{"id":32142,"date":"2013-07-23T13:02:11","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T12:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=32142"},"modified":"2015-05-06T09:00:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T08:00:03","slug":"68-years-ago-the-nuclear-age-is-born-amid-secrecy-cover-up-and-radiation-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/07\/68-years-ago-the-nuclear-age-is-born-amid-secrecy-cover-up-and-radiation-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"68 Years Ago: The Nuclear Age Is Born\u2014Amid Secrecy, Cover-up and Radiation Threat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An<\/a>

An allied correspondent stands in a sea of rubble before the shell of a building in Hiroshima September 8, 1945, a month after the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare was dropped by the US. (AP Photo\/Stanley Troutman)<\/p><\/div>\n

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-eighth anniversary is marked\u2014or mourned, if you will\u2014on July 16.<\/p>\n

Entire books have been written about the test, so I\u2019ll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there\u2019s much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America<\/i>, and my own recent book Atomic Cover-Up<\/a><\/i>). It\u2019s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the Cold War era.<\/p>\n

In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren\u2019t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, the \u201cFather of the Bomb,\u201d worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.<\/p>\n

Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site, but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer\u2019s staff proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, \u201cWhat are you, Hearst propagandists?\u201d<\/p>\n

Admiral William Leahy, President Truman\u2019s chief of staff\u2014who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan\u2014placed the bomb in the same category as \u201cpoison gas.\u201d And sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.<\/p>\n

Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over sparsely populated areas. \u201cWe were just damn lucky,\u201d the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.<\/p>\n

The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves\u2019s first words were: \u201cWe must keep the whole thing quiet.\u201d This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for \u201cdownwinders\u201d and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, \u201catomic soldiers,\u201d those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.<\/p>\n

Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from The New York Times<\/i> and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.<\/p>\n

In the weeks that followed, ranchers discovered dozens of cattle had odd burns or were losing hair. Oppenheimer ordered post-test health reports held in the strictest secrecy. When Laurence\u2019s famous report on the Trinity test was published just after the Hiroshima bombing, he made no mention of radiation at all.<\/p>\n

Even as the scientists celebrated their success at Alamagordo on July 16, the first radioactive cloud was drifting eastward over America, depositing fallout along its path. When Americans found out about this, three months later, the word came not from the government but from the president of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, who wondered why some of his film was fogging and suspected radioactivity as the cause.<\/p>\n

Fallout was absent in early press accounts of the Hiroshima bombing as the media joined in the triumphalist backing of The Bomb and the bombings. When reports of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki afflicted with a strange and horrible new disease emerged, General Groves, at first, called it all a \u201choax\u201d and \u201cpropaganda\u201d and speculated that the Japanese had different \u201cblood.\u201d Then the military kept reporters from the West from arriving in the atomic cities, until more than a month after the blasts, when it controlled access in an early version of today\u2019s \u201cembedded reporters\u201d program.<\/p>\n

When some of the truth about radiation started to surface in the US media, a full-scale official effort to downplay the Japanese death toll\u2014and defend the decision to use the bomb\u2014really accelerated, leading to an effective decades-long \u201cHiroshima narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________<\/p>\n

Greg Mitchell\u2019s <\/i>Atomic Cover-Up<\/a> covers the suppression of film shot by the US Army in Hirohsima and Nagasaki. His <\/i>Hollywood Bomb<\/a> looks at the first movie about the making and use of the bomb, and how MGM revised it under pressure from the military and the White House.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-eighth anniversary is marked\u2014or mourned, if you will\u2014on July 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}