started to surface in the U.S. media, a full-scale official effort to downplay the Japanese death toll \u2013 and defend the decision to use the bomb \u2013 really accelerated, leading to an effective decades-long \u201cHiroshima narrative.\u201d But that\u2019s a story for\u00a0 another day here.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbdb94211-0035-4633-8afd-4416411cae0f_1400x1814.jpeg)
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