Atomic truths plague prize coverup

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"...On the day of the bombing, he accompanied a group of military scientists and observers in a second B-29 that flew with Sweeney. A month later, the Times published his remarkable eyewitness account, and he followed up with a series for the paper on the creation of the bomb. Those articles won him a 1946 Pulitzer Prize.

But Laurence was no ordinary embedded reporter.

A brilliant and respected pioneer of science reporting at the Times, he was also an unabashed cheerleader and paid government propagandist for nuclear weapons.

In March 1945, Gen. Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, secretly recruited him - with the approval of Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger - as a press agent for the War Department....

Australian Wilfred Burchett was the first foreign journalist to get through Gen. MacArthur's military cordon around Hiroshima and report on the civilian devastation. On Sept. 5, 1945, Burchett published an article in the London Daily Express headlined "The Atomic Plague."

A month after the bombing, Burchett wrote, "people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something I can only describe as an atomic plague....."

-Juan Gonzalez

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/story/335618p-286712c.html

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In light of the continuation of New York Times reporters who double as propagandists (Judy Miller) and the continued efforts of some around here of defending the atomic bombings... this is timely.

It would be nice to see Judy Miller stripped of her Pulitzer as well. Those awards give these liars too much credibility.

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1. They paid attention to the reports. After the fact.

Which is, of course, the only way to pay attention to reports. The US generals had no way of understanding what was reported; scientists had a hard time with it.

The correlation of high levels of various kinds of radiation and radiation sickness or cancer was really sketchy, even into the early 1950s. If you believe my 7th-grade science teacher, many of the researchers into nuclear energy in the late '30s and the early '40s had intermittent radiation sickness, and later had a very high rate of death from cancer. Experiments on US troops and Pacific Islanders after Hiroshima were conducted to collect data on radiation sickness and really establish it as science, not anecdote.

The tie-in with cancer was a mystery after radiation sickness was acknowledged: in the '50s bewildering research was published showing a strong correlation between high levels of X-rays used in cancer therapy and clusters of unrelated tumors.

There were researchers who were right early on. But they didn't convince others for years.

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2. I think part of the effect

that is still evident here is the yea rah! "Atomic Age" mentality as opposed to the "Atomic Plague" mentality that would make more sense.

It's like the Iraq "War" or any war and people clinging to the idea of the US being "right". People should be aware that they have been and continue to be propagandized. So many live in denial.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4274694

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4274694#4274785

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3. I noticed this had been posted (similar subject) - Jun Hoshikawa

"...Any real treatment or study of the radiation sicknesses caused by the atomic bombs was strictly prohibited once the U.S. occupation began in late August, 1945. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) established in Hiroshima by the U.S. authority in as late as 1949 carried out detailed medical observation of Hibakusha , the radiation victims, but provided no treatment whatsoever. In fact, the reporting on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was censor-suppressed by the GHQ, the allied occupation authority, and was virtually non-existent until 1952 when the first photographic coverage from the earliest days of the nuclear devastation appeared in a monthly magazine in Japan. Thereafter floods of reportage, narrative, writing, photographs, and painting started to wash over the Japanese society with vivid imagery of hells on earth. At about the same time, with the advent of the large-scale hydrogen bomb experiments in the Marshal Islands in 1954, nuclear abolition movements got under way. One of the explosions at the Bikini Atoll threw 23 Japanese fishermen into severe radiation sickness, and the captain died within 6 months. It was the nightmare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki come alive again. Meanwhile Japanese doctors, some of them Hibakusha themselves, quietly and earnestly kept on treating the atomic bomb victims, groping in the dark with no governmental support, either Japanese or American, and no prior knowledge or on-going research about massive human radiation exposure.


One of the surviving doctors from Hiroshima, Shuntaro Hida, has recently published a book on his work over the last 60 years. Dr. Hida urges us to become aware that there are two distinctive types of radiation exposure. One is the ‘external' radiation exposure. It is caused by gamma ray, one of the three radioactive rays emitted by nuclear material or nuclear explosion. Gamma rays travel a long distance and penetrate every material but lead. A relatively harmless example is the medical X-ray exposure. The large dose of external radiation exposure from Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions killed and tormented many people. Also less dramatic, yet harmful enough, external exposure can happen in accidents at nuclear-related facilities. Another type of radiation exposure is called ‘internal' radiation exposure. This is caused by alpha and beta rays, both with much shorter travelling range, mere skin thickness. The internal radiation exposure happens when irradiated molecules, either from nuclear explosion or nuclear accident, spread and circulate in the environment, and get absorbed into living organism such as human body. If they settle somewhere within the organism, self-radiating molecules keep emitting alpha and beta rays for a long time, creating damage in the neighboring cells. When body cells are affected this way, cancer may grow. When reproductive cells are affected, genetic disorder may develop.


Dr. Hida points out that while the external radiation exposure has been recognized and studied extensively, the second type, the internal radiation exposure has been formally ignored. At this stage, what is still gnawing at the atomic bomb victims is mainly this internal radiation exposure; a time bomb ticking quietly toward death and fatal illnesses within one's own body. Moreover, Dr Hida, and in fact every Hibakusha I read the words of or personally speak with, emphasizes the fact that not only them but all sentient beings on earth now carry this time bomb, thanks to omnipresence of miniscule irradiated particles within the biosphere from nuclear experiments, nuclear accidents, normal operations of nuclear weapon production and nuclear power generation, and increasing use of quasi-conventional weapons such as depleted Uranium shells.


Collectively, surviving victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now in their old age, cry out to the world; “Please understand what is at stake with nuclear warfare. We know from our experience that it should not remain an option. We can humanly allow no more Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear weapon should be abolished forever.”


...And yet, the Japanese majority doesn't seem to be keen to shift our nation's course toward forsaking the Peace Constitution to establish, for example, an authentic war-fighting military, to acquire nuclear weapons, and to assert ourselves again as a militarily aggressive international player. Neighboring countries in Asia would never tolerate this either. The U.S./Japan dance is now entering an interesting phase where the U.S. demands such a course change, and the new generation of Japanese politicians is on the rise with the U.S. backing, trying to persuade the Japanese public that the last 60 years have been a mere fantasy. Here again, I need to remind you that not all Americans nor Japanese aim at this kind of tidal change. Certainly, Hibakusha , the surviving victims of the two atomic bombings are at the forefront of people strongly objecting this unlearning of history."


http://www.schreiner.edu/pip/events.html