Volume 3 | Issue 8 | Article ID 2066 | Aug 03, 2005 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima

Richard Tanter

Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear Hermes typewriter, sitting among the ruins, War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima remains one of the most important Western eyewitness accounts, and the first attempt to By Richard Tanter* come to terms with the full human and moral consequences of the United States' initiation of nuclear war.

For Burchett, that experience was a turning point, 'a watershed in my life, decisively Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me. Still influencing my whole professional career and does. My first reaction was personal relief that world outlook'. Subsequently Burchett came to the bomb had ended the war. Frankly, I never understand that his honest and accurate thought I would live to see that end, the account of the radiological effects of nuclear casualty rate among war correspondents in that weapons not only initiated an animus against area being what it was. My anger with the US him from the highest quarters of the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon government, but also marked the beginning of – although that anger came later. Once I got to the nuclear victor's determination rigidly to Hiroshima, my feeling was that for the first control and censor the picture of Hiroshima time a weapon of mass destruction of civilians and Nagasaki presented to the world. had been used. Was it justified? Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a The story of Burchett and Hiroshima ended scale? But the real anger was generated when only with his last book, Shadows of Hiroshima, the US military tried to cover up the effects of completed shortly before his death in 1983. In atomic radiation on civilians – and tried to shut that book, Burchett not only went back to the me up. My emotional and intellectual response history of his own despatch, but more to Hiroshima was that the question of the social importantly showed the broad dimensions of responsibility of a journalist was posed with the 'coolly planned' and manufactured cover-up greater urgency than ever. which continued for decades. With his last book, completed in his final years in the context Wilfred Burchett 1980 [1] of President Reagan's 'Star Wars' speech of March 1983, Burchett felt 'it has become Wilfred Burchett entered Hiroshima alone in urgent - virtually a matter of life or death - for the early hours of 3 September 1945, less than people to understand what really did happen in a month after the first nuclear war began with Hiroshima nearly forty years ago . . . It is my the bombing of the city. Burchett was the first clear duty, based on my own special Western journalist - and almost certainly the experiences, to add this contribution to our first Westerner other than prisoners of war - to collective knowledge and consciousness. With reach Hiroshima after the bomb. The story apologies that it has been so long delayed . . .” which he typed out on his battered Baby [2]

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That one day in Hiroshima in September 1945 correspondent, Nakamura. A US Navy press affected Burchett as a person, as a writer, and officer, tickled at the idea of 'one of his boys' as a participant in politics for the next forty reaching Hiroshima ahead of correspondents years. But Burchett's story of that day, and his attached to the other services, provided subsequent writing about Hiroshima, have a provisions for Nakamura and for Burchett. greater significance still, by giving a clue to the deliberate suppression of the truth about At 6 a.m. on the morning of 2 September, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the deeper, Burchett boarded an overcrowded train missing parts of our cultural comprehension of heading for Hiroshima. In his knapsack he that holocaust. carried an all-important letter of introduction to Nakamura, the navy-supplied provisions, a One Day in Hiroshima: 3 September 1945 Baby Hermes portable typewriter and a most [3] unjournalistic Colt .45, thoughtfully thrust into his hands by an Australian friend before After covering the end of the bloody Okinawa Burchett left Yokosuka. campaign, from the moment that he heard Outside Tokyo, news of the war's end had come reports of the atomic bombing on August 6, after the Emperor's announcement of Japan's Burchett's goal was to reach Hiroshima as soon unconditional surrender two weeks earlier. as possible after the Japanese surrender on 15 There were as yet, however, no occupying August. He reached Japan in late August forces. Burchett had landed with the vanguard aboard the transport ship USS Millett and of Marines, but MacArthur had barely enough landed with the advance party of US Marines at troops to occupy central Tokyo and the ports, Yokosuka in Tokyo Bay. With two journalist and at every point on his journey to Hiroshima friends Burchett reached Tokyo by train, days and back, Burchett found himself actually ahead of MacArthur's occupying forces. leading the occupation.

Few among the hundreds of journalists who Boarding the train, Burchett crammed in swarmed to Japan with the occupying forces among ordinary soldiers, 'very sullen at first, contemplated the hazardous twenty-one-hour chattering - obviously about me - in a very trip south to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Most hostile way'. But a packet of cigarettes, accepted the claim that the months of aerial displays of a scar from a wound inflicted by a and naval bombardment of Japan prior to the Japanese plane in Burma, and the Baby Hermes surrender had reduced the railway system to as the sign of a journalist, and 'from then on it rubble, and that it was impossible to travel was smiles and friendship, more cigarettes beyond Tokyo. Even this officialagainst bits of fish - and even a drop of sake'. discouragement appears to have been almost unnecessary, at least at that stage. TheAfter a few hours' travelling, the new friends prevailing (and still hardly changed) news dropped off the train, and Burchett managed to values dictated the choice of the majority: 600 get into a compartment which turned out to be Allied journalists covered the official Japanese full of belligerent Imperial Army officers. As surrender aboard the battleship Missouri: only Burchett was later to appreciate, one of the one went to Hiroshima. [4] main impediments to the desire of the Japanese Emperor and Prime Minister to surrender in Burchett spoke only phrasebook Japanese, but July 1945 was their fear of mutiny by the most received enthusiastic help from the staff of the extreme of the militarists in the Imperial Army. Japanese Domei news agency in Tokyo, who Memories of the assassinations by zealous were greatly concerned for their Hiroshima militarists of wavering Prime Ministers and

2 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF cabinet ministers in the early 1930s,leaving. understandably disturbed ministers and the Emperor's chamberlains as they searched for a I followed a tramline which seemed to lead form of words acceptable to the Allies after fairly directly towards the standing buildings, Potsdam. They feared that a small group of, branching off at cross streets for a few hundred army officers would react to news of an yards and then returning to the tramline. imperial rescript of surrender by seizing the Walking those streets I had the feeling of Emperor himself, and quite possibly using the having been translated to some death-stricken sacred hostage as the basis for all-outalien planet. There was devastation and resistance to the death. [5] desolation, and nothing else. Lead-grey clouds hung over the waste that had been a city of On his slow twenty-one-hour trip south,more than a quarter of a million people. Smoky Burchett sensed the depth of enmity towards vapours drifted from fissures in the soil and the victors felt by officers nursing theirthere was a dank, acrid, sulphurous smell. The humiliation. few people in the streets hurried past each other without pausing or speaking, white masks Here the hostility was total. Among thecovering their nostrils. Buildings had been passengers was an American priest,pounded into grey and reddish dust, solidified accompanied by armed guards. He had been into ridges and banks by the frequent rains . . . brought to Tokyo from internment to broadcast No one stopped to look at me. Everyone to American troops on how they should behave hurried, intent on whatever it was that brought in Japan to avoid friction with the localthem into this city of death. [6] population, he explained, warning me in veiled tones that the situation in the compartment At the police station where he went for help, was very tense and that a false move might cost Burchett was understandably ill-received. After us our lives. The officers were furious and he explained his purpose, the police found humiliated at their defeat. Above all I was not Nakamura, who in turn brought a Canadian- to smile as this would be taken as gloating over born woman as translator. At the headquarters what was happening aboard the Missouri. of the surviving police force Nakamura Watching those glowering officers toying with explained Burchett's purpose and his request the hilts of their swords and the long samurai for help. 'The police were extremely hostile and daggers that many of them wore, I felt no the atmosphere was tense . . . The more inclination to smile, especially as the train was Nakamura explained the more the tension in complete darkness as we passed through increased. There was some shouting and the what seemed like endless tunnels. interpreter became pale.'

Eventually, at two the next morning, Burchett's Nakamura later told Burchett that most of the neighbour prodded him awake with the news of policemen had wanted to have all three shot. their arrival in Hiroshima. At what was left of Astonishingly, it was the local head of the the city station, Burchett was arrested by two Kempeitai, the Thought Control Police, who sabre-carrying policemen, and placed in a accepted Burchett's explanation of his task, makeshift cell for the night, where he promptly provided a police car, and set out with Burchett collapsed into sleep. to 'show him what his people have done to us'.

Next morning, Burchett showed the guards his Guided by Nakamura and the police chief, letter of introduction from the Tokyo Domei Burchett went to the Hiroshima office, and they made no attempt to stop him Communications Hospital, 1.3 kilometres from

3 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF the hypocentre. One of the city's six hospitals, effects of widespread malnutrition, resulting it was, like the others, very heavily damaged, from the cumulative effects of long-term most of the staff having become nuclear wartime shortages and the Allied blockade of casualties. At that time it held about 2,300 in- the past year. patients. Of the 300 doctors in the city, 270 were either killed or seriously injured in the After the party passed through the wards, the atomic attack, as were 93 per cent of the city's doctor in charge asked Burchett to leave: nurses. [7] 'I can no longer guarantee your safety. These Relief medical teams from outside the city had people are all marked down to die. 1 will also been quickly organized. By the end ofdie. I was trained in America. 1 believed in September some 2,000 medical workers at Western civilization. I'm a Christian. But how makeshift relief stations had treated 105,861 can you Christians do what you have done in-patients and another 210,048 had received here? Send some of your scientists at least. out-patient treatment. [8] Japanese scientists They know what this is - they must know how and doctors had already made considerable we can stop this terrible sickness. Do that at progress in developing procedures for aiding least. Send your scientists down quickly!' the suffering survivors with limited resources and an almost complete lack of priorBurchett left to write the unique despatch to knowledge of the effects of whole-bodythe Daily Express, sitting on a piece of rubble radiation. The day that Burchett arrived in not far from the hypocentre, sometime in the Hiroshima, a medical meeting was held on early afternoon. What Burchett felt and saw what were to become known as A-bomb that day is best conveyed as it appeared in the diseases, with lectures given on treatment of Daily Express three days later. [10] victims by the Japanese relief medical workers and researchers who had been studying and 30th Day in Hiroshima: Those who escaped treating the victims' illnesses for almost a begin to die, victims of month. THE ATOMIC PLAGUE 'I Write this as a Warning to the World' The appalling sights Burchett witnessed in DOCTORS FALL AS THEY WORK ward after ward were to affect him far more Poison gas fear: All wear masks than the physical devastation he had already seen. Patients - and their families - on filthy tatami mats among the rubble were being ravaged by the effects of massive blast and primary and secondary burn trauma combined with advanced stages of radiation illnesses, resulting in fever, nausea, haemorrahagic stools and diathesis (spontaneous bleeding, from mouth, rectum, urethra and lungs), epilation (loss of hair), livid purpura on the skin, and gingivitis and tonsillitis leading to swelling, and eventually haemorrhaging of gums and soft membranes. [9] In many cases, without effective drugs, large burns and the haemorrhaging parts of the body had turned Express Staff Reporter Peter Burchett was the gangrenous. Recovery was inhibited by the first Allied Reporter to enter the atom-bomb

4 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF city. He travelled 400 miles from Tokyo alone The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me and unarmed, carrying rations for seven meals eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to - food is almost unobtainable in Japan - a black reach the city. With the local manager of umbrella, and a typewriter. Here is his story Domei, leading Japanese news agency, he from –HIROSHIMA, Tuesday drove me through or, perhaps, I should say over, the city. And he took me to hospitals In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic where the victims of the bomb are still being bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, treated. people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm - In these hospitals I found people who when the from an unknown something which I can only bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but describe as the atomic plague. now are dying from the uncanny after-effects . . . Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed THE SULPHUR SMELL over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the My nose detected a peculiar odour unlike hope that they will act as a warning to the anything I have ever smelled before. It is world. something like Sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I smouldering, or at a spot where they were still have seen the most terrible and frightening recovering bodies from the wreckage. But I desolation in four years of war. It makes a could also smell it where everything was still blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The deserted. damage is far greater than photographs can show. They believe it is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from earth soaked with When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look radioactivity released by the split uranium around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles atom. you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man- And so the people of Hiroshima today are made devastation. walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their I picked my way to a shack used as a temporary mouths and noses. It probably does not help police headquarters in the middle of the them physically. vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is But it helps them mentally. . all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets, of buildings, homes, factories, and From the moment that this devastation was human beings. loosed upon Hiroshima the people who survived have hated the white man. It is a hate STILL THEY FAIL the intensity of which is almost as frightening as the bomb itself. There is just nothing standing except about 20 factory chimneys, ¬chimneys with no factories. 'ALL CLEAR' WENT I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing. The counted dead number 53,000. Another

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30,000 are missing, which means 'certainly Hiroshima in the past three weeks to try to find dead'. In the day I have stayed in Hiroshima - a way of relieving the people's suffering. Now and this is nearly a month after the bombing - they themselves have become sufferers. 100 people have died from its effects. For the first fortnight after the bomb dropped They were some of the 13,000 seriously injured they found they could not stay long in the fallen by the explosion. They have been dying at the city. They had dizzy spells and headaches. Then rate of 100 a day. And they will probably all minor insect bites developed into great die. Another 40,000 were slightly injured. swellings which would not heal. Their health steadily deteriorated. These casualties might not have been as high Then they found another extraordinary effect of except for a tragic mistake. The authorities the new terror from the skies. thought this was just another routine Super- Fort raid. The plane flew over the target and Many people had suffered only a slight cut from dropped the parachute which carried the bomb a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should to its explosion point. have recovered quickly. But they did not. The American plane passed out of sight. The all-clear was sounded and the people of They developed an acute sickness. Their gums Hiroshima came out from their shelters. Almost began to bleed and then they vomited blood. a minute later the bomb reached the 2,000-foot And finally they died. altitude at which it was timed to explode - at the moment when nearly everyone inAll these phenomena, they told me, were due to Hiroshima was in the streets. the radioactivity released by the atomic bomb's explosion of the uranium atom. Hundreds and hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by WATER POISONED the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or They found that the water had been poisoned young. by chemical reaction. Even today every drop of water consumed in Hiroshima comes from Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the other cities. The people of Hiroshima are still explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. afraid. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to The scientists told me they have noted a great ashes – except that there were no ashes. difference between the effect of the bombs in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki. HEAP OF RUBBLE Hiroshima is in perfectly flat delta country. Nagasaki is hilly. When the bomb dropped on The Imperial Palace, once an imposingHiroshima the weather was bad, and a big rain- building, is a heap of rubble three feet high, storm developed soon afterwards. and there is one piece of wall. Roof, floors and everything else is dust. And so they believe that the uranium radiation was driven into the earth and that, because so Hiroshima has one intact building - the Bank of many are still falling sick and dying, it is still Japan. This in a city which at the start of the the cause of this man-made plague. war had a population of 310,000. Almost every Japanese scientist has visited At Nagasaki on the other hand the weather was

6 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF perfect, and scientists believe that this allowed in from the US, except for a few who had the radioactivity to dissipate into theshared his path on the dangerous island- atmosphere more rapidly. In addition, the force hopping campaigns. According to Burchett, of the bomb explosion was, to a large extent, none seriously attempted to survey the human expended in the sea, where only fish were consequences of the atomic bombing, although killed. he advised one whom he knew that 'the real story is in the hospitals'. [11] To support this theory, the scientists point to the fact that, in Nagasaki, death came swiftly . . . the moment they heard a rival had got to and suddenly, and that there have been no Hiroshima before them they demanded to get after-effects such as those that Hiroshima is back to their plane and on to Tokyo as soon as still suffering. possible to file their despatches. They had no contact with the local population, as they were Return to Tokyo a solid 'all-American' body with perhaps a Japanese-speaking interpreter attached. They If reaching Hiroshima had been difficult, saw physical wreckage only. [12] transmitting the story to London was also fraught. Nakamura undertook to tap the story The reporters toured the wreckage, and later out on a hand-set in Morse code to the Tokyo held a press conference at the Hiroshima Domei office. But while Burchett was in Prefectural Office. [13] After the press Hiroshima, MacArthur declared Tokyo off-limits conference, and with fog threatening to close to journalists. This frustrated the plan for his in, the reporters prepared to get back to Tokyo friend Henry Keys to wait in the Tokyo Domei as soon as possible. office for the story to be tapped through from I asked if I could fly back with them to Tokyo, Burchett. Twice turned off the train from the train journey being rather risky. Yokohama to Tokyo by American Military Police, Keys hired a Japanese journalist to wait 'Our plane's overloaded as it is,' replied the for Burchett's story in Tokyo and bring it to colonel Yokohama immediately. Late on the evening of 3 September the story arrived and Keys bullied 'You've used up more petrol getting here than I the reluctant wartime censors to allow the weigh,' I argued. ' unprecedented story through unchanged. Yes. But this airstrip's a very short one and we Burchett was not the only foreign journalist to can't take on any extra weight.' arrive in Hiroshima on 3 September. A Pentagon press 'Investigatory Group' arrived by 'Will you take a copy of my story back to Tokyo plane from Tokyo just as Burchett was finishing at least, and give it to the Daily Express his piece. According to Burchett, having been correspondent?' guaranteed an 'exclusive', the journalists in the official party were surprised to see him there. 'We're not going back to Tokyo,' was the While the journalists felt piqued and threatened colonel's brusque reply. He called the by Burchett's scoop the officials accompanying journalists together and they piled into their them as press handlers were hostile and minibus and headed back for the airport. [14] suspicious. As it happened, Nakamura had slowly but In Burchett's eyes, most of the Pentagon press successfully transmitted the long story. But team were headquarters hacks specially flown Burchett could not be sure, and he must have

7 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF been deeply angered at the refusal to help him Back in Tokyo, 'the American nuclear big-shots back to Tokyo. were furious'. Burchett's article had raised a storm. Not only had the Daily Express That night, as the story was wired through to headlined the story 'THE ATOMIC PLAGUE - I London, Burchett began an eventful trip back Write this as a Warning to the World', and put to Tokyo by train. In the middle of the next day, it on the front page, but they had released it as the train passed through Kyoto, Burchett gratis to the world's press. On the surface, US saw two unmistakable Australians - prisoners of officials were mainly angry about Burchett's war from a local camp left in less than benign claim that residual radiation was still confusion as the war ended, with no effective hazardous and that, a month after the bombing, arrangements to feed the starving POWs. Word people were still dying from radiation illness - had filtered in to the camp about the end of the what he had referred to as 'the atomic plague'. war, and the soldiers had volunteered to leave to look for food in Kyoto. The emaciated pair On the morning of 7 September Burchett begged Burchett to come back to the camp to stumbled off the train in Tokyo to discover that meet their fellow inmates to convince them senior US officials had called a press (and the confused guards) that the war was conference at the Imperial Hotel to refute his indeed over. article. He reached the press conference just in time to hear Brigadier-General Thomas Farrell, In the next two days Burchett visited six POW the deputy head of the Manhattan atomic bomb camps, speaking to the prisoners, telling them project, explain that the bomb had been of the Allied victory and the coming of the exploded at a sufficient height over Hiroshima occupation forces. to avoid any risk of 'residual radiation'.

It was necessary to bluff the Japanese camp There was a dramatic moment as I rose to my commanders, with whatever authority I could feet, feeling that my scruffiness put me at a muster, that I had come officially to ensure that disadvantage with the elegantly uniformed and the surrender terms were being complied with bemedalled officers. My first question was and that living conditions for the POWs were whether the briefing officer had been to being immediately improved. I have addressed Hiroshima. He had not. I then described what I various types of audiences in my time, but had seen and asked for explanations. He was never such eager listeners as these. These men very polite at first, a scientist explaining things were famished. They bore on their faces and to a layman. Those I had seen in the hospital bodies all the evidence of physical hunger, but were victims of blast and burn, normal after above all their eyes told that they were any big explosion. Apparently the Japanese famished for news. Hesitating for a moment, at doctors were incompetent to handle them, or that first encounter, while I tried to formulate lacked the right medication. He discounted the the most economic way of telling them what allegation that any who had not been in the city they yearned to hear, I felt the compulsion in at the time of the blast were later affected. scores of pairs of eyes glittering with the Eventually the exchanges narrowed to my intensity of their appeal to begin, to tell them it asking how he explained the fish still dying was all over and they would soon be on their when they entered a stream running through way home again, with a few details of how it the centre of the city. came to be over so suddenly. [15] 'Obviously they were killed by the blast or Confronting the Manhattan Project overheated water.'

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'Still there a month later?' Although Burchett dismissed most of the obstructions placed in his way at the time of 'It's a tidal river. so they could be washed back the Hiroshima story as the predictable and forth.' overreactions of bureaucrats, he eventually came to see a more deeply disturbing pattern. 'But I was taken to a spot in the city outskirts Reflecting later on his difficulty in transmitting and watched live fish turning on their stomachs his story, his hospitalization, the theft of his upwards as they entered a certain patch of the camera, the extreme hostility of US military river. After that they were dead withinofficials in Hiroshima and Tokyo, and the seconds.' efforts to limit access to Hiroshima, Burchett came to see his own story in a broader context The spokesman looked pained. 'I'm afraid of official US policy to conceal the truth of you've fallen victim to Japanese propaganda.' Hiroshima. 'In 1945 I was too overwhelmed by he said, and sat down. The customary 'Thank the enormity of what happened at Hiroshima you' was pronounced and the conference and Nagasaki to appreciate the cool ended. Although my radiation story was denied, deliberation and advance planning that went Hiroshima was immediately put out of bounds, into manufacturing the subsequent cover-up.' and I was whisked off to a US Army hospital for [18] tests. [16] Here Burchett quite rightly saw his own scoop as provoking an official US government At the hospital, Burchett's white-blood-cell response. How much was premeditated and count was found to be lower than normal. At planned before the bombing is unclear, but the time Burchett accepted the explanation of there is little doubt that with Burchett's the low white-corpuscle count as the work of announcement to the world of the effects of antibiotics he had been given earlier for a knee radiation illness, the true character of the infection. Only many years later did Burchett holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could discover that the explanation was quite wrong: not easily be contained. Hiroshima and the number of white corpuscles in his blood Nagasaki were to take on a meaning different ought to have increased to fight the infection. to other, comparable holocausts such as the On the other hand a low white-blood-cell count firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. is characteristic of radiation illness. [17] The extent of the suppression of the truth of By the time Burchett emerged from hospital a the first nuclear bombings is probably even few days later, his camera containing unique greater than Burchett guessed, and certainly shots of Hiroshima and its victims had been more complex. Beginning with the attack on stolen. MacArthur had withdrawn his press Burchett, there were three strands to official accreditation and announced his intention to American policy towards information about expel Burchett from occupied Japan. Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First, access to the intervention of friends in the US Navy with Hiroshima was denied to Allied journalists. whom Burchett had worked for much of the Second, public discussion of the topic was Pacific campaign led to the withdrawal of the banned in Japan. Finally, through the expulsion order, Burchett left Japan at the call censorship and official disinformation program of the Beaverbrook press shortly afterwards, as a whole, Western perceptions were not to return for over two and a half decades. channelled in such a way as to minimize understanding of the human, as opposed to the Hiroshima: Constructing the Silence physical, destructiveness of the weapon. The

9 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF first step in the attempt to suppress the truth been performed to establish the effects of about Hiroshima was to attack claims of radiation illness. [21] Leaving aside the fact radiation illness, and to deny authority to that US scientists and military planners knew Japanese-sourced accounts of Hiroshima and perfectly well the potential – and expected - Nagasaki. The dismissal of Burchett was part of radiation effects of the weapon, at that time, this. In the week after Burchett's claim of United States scientists were in no position to continuing radiation illness and residualbe authoritative: no US scientists entered radiation, Manhattan Project officials publicly either of the bombed cities until 9 September, attacked such claims several times. Statements six days after Burchett. by General Farrell and his chief, Major General Leslie Groves, appeared in the New York Times The US rebuttal did not stand up. Burchett, and describing claims such as Burchett's ashis Japanese sources in Hiroshima, were quite 'Japanese propaganda', and categorically right to stress the radiation effects of the denying any residual radiation effects. [19] bombing. Contrary to Groves' and Farrell's claims, scores of thousands of people became According to the Manhattan Project's official ill and died from exposure to radiation emitted publicist and historian, New York Times from the bomb, principally gamma rays and science writer, William L. Laurence, neutrons. Burchett's newspaper account of This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of people dying from the after-effects of the bomb the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle without any visible injury is quite accurate: of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer to Japanese propaganda that For no apparent reason their health began to radiations were responsible for deaths even the fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. day after the explosion, Aug. 6 and that persons Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And then entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth. maladies due to persistent radioactivity. The At first, doctors told me, they thought these Japanese are continuing their propaganda were the symptoms of general debility. They aimed at creating the impression that we won gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create results were horrible. The flesh started rotting sympathy for themselves . . . Thus, at the from the hole caused by the injection of the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' needle. And in every case the victim died. that did not ring true. More recently they have sent in a radiologist, and since then the Radiation deaths were still occurring in large symptoms they describe appear to be more numbers when Burchett visited the authentic on the surface, according to the Communications hospital – and still occur today radiologists present here today. [20]In fact, as the long-term effects of exposure to Japanese radiologists and nuclear specialists radiation are revealed in the form of a variety had arrived in Hiroshima within days of the of blood diseases, leukaemia and other cancers. bombing: the first confirmation that the[22] weapon that struck Hiroshima was an atomic bomb was provided by Japan's leading nuclear Burchett was also correct on the possibility of physicist, Nishina Yoshio, on 10 August. residual radiation at dangerous levels. Residual Systematic radiological soil sampling was radiation comes mainly from irradiated commenced the same day by Kyoto Imperial materials that have turned into radio isotopes University scientists, and continued around and from particles of uranium from the bomb Hiroshima for the next week. Within two weeks that escaped fission. As fallout, residual of the bombing some twenty-five autopsies had radiation could disperse widely and in an-

10 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF uneven pattern of concentration. Radioquite common, and Farrell's attack wrong. isotopes thought to have been generated in the 'Since spermatogonia of the testis and follicular explosion had half-lives varying from a few cells of the ovary are radio-sensitive, minutes or hours (e.g. manganese 56, half-life disturbance of the reproductive function was 2.6 hours) through to several years (e.g. cesium an inevitable consequence of exposure to the 134, half-life 2.05 years). Japanese studies have atomic bomb.’ [28] The month after Burchett's concluded that 'the total gamma-ray dose from visit, surveys of sperm of men exposed to the induced radiation up to 100 hours after the bomb showed that nineteen out of twenty-two explosion one metre above the ground at the men one kilometre or less from the hypocentre hypocentre in Hiroshima averaged about 100 were effectively sterile. One third of a larger rads' and fell off sharply away from the sample of men were sterile in late 1945. Within hypocentre. Fallout effects would be additional, five years, the majority returned to normal and unevenly distributed according to weather fertility. Among women up to five kilometres patterns which prevailed after the bombing. from the hypocentre, some seventy per cent [23] suffered irregular menstruation, and ovarian disorders were common. [29] At this point These are certainly levels that could induce growth disorders such as microcephaly (a radiation illness either through direct exposure smaller than normal head, often accompanied or through the breathing or swallowing of by mental retardation) as a result of exposure induced-radioactive material. In the days after of children in utero to massive radiation had the bombing many people entered the city to not yet emerged. help and to search for relatives. Mortality rates cannot confirm the effects of residual radiation Immediately after Burchett's story on the among these early entrants [24], but morbidity radiation effects of the bomb was published, rates among survivors certainly do. Immediate severe restrictions were applied to journalists, radiation effects were clear among substantial both Allied and Japanese. On 5 September, numbers who entered the hypo centre area MacArthur's headquarters banned Allied within two or three days. In the long term, ‘the journalists from Tokyo as MacArthur's troops crude mortality rate for leukaemia, according prepared to enter the city. 'It is not military to the 1960 national census, was three times policy for correspondents to spearhead the greater for those entering Hiroshima within occupation,' declared a spokesman for General three days after the bombing than the average MacArthur. [30] Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crude leukaemia rate in all of Japan.' [25] placed completely out of bounds. Sophisticated censorship plans had been drawn There had been great anxiety about the up in April 1945 at MacArthur's Philippines possibility of the atomic weapon rendering both headquarters in preparation for the expected cities biologically sterile in toto. TheOperation Olympic invasion in November 1945. announce¬ment by Tokyo Radio of the[31] The most serious restriction on both sprouting of the first green shoots in the late journalistic reporting of Hiroshima and summer after the bombing was understandably Nagasaki and public Japanese scientific and a matter of great joy and relief. [26] Farrell medical surveys was a series of civil-liberties returned to attack the credibility of Japanese and press codes issued by MacArthur's witnesses and scientists on 19 September when headquarters. he denied newspaper reports of biological sterility. [27] The first civil-liberties code, issued on 10 September, was aimed at achieving 'an In fact, temporary sterility among men was absolute minimum of restrictions upon freedom

11 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF of speech'. The directive commanded the a ferociously militarist government provided Japanese government to 'issue the necessary the ongoing grounds for the flawed moral orders to prevent dissemination of news . . . challenge to the authority of the Allied powers. which fails to adhere to the truth or which On 15 September Asahi Shimbun reiterated the disturbs the public tranquillity'. [32] argument of the Japanese cabinet when it described the use of the atomic bomb as 'a In the following week the tranquillity of breach of international law', which it most MacArthur's headquarters was disturbed on certainly was. Two days later the paper argued three fronts: public opinion at home, the that if it were correct, as the occupying power Japanese media and the Japanese government. argued, that Japanese atrocities in the Each was to contribute to a tightening of Philippines had led to Filipinos abandoning censorship about the nuclear bombing. As their previous support for the Japanese, then wartime news restrictions were lifted, and would that not also apply to the Allied forces in prisoner-of-war camps liberated, appalling Japan? [35] accounts of Japanese atrocities towards Allied soldiers flooded the front pages of Western MacArthur's headquarters was not only dealing newspapers. Far outweighing the coverage of with unrepentant Japanese media and vengeful the nuclear bombings, these stories whipped up victorious American (and Australian and an atmosphere of revenge where anyBritish) public opinion, but also with a cynical suggestion of sympathy for the defeated was to Japanese government still attempting to extract be scourged. Newspaper reports from Tokyo maximum political concessions from their carried the suggestion that the Allied powers conquerors. were treating the conquered leniently. MacArthur's actions in Tokyo immediately According to declassified US military came under scrutiny for evidence of 'softness intelligence documents, the US code-breaking towards the Japanese'. system MAGIC intercepted the following message from Foreign Minister Shigemitsu In Japan, newspapers and radio wereMamoru on 13 September to Japanese missions attempting to deal with Allied revelations of in Lisbon and Stockholm: 'The newspapers Imperial army war atrocities mainly by denial. have given wide publicity to the Government's Asahi Shimbun wrote: 'Virtually all Japanese recent memorandum concerning the atomic who have read the report are unanimous in bomb damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . saying that the atrocities are hardly believable.' since the Americans have recently been raising [33] As was to be the case for decades to come, an uproar about the question of our Japanese anger over the use of the atomic mistreatment of prisoners, I think we should bomb obliterated recognition and guilt of the make every effort to exploit the atomic bomb atrocities of a decade of militarism. In some question in our propaganda.' [36] The cases this continued the distortion and false intercepted reply of the Japanese minister in reporting characteristic of the state-controlled Stockholm was even more damaging. Why not, media of wartime Japan, as when the Domei radioed the diplomat, take a more subtle press agency defended the Empire, declaring approach, and organize domestic Japanese 'Japan might have won the war but for the reporting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be atomic bomb, a weapon too terrible to face, and picked up by overseas news bureaux? Better one which only barbarians would use.’ [34] still, have 'Anglo-American newspapermen write stories on the bomb damage and thus The basic fact that a war crime of massive create a powerful impression around the proportions had been committed to bring down world'. This provided MacArthur's hawks with

12 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF the evidence they needed to justify the most understanding of what had taken place and the stringent censorship. urgently needed diffusion of medical research Burchett's article published a week earlier and treatment information. Meanwhile the could not have come at a worse time from the occupation authorities were meticulously perspective of the censors. Victors' justice collecting scientific information on the bomb prevailed. The enraged MacArthur ordered 'one and its health effects for American scientific hundred per cent censorship . . . No more false consumption. state¬ments, no more misleading statements are to be permitted; no destructive criticism of The press code was not applied simply to the Allied powers.' suppress unfavourable or critical or accurate reporting and discussion of the atomic The press code issued on 19 September was bombings. Such discussion as was allowed had designed to educate the Japanese byto be slanted in particular directions. According prescribing journalistic ethics: to Japanese historians, the only acceptable treatment of the bombing had to accept and 1. News must strictly adhere to the truth. reflect the view that the bombs shortened the 2. Nothing shall be printed which might, war, and were effectively instruments of peace. directly or by inference, disturb the public [38] In April 1947, during the first mayoral tranquillity. election in Hiroshima which inaugurated the 3. There shall be no false or destructive national civic democratization programme, a criticism of the Allied powers. candidate was cut off in the middle of his radio 6. News stories must be factually written and speech by a US military observer because of his completely devoid of editorial opinion. failure to comment favourably on the bombing. 7. News stories shall not be colored to conform [39] with any propaganda line . . . 9. No news story shall be distorted by the When the novelist Nagai Takashi attempted to omission of pertinent details. [37] publish his book Nagasaki no Kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), he was told that it could appear Pre-publication censorship was exercised by only if a description of Japanese atrocities were GHQ, with any excisions to be rewritten added to the volume. Nagai, a Catholic who properly, without black patches of ink or XXXs believed that the bomb was God's will, in fact or any other hints of censorship. The pretence acceded to the censor's demand and the book of free speech was vital to achieve the full became a best seller. But, as Lifton remarks, effectiveness of the censorship. 'What the particular American, or groups of The atomic bombings were a priority concern Americans, who made this decision did not of the censors. To begin with the press code realize was that the equation of the two was a severely restricted spoken and writtentacit admission that dropping the bomb was reporting about the bombed cities. No Japanese also an atrocity.' [40] Not surprisingly, Lifton scientific or medical data could be published. It suggests that beneath the censorship policy's was not until the end of the occupation period overt concern to minimize any possible in 1951 that newspaper photographs of the retaliation against the victors, or succouring of victims of the nuclear bombing, the hibakusha, resurgent militarism, there lay both American showing the keloids on their bodies, were guilt and horror over the effects of the published by Asahi Shimbun. As a result of the bombing, as well as what Lifton rather coyly censorship, all public discussion of the bomb refers to as 'wider American political concerns'. damage, and all medical treatment reports, disappeared, greatly impeding both public Survivors of the bombing turned to writing as

13 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF testimony to the holocaust. They tooten reels of the film, keeping its existence immediately encountered the censor. Many secret until the end of the occupation. [42] poems and other writings were distributed illegally. The Hiroshima poet, Kurihara Sadako, Celebrating the Bomb published her poem 'Let the Child be Born' in 1946 in a Hiroshima magazine edited by her A still more profound form of distortion, one husband. The poem, based on a story she had which was to have a significant effect on heard, which tells of a baby born in a cellar Western understanding of nuclear war, amid 'the smell of fresh blood, the stench of becomes evident if Burchett's article is death', is an evocation of life and its renewal compared with other accounts of Hiroshima amid otherwise unending suffering: and Nagasaki by Allied journalists at the time. In the West, the common images of the nuclear 'I am a midwife. Let me help the delivery,' holocaust have always been essentially said one of the seriously wounded, technological, or more precisely, without who just now was groaning. human content. The hands of the clock ticking So, in the depths of this gloomy hell, towards midnight refer to the machine-like and a new life was born. apparently inexorable move to the terminal But before the light of the dawn the midwife, explosion. The most general image, the still stained with blood, dies. mushroom cloud, is even further removed from Let the child be born, the earth and the fate of human beings. The let the child be born, associations of the billowing, technicolored even if it means throwing away one's own life. eruption are with an awesome and perhaps terrible power but not at all with the human After publishing this poem Kurihara and her beings consumed within it. Still less does that husband were taken to General Headquarters image suggest the responsibility of the human and interrogated about the poem, which was agency involved - the pressing of the button held to violate the press code, and theand the decision that it should be pressed. unwritten code stipulating suitable treatment of the atomic bombing. [41] Just how potent an effect this removal of the human element has been on our imaginings of One event in particular has come to symbolize nuclear war is revealed by comparing it to the the US censorship approach. As part of the common images of other twentieth-century joint Japanese scientific and medical survey of horrors of war. The First World War produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film company an extraordinary set of visual and written Nippon Eiga-sha filmed material for aimages, but all essentially human in scale and comprehensive visual documentation of the implication - trenches, barbed wire, bodies in effects of the bombing. The film wasmud. The Nazi war on the Jews is remembered immediately prohibited. When the Japanese in the popular imagination through the scientific survey staff protested, the GHQ concentration camp, the SS master and inmate- reversed its decision, and allowed the filming to slave, guards and the almost unbelievable proceed. Then, in February 1946 when the industrialized killing of the gas chambers. But, filming of the 1l,000-foot Effects of the Atom however far beyond the experience of the Bomb (edited from 55,000 feet) was submitted watcher, the images are still on a human scale, to the US authorities, it was despatched to a direct signification of human suffering. This is Washington, together with all known prints and not true of our understanding of Hiroshima and negatives. In fact, a group of the film workers Nagasaki. In part, this is a matter of censorship secretly made an unauthorized print and hid and suppression. But as a comparison of

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Burchett's account and that of hisbrief coverage of the medical situation, but contemporaries shows, there was another level without any of Burchett's attempts to portray of distortion involved. the situation of the burn and radiation victims in the hospitals. Lawrence wrote vaguely that In contrast to the policy of suppressing critical accounts of the effects of the atomic bombing, Japanese doctors told us they were helpless to 'articles that publicized the power of the atomic deal with burns caused by the bomb's great bomb were warmly welcomed by GHQ’. [43] flash or with the other physical ailments caused What was to become the dominant official by the bomb . . . They told us that persons who assessment of the nuclear bombing was clear had been only slightly injured on the day of the to the Japanese at the very beginning. As some blast lost 86 per cent of their white blood of them wrote later: corpuscles, their hair began to drop out, they lost appetites, vomited blood and finally died. A group of American reporters who visited [Emphasis added.] Hiroshima on 3 September 1945 expressed satisfaction with the complete destruction of Surprisingly for experienced journalists, the the city. At a press conference held at the party apparently made no attempt to prefectural office, a New York Times reporter substantiate these dramatic claims, or to [W.H. Lawrence] noted the total devastation of expand on them. Astonishingly, the presumably the city and extolled the obvious superiority of well-briefed journalists of the official party the bomb's potential. Some Japanese reporters made no explicit reference to the effects of present at this press conference raisedradiation. As we have already seen, Lawrence questions from the standpoint of the bomb's reported the official refutation of Japanese victims . . . but [Lawrence] refused to answer sourced claims of widespread radiation illness such questions. His concern was solely with the after his return to Tokyo without referring to power of the bomb: its victims interested him his own visit. In his report on a visit to only as proof of that might. [44] Nagasaki, again largely concerned with physical damage, he said, 'I am convinced that, The day Burchett's 'Atomic Plague' article was horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the published in the Daily Express, W.H. Lawrence, Japanese are exaggerating its effects in an with the Pentagon-approved press team wrote effort to win sympathy for themselves in an of his visit to Hiroshima in the New York Times. attempt to make the American people forget [45] A reading of the long article substantiates the long record of cold-blooded Japanese the Japanese reporters' comments on the press bestiality.' [46] conference. Lawrence and his party landed at Kure Naval Base near Hiroshima, and toured Echoing the emerging official US justification the city with a Japanese naval surgeon,for retaining a monopoly of nuclear-weapons speaking occasionally to witnesses. There is no use, Lawrence went on, 'It should be the last indication that he visited any hospital or evidence needed to convince any doubter of the medical relief station. need to retain and perfect our air offense lest the fate of Hiroshima or Nagasaki be repeated The dominant concern of this description of in Indianapolis or Washington or Detroit or Hiroshima is the physical damage which made New York.' it 'the world's most damaged city, worse than Warsaw or Stalingrad that held the record for Lawrence's basic attitude, and the one which Europe’. The tour of the rubble, amid the decay was to underpin the dominant 'official' meaning of the remaining bodies, is interspersed with of Hiroshima that came to be constructed, is

15 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF clear from his comment on his own feelings: 'A honor, unique in the history of journalism, of visit to Hiroshima is an experience to leave one preparing the War Department's official press shaken by the terrible, incredible sights. Here release for worldwide distribution. No greater is the final proof of what the mechanical and honor could come to any newspaperman, or scientific genius of America has been able to anyone else for that matter.’ [48] accomplish in war.' Two days later Laurence flew in an observer Three themes had by now emerged in officially plane in the attack on Nagasaki, about which sanctioned American coverage of the nuclear he wrote a long account published a month bombing. The first was that the bombs were a later in the New York Times. [49] For Laurence just and necessary contribution to world peace, the Nagasaki plutonium bomb was 'a thing of and that a continued US nuclear monopoly beauty to behold, this "gadget"'. would maintain the peace. The second was that the most important quality of the bombs to be Being close to it and watching it as it was being emphasized was their physical power. Finally, fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely the human consequences were to be conceded shaped that any sculptor would be proud to so far as was necessary to establish the claim of have created it, one somehow crossed the technological omnipotence, but were otherwise borderline between reality and non-reality and to be ignored or suppressed. Together these felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural. made possible the elimination of any legitimate Could it be that this innocent-looking object, so perspective other than that of the victors and beautifully designed, so safe to handle, could in the celebration of their power. much less time than it takes to wink an eye annihilate an entire city and its population? The contrast between Burchett's view of the bombings and the duty of the journalist Just as his near-namesake Lawrence had becomes even more clear when Burchett's conceived of the bombing as an expression of writing on Hiroshima is compared with that of 'the mechanical and scientific genius of another New York Times writer, William L. America', Laurence saw the bomb in spiritual Laurence (not to be confused with W.H. and aesthetic terms that rendered the deathly Lawrence). [47] Seconded from his newspaper qualities of the weapon somehow invisible. The to the Manhattan Project, Laurence became the aesthetic, moral, political and scientific claims official publicist and historian of the first were interwoven and mutually reinforcing. nuclear weapons. As a science writer he had written on the possibility of nuclear weapons In imagery redolent of alienated power and before the war, and been given the task of sexuality, the result – the result of the exquisite explaining the atomic bomb to the world public, technology that Laurence recognizes in his including writing the statement with which transcendent adoration – is a cloud that lives: President Truman announced the first atomic bombing. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury Laurence witnessed the Trinity test atof creamy foam, sizzling upward and then Alamogordo on 16 July 1945, and accompanied descending earthward, a thousand geysers the USAF 509th Bombing Group to Tinian later rolled into one. It kept struggling in an that month. Listening to Truman'selemental fury, like a creature in the act of announcement on the radio, he wrote of his breaking the bonds that held it down . . . It was pride as a journalist: 'The world's greatest story as though the decapitated monster was was being broadcast, and mine had been the growing a new head.

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Death and responsibility were banished. In the technology. As a war correspondent in the air over Nagasaki, Laurence - apparently for Pacific, he had not expected to survive the war. the only time - addressed himself to the moral While was more radical than most in question: 'Does one feel any pity or compassion anticipating sympathetically the emergence of for the poor devils about to die?' His answer post-colonial Asia, Burchett was in some was resounding: 'Not when one thinks of Pearl respects a typical male war correspondent. Harbor and of the Death March on Bataan.' In Democracy with a Tommygun, apparently This reflexive American defence of thewritten in the last year of the war (the chapter slaughter of the civilians who made up the on Hiroshima is 'A Postscript'), Burchett target was hypocrisy. One might suppose that describes LeMay's US Air Force firebombing of the innocents below had participated in or bore Japanese cities from November 1944 in glowing responsibility for the earlier events. and admiring terms. Writing here of the long- range bombing campaign Burchett praised the As well as establishing the innocence of the wonder of 'Amer¬ican planning, production bomb, another important myth was being and organization'. The aircraft in question, the created here, that of the clean atom: 'I saw the B-29, evoked Burchett's greatest admiration, as atomic substance [i.e. plutonium] before it was a specifically American achievement: placed inside the bomb. By itself it is not dangerous to handle.’ Laurence returned to 'The Superfortress, apart from being able to Alamagordo after the Nagasaki bombing, and deliver heavier bombloads farther than any from there wrote the 12 September attack on other plane, is also the most beautiful aircraft Burchett and the Japanese-sourced claims of yet produced. Smoothly tapering like an artist's large numbers of radiation deaths. [50] brush handle, it rides like a feathered dart.’ [52] This admiration of American technology It is very hard to imagine a more complete carries over into a description of the Tokyo fire contrast between two approaches to journalism raid of 10 March 1945: 'The world's greatest than that between Burchett and Laurence. incendiary target had been touched off by the Laurence provides the archetype for Robert war's greatest incendiary raid. Never since the Lifton's study of nuclearism - that late-great fire of London had there been a twentieth-century secular religion 'in which conflagration as started early that Saturday "grace" and even "salvation" – the mastery of morning in the centre of downtown Tokyo, death and evil – are achieved through the where in the most inflammable portion of the power of a new technological deity . . . capable city, the population density exceeds 100,000 not only of death and destruction but also people per square mile.' [53] unlimited creation.’ [51] For Laurence, the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima In a description very similar to that of W.H. was a point in a secular crusade for the new Lawrence describing Hiroshima in statistics, religion. In this new muscular deism, there was Burchett tells the externals of that appalling no place for the victims of the holocaust; only a night, essentially from the perspective of the transcendent fusion of technology and the pilots and aircrew whose lives and dangers he power that directed it. shared. That night went beyond even the horrors of Dresden and Hamburg. The United ‘The Alienation is Temporary, theStates Air Force had developed the napalm Humanity Imminent.’ bomb especially for the firing of Japanese Burchett himself was not innocent of this cities. [54] To test the new incendiaries predominantly masculine worship ofdeveloped for the highly inflammable Japanese

17 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF cities, the air force built a miniature Japanese At the heart of war is a profound alienation city block, complete with rooms and furniture. from the enemy, an alienation experienced as A nearby army firefighting team was then hatred, fear and a sundering of any possibility equipped with Japanese fire equipment and of communion or fellow feeling. But, as Michael pitted against the new products. When the new Walzer has put it, 'The alienation [of the jellied petroleum bomb produced a fire that enemy] is temporary, the humanity imminent.' defeated the firefighters, the researchers knew [58] Burchett and the POW both experienced they had met the air force's requirements. what the religious call the conversion of the Several hundred B-29s, carrying six tons of heart, which makes possible a reconstitution of napalm or oil-filled incendiaries apiece, each a shared humanity. From that position Burchett blanketed an area 2,500 feet by 500 feet with wrote his prophetic warning from the hospitals burning gasoline. [55] A factory worker, of Hiroshima. Tsuchikura Hidezo, spoke of the scenes among the 750,000 people trapped in the world's most At the heart of the state is the legitimation of crowded urban area when 100,000 died: its right to violence and its right to demand that the citizen take part in organized violence. Fire winds with burning particles ran up and As a result, states are always engaged in a down the streets. I watched people, adults and contest of legitimation with their peoples – children, running for their lives, dashing madly legitimation, not of this regime rather than about like rats. Flames ran after them like that, but legitimation of the right of war. Such living things, striking them down. They died by rights are never wholly accepted, the hundreds in front of me . . . The whole wholeheartedly, by the whole population in spectacle with its blinding lights and societies divided by sex, class, and ethnicity, thundering noise reminded me of the paintings and the humanity of the enemy is always in of purgatory - a real inferno out of the depths of danger of erupting through the state-managed hell. [56] artifice of hatred and alienation. But in the twentieth century, legitimation of the violence What is striking, and to Burchett's credit, is of the state has become at the same time more that as soon as he actually saw the human results of the work of his comrades of the past contingent and more necessary than before. year, he immediately responded: in the plain and decent prose of his Hiroshima account he Hiroshima, while marking a turning point in described the unprecedented suffering before some ways, is in other respects simply the him which amounted to what he called 'the culmination (or more pessimistically, the lowest watershed in my life'. point so far) of a trend towards a loss or restraint over the slaughter of civilians that has Burchett's reversion to a shared humanity marked this century. Throughout the century, paralleled that of others who had completely the proportion of civilians killed in wars has supported the war's aims in the Pacific. An tended to rise as a proportion of the dead. Most Australian prisoner of war who reachedimportant in this trend has been 'the terrific Hiroshima a few days later wrote of the growth of air warfare, and the sweeping immediate transformation of his consuming disregard for all humane limitations on hatred: '. . . we felt no sense of either history or bombardment from the air. This has produced triumph. Our brother man went by crippled and an extent of devastation, and in some part a burned, and we knew only shame and guilt . . . degradation of living conditions, that has not Our hatred for the Japanese was swept away by been approached since the end of the Thirty the enormity of what we had seen.' [57] Years' War.'

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Writing in 1945 before the atomic bomb was It was a time of historic decision, if only the dropped on Hiroshima, Liddell Haft continued: collective means could be found to make it. 'It is the combination of an unlimited aim with Burchett sensed it, and wrote his warning to an unlimited method - the adoption of a the world with that aim. In this setting, demand for total surrender together with a legitimation of the atomic bombing was not at strategy of total blockade and bombingall certain, and since the United States rapidly devastation ¬which, in this war, has inevitably decided to build its post-war global dominance produced a deepening danger to the relatively around a nuclear monopoly, securing public shallow foundations of civilized life.’[59] acquiescence was of paramount importance. The uncensored discoveries of Burchett about The need for legitimation of this new stage of the human effects of the bomb, and particularly total warfare grew from the resistance to the devastating impact of radiation illness, unthinking - or unfeeling - acquiescence in needed to be stopped and an official what was palpably atrocious, justifiable, if at interpretation rendered secure. all, only by a calculation of means and ends. The American justification was, in fact, widely Military and foreign policy is always the least challenged, both at a political level and by the democratic area of state decision. On nuclear immediate revulsion felt by many. At the time matters the state resolved that it would tolerate Burchett wrote, public opinion was quite mixed no serious public discussion either of the about the nuclear bombing, and the American human impact of the bomb or of the option of justification was by no means universally not using the bomb. US state managers were accepted. The day after the Hiroshima bombing not sure of the reactions of the American the Vatican expressed serious concern. [60] US people. As National Security Council Document newspapers reported widespread European No. 30 of 1948 put it: concern and dismay: the New York Times ran an article three days after the bombing headed In this matter, public opinion must be 'Britons Revolted by Use of Atom Bomb'. At recognized as a factor of considerable home, the New York Sun claimed that 'the importance. Deliberation or decision on a entire city is pervaded by a sense ofsubject of this significance, even if clearly oppression. Many feel they would have been affirmative, might have the effect of placing happier if the 2,000,000,000-dollar experiment before the American people a moral question of had failed, or the knowledge had been thrown vital significance at a time when the full in the river like an unwanted kitten.’ [61] security impact of the question had not become apparent. If this decision is to be made by the Before long an argument emerged that a American people, it should be made in the principal reason for the haste to use the bomb circumstances of an actual emergency when was as a warning to the Soviet Union, and to the principal factors are in the forefront of end the war before the wartime ally would have public consideration. [63] to be given a major role in a Pacific settlement involving Japan. This was buttressed by the Popular involvement in decisions of the nuclear report of the United States Strategic Bombing state was seen as a risk that could be taken Survey of Japan which concluded that even only at a time of war fever, when the possibility without the nuclear bombing, Japan could not of a calm and informed decision could be have continued the war for more than a few minimized. The silence of Hiroshima is a crucial months, and that an invasion costing many part of the nuclear state's strategy of Allied lives would not have been necessary. All maintaining the perpetual alienation of the that was at stake was the speed of victory. [62] enemy. Burchett's small but urgent voice from

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Hiroshima helped to render the imminent nuclear world are even more dangerous than shared humanity palpable, to this extent before. The Cold War was at root a bilateral contributing to the possibility of a collective nuclear contest, closely analysed by game decision to refuse acquiescence in the next theorists seeking “rational solutions” to the nuclear war. 'One of evil's principal modes of Prisoners’ Dilemma, which lay only in being,' says John Berger, 'is looking beyond heightened trust and communication between (with indifference) that which is before the the opposing sides. In game theory terms eyes.’ [64] Evil, in this sense, is organized and outside that cold war context, when the number orchestrated by state and mass media, but of effective players rises above n=2, strategic never quite successfully. 'In visiting Hiroshima', stability, deterrence, bluffing and war Burchett later wrote, I felt that I was seeing in avoidance all become problematic, resulting in the last hour of WW2 what would be the fate of extreme uncertainty. [67] hundreds of cities in a WW3. If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the • In an effort to overcome restrictions on the right direction, what does? Or should?’[65] use of nuclear weapons arising from both moral concerns about genocide and practical military concerns about the counter-productive consequences of such use, the United States has been pressing ahead with the development of new types of nuclear weapons, such as Afterword “bunker-buster” tactical nuclear weapons.

August 6, 2005Originally written for the • Pressure for disarmament within fortieth anniversary of the US attack on governments and in global civil society has Hiroshima, Voice and Silence in the First ebbed. Early post-Cold War commitments to Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima dismantle existing nuclear weapons have been was published a year later in a long out of print set aside. More importantly still, the actions of book reviewing the life of the Australian successive US administrations have almost journalist Wilfred Burchett. [66] hopelessly compromised the core international legal-political restraints on nuclear Twenty years after writing Voice and Silence proliferation: the Non-Proliferation Treaty and what strikes me is its continued salience. The the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. threat of nuclear war is if anything greater now than at the height of the Reagan years, with the • The psycho-cultural state of nuclear terror dangers coming from multiple sources: endured by the populations of the nuclear- weapons countries that was a crucial part of • The number of nuclear-armed states has the structures that maintained the Cold War increased sharply, by and large withhas been effectively re-constituted – on a much acquiescence if not collusion of the sole wider scale in the context of globalization – remaining superpower. through the disabling consequences of the post 9.11 motif of terrorism. [68] • The risks of nuclear terrorism by non-state actors have expanded greatly, and should not • The worldwide peace movements sparked by be ignored by those accustomed to concerns the nuclear escalation of the Reagan years have about nuclear-armed states. all but disappeared, with little effective public restraint on the actions of the nuclear states, • The structural characteristics of the new despite everything that is known about the

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These sources of danger intersect with others Charges that Burchett participated in North such as the high level of irrationality and Korean and Chinese brainwashing of US and ideological motivation of decision-making in the allied prisoners of war pursued him until his Bush administration, and the intertwining of death in 1983. The most careful study of those the nuclear threat to security with other claims, by Gavan McCormack, refutes them, problems of genuinely global scale such as concluding climate change, threats to biodiversity, and the contradictory consequences of market-driven When all the false, garbled and malicious globalization. The complexity of these threats, stories of his activities in Korea are discounted, combined with their global rather than simple what remains is the portrait of an honest man national character makes the task of building who tried to tell the truth, who was almost social movements for peace and sustainability alone in seeing the war primarily from the point both more difficult and more urgent than a of view of the suffering Korean people rather quarter of a century ago. than that of the ‘Great Powers’ or his own or any other government. [70] “The Atomic Plague”: the indubitable achievement At the height of the Vietnam War, Burchett accompanied a National Liberation Force unit Burchett’s September 6th Daily Express article into South Vietnam, reporting the life of the was the first eyewitness published account. Yet guerrilla resistance – for which he was the importance of Burchett’s article was not mercilessly pilloried in the mainstream media. just the fact that he was the first to write from While Burchett’s courage in reporting from the the site of the holocaust, but also what he NLF side was never in doubt, even leading wrote about – and what his colleaguespeace movement activists of the time were embedded in the U.S. Occupation press corps concerned about the reliability of his reporting. did not: the human consequences of the David Marr’s long and careful assessment of technology he had hitherto admiredBurchett’s quarter century of writing about uncritically. This is clear from the headline to Vietnam from the peace talks of 1954 onwards his Daily Express article: “30th Day into the late 1970s confirms the flaws as well as Hiroshima: Those who escaped begin to die, virtues: victims of THE ATOMIC PLAGUE: 'I Write this as a Warning to the World'”. In response, U.S. Did Burchett tell the truth about Vietnam? The occupation forces and the U.S. Defencerecord is more mixed. He certainly worked Department denied his claims of radiation hard to dig out the facts, organize them and poisoning, branding him a victim of Japanese present them forcefully to readers. On the propaganda, and commenced the decades-long other hand, he sometimes deliberately left out US government censorship of the full effects of evidence, and he wilfully distorted evidence the bombing. presented by the ‘other side’. [71]

Burchett was no saint, nor did he aim for Today, regardless of the final assessment of “detachment”. His account of the human Burchett’s reporting of Vietnam, the question effects of the Hiroshima bombing, stands as the that comes immediately to mind is why so few one indubitable achievement in a long and of his colleagues – of whatever political stripe - controversial working life, during which he was took the same chance to report the other side. banned from his own country, labelled traitor Looking at the pattern of complaisant

21 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF contemporary reporting in a new age of preoccupied me in the last part of Voice and destructive imperial over-reach, the same Silence twenty years ago have now come to question arises even more forcefully. The centre stage in the complex and powerful work contrast between the work of Robert Fisk, Dahr of American historians of the Pacific War and of Jamail, John Martinkus and other independent Japan. [76] journalists on the one hand, and that of their colleagues embedded in the Green Zone of Born of the conquerors Baghdad makes the same point – unbearably, almost daily. [72] There is a final importance to be discerned in The Atomic Plague. It is a product of victory, The role of journalists was, and remains, as written by an Australian who had flown as a Burchett maintained, central to this telling and comrade with the young American crews of the re-telling of history. Burchett was pilloried. The B-29s as they incinerated hundreds of New York Times’ William L. Laurence, who thousands in the cities of Japan in the spring of denied his extensive knowledge of the radiation 1945. Despite its focus on the human effects of the bomb when he willingly led the consequences of the technology and military charge to deny Burchett’s claims, went on to organization Burchett had hitherto admired win a Pulitzer Prize. [73] uncritically, its author was not Japanese, was not opposed to the war effort, and was not – at Recovering historical memory that time - hostile to the United States.

In his book Shadows of Hiroshima, Burchett This separates Burchett’s act of witness from lamented the loss of the series of long reports most Japanese accounts, contemporary and from Nagasaki filed to the Chicago Daily News otherwise, including that of many official by his friend George Weller. Like Burchett, Japanese acts of remembrance. Many of these, Weller had jumped off the official caravan of especially the voices of official Japan, stress the embedded journalists in Yokohama, and headed undoubted significance of humanity as a whole, south alone to Nagasaki. Unlike Burchett morally and politically, but in a way that Weller submitted his copy to the GHQ censors, truncates the specifically Japanese story of who blocked it, and it was never seen again. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making a story that But just recently, a long lost carbon copy of the starts early one hot summer morning in 1945. reports wrote from Nagasaki was discovered by Notoriously, the Hiroshima Peace Park, site of Weller’s son, and the first of the reports was the annual national commemoration attended finally published. [74] by every post-war prime minister, for many years continued the work of the war by erasing Since Voice and Silence was written, it has memory of the many Korean hibakusha who come to light that US authorities suppressed died in the city. At its worst, Hiroshima not only the Japanese footage of Hiroshima and becomes a symbol not of a universal capacity Nagasaki discussed there, but also even more for suffering and a call to abandon war, but a footage, in colour, filmed by a US military film badge of a specifically Japanese victim status. unit. [75] Since this essay was written historians in the When Kurihara Sadako died in March 2005, US and Japan and elsewhere have greatly aged 92, it was her justly famous 1946 poem, expanded our knowledge of the wider pattern 'Let the Child be Born' that was widely of reporting about Hiroshima and the US reproduced in Japan. Yet in her later poems like censorship campaign. Questions about the “Hiroshima and the Emperor’s New Clothes” relationship between history and memory that and most famously “When we say ‘Hiroshima’”

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Kurihara targeted the hypocrisy of this official a crime never before committed. So far as it is Japanese valorizing of Japan's position as humanly possible to make such judgments, victim. Hiroshima, together with Nagasaki and the firebombings that preceded them, rendered the When we say "Hiroshima," scales of atrocity equally heavy on both sides. do people answer, gently, ‘Ah, 'Hiroshima’?” ... The deeply entrenched triumphalism of the Say "Hiroshima," and hear "Pearl Harbor.” victors’ subsequent political cultures endures Say "Hiroshima," and hear "Rape of Nanjing." to this day, masking and fostering the Say "Hiroshima," and hear women and children pathologies that poison the deep structure of in Manila relations between Japan and the U.S., and thrown into trenches, doused with gasoline, helping in turn to shield the United States from and burned alive. self-doubt in its ongoing imperial ventures. One Say "Hiroshima," listens in vain to unending demands from and hear echoes of blood and fire. American and Australian politicians for full Ah, 'Hiroshima', Japanese apology for the Pacific War waiting in we first must vain for the other shoe to drop. As with all such wash the blood suppressed pathologies, there is a terrible off our own hands. [77] psychological – and political – price to be paid with the return of the repressed. Kurihara reminded her Japanese post-war audience that witness to events of'One of evil's principal modes of being’ transhistorical human significance is always conducted by women and men standing in All of this work confirms the reality of the history at particular places. An authentic – or at suppression of the historical record that least a decently complete – Japanese account Burchett – unwittingly – documented for the cannot begin on that summer morning. first time, the complexity of trauma on the side of the nuclear victors as much as the defeated. One of the virtues of “The Atomic Plague” was Burchett’s achievement confirms the that it was written for the victors by one of its continuing salience - now as much as twenty best war correspondents, writing almost years ago – of John Berger’s comment on our directly from the worst his civilization could do complicity in evil, then and now: 'One of evil's right before his eyes. Kurihara is right, that the principal modes of being,' says John Berger, 'is Japanese of her generation should not avert looking beyond (with indifference) that which is their eyes from the events in which,before the eyes.’ [78] dictatorship or not, they were to varying ______degrees complicit. Burchett, writing from the Notes victors for the victors, is demanding that they face what had been done in their name. That * The original version of this essay was first story had to start in Hiroshima, the other side published in Ben Kiernan (ed.), Burchett of victory. Reporting the Other Side of the World 1939-1983, Quartet, London, 1986. That Today, for Americans and their allies of the version has not been changed except to remove Pacific War (reborn half a century later as the obscurities and infelicities of expression. In the Coalition of the Willing) it is still difficult to Afterword I note several important subsequent face the fact that the Pacific War came to an developments in our knowledge of the events end with an unprecedented act of mass terror, dealt with here, especially concerning the U.S.

23 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF censorship of the radiation effects of the Nagasaki: the Physical Medical and Social bombing. Joel Kovel, Gavan McCormack and Effects of the Atomic Bombings, Hutchinson, Belinda Probert were particularly helpful in London, 1981, p.516. commenting on the original version, and I am 8. Ibid., p.519. grateful to Mark Selden for careful and 9. Ibid., pp.130ff. productive editing of this version. 10. The piece that was published in the Daily Express on 6 September 1945 was slightly 1. Letter to David Gourlay, 9 July 1980. altered by an editor who thought 'poor Peter 2. Shadows of Hiroshima, Verso, London, 1983, [Burchett]' had been overcome by the sights of pp.8-9. the inferno, and who inserted some gratuitous 3. Burchett told the story of how he got to paragraphs from the Science Editor. The article Hiroshima a number of times in published is reprinted in Shadows and in Harry Gordon form. The first is in 'Hiroshima: A Postscript' in (ed.), The Eyewitness History of Australia, his Democracy with a Tommygun (F.W.Currey O'Neill, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 361-2. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1946); again in his 11. Shadows, p. 4l. autobiographies Passport (Nelson, Melbourne, 12. Passport, p.173. 1969) and At the Barricades (1980); and finally 13. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, op.cit., p.15. in Shadows of Hiroshima (Verso, London, 14. Passport, p.l72. In the various published 1983). The story of Burchett's trip to Hiroshima versions of the story, Burchett repeatedly and back as told here is drawn from all three. acknowledged the support he received from 4. One other journalist also broke through several of the veteran war correspondents in official restrictions at the time and reached the official party who protested at this Nagasaki. George Weller of the Chicago Daily unprofessional behaviour. News avoided military public relations 'hawks' 15. Passport, pp.174-5. A contemporary and reached Nagasaki by subterfuge on 6 account of Burchett's POW-camp exploits by September. The 25,000-word article he wrote Jim Vine was published in the Brisbane Courier- on the basis of interviews with witnesses and Mail, 11 September 1945, and reprinted in medical workers was much more detailed than Gordon, op.cit., p.364. Burchett must have Burchett's. 'As a loyal, disciplined member of been the source. Burchett mentions encounters the press corps, I sent the material toin the Kyoto-Tsuruga area and Kobe-Osaka. MacArthur's press headquarters for clearance Vine places the liberated camps as two on the and transmission . . . The paper . . . received west coast of Honshu and three on the Inland nothing. MacArthur had "killed" the lot.’ (cited Sea. in At the Barricades, p.1l6.) 16. Shadows, pp.22-3. 5. For the well-founded fears of the Emperor's 17. Even as late as 1970 Burchett still accepted circle see Pacific War Research Society, Japan's that initial explanation (Passport, p.176). Longest Day, Kodansha International, Tokyo, Presumably his reassessment of the probable 1980. link between his own low white-blood. cell 6. Passport, p.167. Burchett later quotes one of count and his exposure to residual radiation in the remaining doctors as saying that they knew Hiroshima began when he returned to they were not dealing with an infection, but Hiroshima for the first time a year later. that use of these masks provided some comfort 18. Shadows, p.9. in the face of an otherwise incomprehensible 19. Farrell is reported in an article in the New experience. York Times, 13 September 1945, p4 by W.H. 7. Committee for the Compilation of Materials Lawrence and datelined Tokyo; Groves's on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in statement is reported by William L. Laurence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and the NYT, 12 September 1945, pp. 1,4 in an

24 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF article, datelined New Mexico, 9 September, of Hiroshima for Japan. delayed. 42. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, op.cit., p.510; 20. Laurence, ibid. Nishi, op.cit., p.102. The film was eventually 21. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. p.504. returned in 1967 after a Japanese campaign, 22. Ibid., pp. 73-9. but even then could not be seen by the 23. Ibid. Japanese public, or the victims: 'The Ministry of 24. Ibid., p.243. Education however, did not fully release the 25. Ibid., p.270. film to the public. reasoning that much of it 26. New York Times, 7 September 1945, p.7. would violate the privacy of those people who 27. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. op.cit., p.616. had been exposed to the bombs and that it 28. Ibid., p.l51. contained too many cruel scenes.' Ibid. 29. Ibid., pp.l52-3 43. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, op.cit., p.14. 30. New York Times, 5 September 1945, cited 44. Ibid., p.l5. in Shadows, op.cit., p.23. 45. 'Visit to Hiroshima Proves It World's Most 31. Marlene J. Mayo, 'Civil Censorship and Damaged City', New York Times, 5 September Media Control in Early Occupied Japan: From 1945, pp.1,4. Minimum to Stringent Surveillance', Robert 46. 'Atom Bomb Killed Nagasaki Captives'. New Wolfe (ed.), Americans as Proconsuls: United York Times, 10 September 1945, pp.1,5. States Military Government in Germany and 47. Burchett – and the chroniclers of Hiroshima Japan, 1944-1952, Southern Illinois University and Nagasaki – confuse the two New York Press, Carbondale, 1984, pp.292-3. Mayo's Times reporters, W.H. Lawrence, the war important new study of US censorship policy is correspondent in Hiroshima the same day as based on declassified US official documents. Burchett, and W.L. Laurence, the Manhattan However, she devotes no attention to the Project publicist. In one passage, Burchett tries question of censorship of the effects of the to work out how and why Laurence/Lawrence atomic bombing. took so long to publish his Hiroshima account 32. Toshio Nishi, Unconditional Democracy: after visiting Hiroshima the same day as Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, Burchett (Lawrence's report was in fact 1945-1952, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, published the day before Burchett's), and why 1982, pp.86-7. he moved backwards and forwards across the 33. New York Times, 18 September 1945. Pacific. That Burchett has confused the two is 34. Nishi, op.cit., p.87. clear from pp.18-19 of Shadows, where the 35. Ibid., p.88. author of the New York Times article 'No 36. Mayo, op.cit., p.294 radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin', datelined 37. Nishi, op.cit., pp.88-9. 'Tokyo, 13 Sept.' is given as W.H. Laurence (in 38. Ibid., p.101. the original Times by-line, W.H. Lawrence). The 39. Ibid., p.102. Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: author of the article 'US Atom Bomb Site Belies the Survivors of Hiroshima, Weidenfeld and Tokyo Tales', datelined 'Atom Bomb Range. Nicholson. London, 1968, p.329. New Mexico, Sept. 9' is correctly given as 40. Lifton, op.cit. William L. Laurence. The chroniclers of 41. For the story of the poem (translated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki also note the presence Gavan McCormack) and its full text see Rokuro at a press conference in Hiroshima on 3 Hidaka, The Price of Affluence: Dilemmas of September 1945 of 'W.L. Laurence' rather than Contemporary Japan, Penguin Australia.W.H. Lawrence, (p.15). To make matters worse, Ringwood, 1985, pp.30-1. See also Lifton. Robert Lifton's discussion of W.L. Laurence and op.cit. p.329. Hidaka reports Kurihara’snuclearism refers to 'William L. Lawrence'. subsequent critical reflections on the meaning 48. William L. Laurence, Dawn Over Zero,

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Alfred Knopf: New York, 1947, p.224. London, 1986. 49. 'Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki Told by Flight 67. See Paul Bracken, “The Second Nuclear Member', New York Times, (9 Aug. delayed). 9 Age: How Much Has Changed, How Much September 1945. pp.1, 35. The same material Remains the Same?” (2002), Nautilus Institute was later included in Dawn Over Zero. Global Scenarios Workshop 2004: Who Will 50. 'US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales', Stop Nuclear Next Use, April 27-28, 2004. New York Times, 12 September 1945, pp.1, 4. http://www.nautilus.org 51. The Broken Connection, Touchstone, New /gps/scenarios/paper.html, and Patrick Morgan, York, 1980, pp.371-6. Deterrence Now, Cambridge U.P., 2003. 52. Democracy with a Tommygun, p.238. 68. See Joel Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear 53.Ibid., p.242. Terror, Southend Press, 1984. 54. Gene Gurney, 'The Giant Pays Its Way', in 69. Our knowledge of Burchett’s life and work James F. Sunderman (ed.), World War in the will be greatly enriched by to soon-to-be Air: The Pacific, Watts, New York, 1962. p.249. published works. Tom Heenan’s critical 55. Ibid., p.258; see also, Wesley Frank Caven biography, originally a Monash University and James Lea Cate (eds.), The Army Air Forces History Department PhD, The Life of Wilfred in World War 2. Volume 5 - The Pacific: Burchett, is to be published by Melbourne Matterhorn to Nagasaki, University of Chicago University Press. And a consolidated and Press, Chicago and London, 1953. definitive edition of Burchett’s various memoirs 56. Cited in John Costello, The Pacific War, edited by his son, George Burchett, and Nick Rawson, New York, 1981, p.551. Shimmin, as Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The 57. Kenneth Harrison, Road to Hiroshima, Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett (860 pp.) is Rigby, Adelaide, 1983, pp.15, 267. due from University of New South Wales Press 58. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: an in October 2005.. Argument with Historical Illustrations,70. Gavan McCormack, “Korea: Burchett’s Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p.142. Thirty years’ War”, in Kiernan, Burchett, op.cit. 59. B.H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in p.205. Warfare, Faber and Faber, London, 1946, pp. 71. David G. Marr, “Burchett on Vietnam”, in 67, 74. 60. New York Times, 8 August 1945, Kiernan, Burchett, op.cit. pp.235-6. p.1. 72. “Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on living in two 61. Reported in 'Fears of "Atomic" Wars in US', worlds”; and John Martinkus, Travels In Herald, Melbourne, 9 August 1945, p.2. American Iraq, (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004). 62. See, for example, P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, http://www.tomdispatch.com War and the Bomb, McGraw-Hill, New York, /index.mhtml?pid=2619 1949. In one of Clio's little ironies, the leader of 73. See Greg Mitchell and Robert J. Lifton, the bombing survey in Japan, was Paul Nitze, a Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, leading nuclear advocate for the Committee on Putnam, 1995, and the demand by Amy the Present Danger forty years later. Goodman and David Goodman to rescind 63. Cited by Peter Pringle and William Arkin in Laurence’s Pulitzer: “Hiroshima Cover-up: How SlOP: Nuclear War from the Inside, Sphere, the War Department's Timesman Won a London, 1983, p.28. Pulitzer”, Common Dreams News Center, 64. John Berger, 'Hiroshima - a portrait of evil', August 10, 2005, New Society, 6 August 1981, p.222. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0810-0 65. Wilfred Burchett, letter to David Gourlay, 9 1.htm. July 1980.Notes to Afterword 74. Weller’s much longer account confirms 66. Ben Kiernan (ed.), Burchett: Reporting the Burchett’s impressions, referring to the effects Other Side of the World 1939-1983, Quartet, of radiation as “Disease X”. The first of Weller’s

26 3 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF reports is published in English by the Mainichi eds., Living With the Bomb: American and Daily News, June 29, 2005, Japaneseat Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/sear M.E. Sharpe, 1997. The Nuclear Education ch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963 Project by Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden on 439. For two detailed accounts see Greg Japan Focus provides a comprehensive listing Mitchell, “SPECIAL REPORT: A Great Nuclear- of relevant studies in English: Age Mystery Solved”, Editor and Publisher, http://japanfocus.org/category.asp?id=66. June 16,77. Translated by2005, Richard Minear in Sadako http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/sear Kurihara, When We Say Hiroshima: Selected ch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963 Poems, Michigan Monograph in Japanese Studies 23, University of Michigan Press, 1998. 439 and Mark Selden, "Nagasaki 1945: While See also his translation of “Hiroshima and the Independents were Scorned, Embed Won Emperor’s New Clothes” in his “Kurihara Pulitzer, Japan Focus, July 7, 2005. Sadako, 1913 – 2005”, Japan Focus, March 15, http://japanfocus.org/article.asp? id=325 2005. http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=237 75. Greg Mitchell, “SPECIAL REPORT: 78. John Berger, 'Hiroshima - a portrait of evil', Hiroshima Film Cover-Up Exposed”, Editor and New Society, 6 August 1981, p.222. Publisher, August 3, 2005. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/new Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at s/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10010015 the Nautilus Institute for Security and 83. Sustainability (www.nautilus.org). His book 76. See Mitchell and Lifton, op.cit.; Michael Masters of Terror: Indonesia's Military and Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory. Violence in East Timor in 1999 (expanded and Cambridge U.P., 1996; John Dower, War updated edition) is in press. He wrote this Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific article for Japan Focus. Posted August 11, War, Pantheon; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, 2005.

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