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After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, US government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that civilians did not face “undue suffering,” that it was “a very pleasant way to die.”
After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, top US government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that Japanese reports of deaths due to radiation were “propaganda.”
The US general overseeing the nuclear program told Congress that Japanese civilians did not face “undue suffering,” insisting that it was in fact “a very pleasant way to die.”
This information was revealed by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
On August 8, the archive published declassified documents exposing this shocking history. The archive wrote:
the head of the [Manhattan] project, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, was so worried about public revulsion over the terrible effects of the new weapon – which a Navy report later in 1945 called “the most terrible agent of destruction known to man” – that he cut off early discussion within the MED of the problem. Later, he misleadingly told Congress there was “no radioactive residue” in the two devastated cities. In doing so, he contradicted evidence from his own specialists whom he had sent to Japan to investigate. Groves even insisted that those who had been exposed to radiation from the atomic explosions would not face “undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”
The New York Times echoed these falsehoods on behalf of the US government, publishing an article on September 13, 1945 titled “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin.”
In this case, the newspaper of record was repeating the lies of another top US official, Brig. Gen. T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission. Like Groves, Farrell ignored his own medical experts and publicly denied that Japanese civilians were dying of radioactive fallout.
Doctor James N. Yamazaki was the lead physician of the US Atomic Bomb Medical Team sent to Nagasaki in 1945 to investigate the effects of the nuclear attack.
In his website Children of the Atomic Bomb, published by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Yamazaki wrote:
The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. It is not unlikely that the estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are over conservative.
Yamazaki added that the “bomb was a deliberate act of destruction that destroyed human bodies, brains, and genes for generations.”
Multipolarista further detailed this gruesome history in a report after the assassination of Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this July.
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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
Featured image is from Multipolarista
