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Tue 7 Aug, 2007 09:24 am
Special Report: HBO Airs A-Bomb Footage Kept from Media for Decades
By Greg Mitchell
Published: August 06, 2007 6:25 PM ET
On the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima -- widely ignored elsewhere in the media today -- HBO aired Monday night a documentary by Steven Okazaki titled "White Light/Black Rain." It mainly focuses on a few survivors of the attack in 1945, which took at least 150,000 lives. It is shown again at 10 p.m. on Tuesday.
The film also features extremely graphic footage of victims of the bombings shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the attacks by an American military film crew -- and then kept from the press and public for decades.
In the early 1980s, I helped bring the existence of this long-suppressed footage to light, and later wrote about it at length for the book that I co-authored with Robert Jay Lifton, "Hiroshima in America." The footage was used extensively in the award-winning 2004 film "Original Child Bomb," for which I served as an adviser.
Here is a full report on how the footage came to exist -- and then hidden from all.
In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.
The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. Suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was quite significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.
As editor of Nuclear Times magazine in the 1980s, I met Herbert Sussan, one of the members of the U.S. military film crew, and Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian who first showed some of the Japanese footage on American TV in 1970. In fact, that newsreel footage might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling.
The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Md., in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.
When that footage finally emerged, I corresponded and spoke with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military filmmakers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.
"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. ... They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because ... we were sorry for our sins."
More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was ... because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.
THE JAPANESE NEWSREEL FOOTAGE
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the U.S. readied plans for occupying the defeated country -- and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.
But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. In early September, just after the Japanese surrender, and as the American occupation began, director Sueo Ito set off for Nagasaki. There his crew filmed the utter destruction near ground zero and scenes in hospitals of the badly burned and those suffering from the lingering effects of radiation.
On Sept. 15, another crew headed for Hiroshima. When the first rushes came back to Toyko, Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer, felt "every frame burned into my brain," he later said.
At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years "the world ... knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction."
Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.
Then, on Oct. 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.
SHOOTING THE U.S. MILITARY FOOTAGE
In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern -- who as a member of Hollywood's famed First Motion Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler's "Memphis Belle" -- had become one of the first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.
As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would be a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that "the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions."
McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and "caption" the material, so it would have "scientific value." He took charge of this effort in early January 1946, even as the Japanese feared that, when they were done, they would never see even a scrap of their film again.
At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on January 1, 1946 to document the results of the U.S. air campaign in more than 20 Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.
The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki. "Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there," Sussan later told me. "We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust. ... I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud."
Along with the rest of McGovern's crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world.
At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients -- and then took off his white doctor's shirt and displayed his own burns and cuts.
After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot "Sanshiro Sugata," the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.
THE SUPPRESSION BEGINS
While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing and labeling all their black & white footage into a rough cut of just under three hours. At this point, several members of Japanese team took the courageous step of ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the Americans took over the project.
Director Ito later said: "The four of us agreed to be ready for 10 years of hard labor in the case of being discovered." One incomplete, silent print would reside in a ceiling until the Occupation ended.
The negative of the finished Japanese film, nearly 15,000 feet of footage on 19 reels, was sent off to the U.S. in early May 1946. The Japanese were also ordered to include in this shipment all photographs and related material. The footage would be labeled SECRET and not emerge from the shadows for more than 20 years.
The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the U.S. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels in huge footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than 30 years.
McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.
Fearful that his film might get "buried," McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. "He was that kind of man, he didn't give a damn what people thought," McGovern told me. "He just wanted the story told."
In an article in his hometown Buffalo Evening News, McGovern said that he hoped that "this epic will be made available to the American public." He planned to call the edited movie "Japan in Defeat."
Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn't want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make four training films.
In a March 3, 1947 memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps, explained that the film would be classified "secret." This was determined "after study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is believed that the information contained in the films should be safeguarded until cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission." After the training films were completed, the status would be raised to "Top Secret" pending final classification by the AEC.
The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film "and not let anyone touch it -- and that's the way it stayed," as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the top-secret area.
"Dan McGovern stayed with the film all the time," Sussan later said. "He told me they could not release the film [because] what it showed was too horrible."
Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on the footage "would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history." A reply from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack "wide public appeal."
McGovern, meanwhile, continued to "babysit" the film, now at Norton Air Force base in California. "It was never out of my control," he said later, but he couldn't make a film out of it any more than Sussan could (but unlike Herb, he at least knew where it was).
THE JAPANESE FOOTAGE EMERGES
At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. Fearful that it might get lost forever in the military/government bureaucracy, he secretly made a 16 mm print and deposited it in the U.S. Air Force Central Film Depository at Wright-Patterson. There it remained out of sight, and generally out of mind. (The original negative and production materials remain missing, according to Abe Mark Nornes, who teaches at the University of Michigan and has researched the Japanese footage more than anyone.)
The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as "the film of illusion," to no avail. A rare article about what it called this "sensitive" dispute appeared in The New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been "Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years." Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a "hold" on the Japanese using it -- even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.
Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, few in the U.S. challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its "first-use" nuclear policy: Under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn--in the sand. The U.S., in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on other occasions.
On Sept. 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film "not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense)."
Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the United States had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black & white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look. Soon Barnouw realized that, despite its marginal film quality, "enough of the footage was unforgettable in its implications, and historic in its importance, to warrant duplicating all of it," he later wrote.
Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. Barnouw arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press. A throng turned out and sat in respectful silence at its finish. (One can only imagine what impact the color footage with many more human effects would have had.) "Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945" proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the roof of a building.
In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed interest in airing it. "Only NBC thought it might use the film," Barnouw later wrote, "if it could find a 'news hook.' We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for." But then an article appeared in Parade magazine, and an editorial in the Boston Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see this film: "Television has brought the sight of war into America's sitting rooms from Vietnam. Surely it can find 16 minutes of prime time to show Americans what the first A-bombs, puny by today's weapons, did to people and property 25 years ago."
This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of dropping the bomb.
"I feel that classifying all of this filmed material was a misuse of the secrecy system since none of it had any military or national security aspect at all," Barnouw told me. "The reason must have been--that if the public had seen it and Congressmen had seen it--it would have been much harder to appropriate money for more bombs."
THE AMERICAN FOOTAGE COMES OUT
About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.
In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo teacher named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the U.S. military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.
There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the U.S. military footage.
Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, D.C. verified this. He found eighty reels of film, labeled #342 USAF, with the reels numbered 11000 to 11079. About one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: "School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damaged ... Commercial school demolished ... School, engineering, demolished. ... School, Shirayama elementary, demolished, blast effect ... Tenements, demolished."
The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me at the time, "If no one knows about the film to ask for it, it's as closed as when it was classified."
Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called "Prophecy" and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.
That fall a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New York Film Festival, called "Dark Circle." It's co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, "No wonder the government didn't want us to see it. I think they didn't want Americans to see themselves in that picture. It's one thing to know about that and another thing to see it."
Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s -- or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In late 1982, editing Nuclear Times, I met Sussan and Erik Barnouw -- and talked on several occasions with Daniel McGovern, out in Northridge, California. "It would make a fine documentary even today," McGovern said of the color footage. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a movie of the burning of Atlanta?"
After he hauled the footage back to the Pentagon, McGovern said, he was told that under no circumstances would the footage be released for outside use. "They were fearful of it being circulated," McGovern said. He confirmed that the color footage, like the black and white, had been declassified over time, taking it from top secret to "for public release" (but only if the public knew about it and asked for it).
Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long lingered. Here McGovern added his considerable voice. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation," he said. "The medical effects were pretty gory. ... The attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don't make people sick."
But who was behind this? "I always had the sense," McGovern answered, "that people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force--it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody," he declared. "If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war."
Even so, McGovern believed, his footage might have surfaced "if someone had grabbed the ball and run with it but the AEC did not want it released."
As "Dark Circle" director Chris Beaver had said, "With the government trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad publicity."
TODAY
In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people they filmed in 1946. By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On Sept. 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?
In the mid-1990s, researching "Hiroshima in America," a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.
The 50th anniversary of the bombing drew extensive print and television coverage -- and wide use of excerpts from the McGovern/Sussan footage--but no strong shift in American attitudes on the use of the bomb.
Then, in 2003, as adviser to a documentary film, "Original Child Bomb," I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. She not only did so but also obtained from McGovern's son copies of home movies he had shot in Japan while shooting the official film.
"Original Child Bomb" went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and this year debuted on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage finally reached part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended.
Only then Americans who saw the footage were able to fully judge for themselves what the late Daniel A. McGovern was trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race -- and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.
What's the point of this lengthy post? I think most Americans know we dropped two bombs. One on Hiroshima; the other on Nagasaki. By dropping these two bombs the US saved the lives of untold thousands of American G.I.'s that would have had to "storm" the Japanese Islands. And, the Japanese had their policy of fighting to the last person.
Also, by dropping these two bombs, I believe we had an easier time in de-Nazifying Germany, since any Nazis that wanted to "regroup" likely thought better, after seeing that we had this new weapon (and they couldn't build one, since a number of their better "German" physicists had escaped to America, since they were Jewish). Boy, was the US lucky to get those physicists, and then save so many American G.I.'s lives with the bomb they helped to build. Talk about good luck!
e brownQuote: 2. Neither German or Japan were anywhere close to developing the bomb. Both had programs and both failed. The US spent millions on the Manhatten project and new the economic costs... and with that knowledge were certain that Japan the waning years of the war could not possibly succeed. Hindsight backs this up.
The fact that they would have if they could of is irrelevent to the question.
3. Japan had already been defeated when the bombs were dropped. Everyone (including the Japanese army) knew the war was over.
Wrong wrongedy wrong. The Japanese already tested a subcritical device on Aug 5 1945 and had a successful trigger. They had planned to deploy their 3 "aitcraft carrying subs" into US Coastal waters by fall of 1945.
Your argumemnt that "They were already defeated " doesnt hold water because we bombed the **** out of Tojyo and several other military targets and they only steeled their resolve. The loss of Iwo and Okinawa only proved that they were arming the homeland for the final fight.
Historians have shown that the Japanese were actually closer to an actual bomb than we even suspected. Since they had used a steam centrifuge for UF6 they could produce more U234/5 than we could.(We didnt begin using the stem centrifuges till after the war)
All facts of the story counter what youve asserted. Why did it take 2 bombs? The Japanese were not willing to surrender unconditionallt and we feared another WWI scenario where the Japanes e would arise in 20 years armed with nuclear teeth.
The Russian argument is valid I suppose , but, the Rsussians had a burning vengeance against the Germans , and, had they not been there to take on the 2/3 of Hitlers army at the eastern freont, you think that we would have successfully had a D--Day?
The Russians were nuts for revenge and we recognized how thir revenge turned to "real estate speculation" Of course Russia ws one of those left standing after the war. But we were interested in bringing the war to a conclusion in the Pacific because we were flat broke.
My dad would have been in an invasion fleet scheduled for September 1945 and hed seen enough **** un Burma a few years before. His regiment was training somehwere so they could land and kill everything that =moved. As my ad said, "I was gonna have my men kill women and children as well as soldiers because they coulnt know who was being trained as homeland guards".
Did you ever see the firebomb fotosof Tokyo? Why didnt they surrender then?
Quote: Hindsight backs this up.
Historiographical ata supports me. There is a redords room at the ORNL labs near the "peace bell" where some of the archives of the Japanese nuclear program are kept. Most of the information of the temporal proximity of the Japanese and their own biomb wasnt widely known tillafter the war.
We demanded unconditional surrender. We won back all the territories they took in the 30's, then we started invading their home islands , we fire bombed their capitol and dropped one nuke on Kiroshima, yet they still didnt surrender with anything other than stalling. Remember, we wre duped once by their duplicity when they , under the cover of peaceful negotiations with us, were already launching an airwave against military and civilian targets at Pearl Harbor. "Once bitten, twice shy"
As admiral Yamamoto said after Pearl'
"Im afraid that all weve done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with terrible resolve" Boy-he got that right.
Nuclear Weapons History:Japan's Wartime Bomb Projects Reveal
Nuclear Weapons History: Japan's Wartime Bomb Projects Revealed
By Deborah Shapley
[This is an abridged and slightly edited version of the article appearing in Science, 13 Jan 1978, pp. 152-157]
A little-publicized chapter in the history of atomic weapons is the Japanese effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The effort centered around Japan's university physics laboratories, and its chief figure was Yoshio Nishina, who was Japan's leading scientist and a physicist of international stature.
Much has been written about how the United States and Britain during the war were concerned that the Germans, who had discovered atomic fission in the 1930's, would develop the world's first superbomb based on this principle. Indeed, the German wartime atomic research effort was a major rationale for the Manhattan Project in the United States.
But in the case of Japan it seems that no one in the U.S. government took the possibility of a Japanese atomic bomb project seriously.
Still more curious is the curtain of silence which the Japanese themselves seem to have pulled over the subject, and which they have kept tightly drawn since the war. Even the Americans who interrogated Nishina concluded that Japan had had no atomic bomb project.
Even today in Japan, when historians tell Japanese that there was such a project, many Japanese react with disbelief. Japan's postwar official policy, that she does not and never will seek to be a nuclear-armed country, seems to have inhibited discussion of the project. Japan's wartime atomic research, in Japan, has become a social secret.
The effort is documented in two authoritative Japanese histories. One is a history of science and technology in Japan of which volume 13, published in 1970, deals with science and technology during World War II. The second is a social history of science, by Tetu Hirosige, published in 1973, that has an entire chapter devoted to the wartime science mobilization, including among other things, atomic research. Nishina died in 1951 and there is no known account by him of his wartime activities. But there are other firsthand accounts, notably the diary of Masa Takeuchi, a worker at Nishina's laboratory who was assigned to the thermal diffusion project, and a memoir of
Bunsabe Arakatsu, a physicist from Kyoto.
These materials have been collected independently by Herbert F. York, Jr., director of the Program in Science, Technology and Public Affairs at the University of California at San Diego, and Charles Weiner, professor of history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). Weiner is now completing a full-scale historical study of the subject.
It is no surprise that physicists in Japan were tempted, around 1940, to study the military applications of fission. Throughout the 1930's, Japan had kept pace with the exciting developments in physics -- with theory in Europe and experimental techniques in the United States. Nishina spent several years in Copenhagen in the laboratory of Niels Bohr.
The Japanese also became schooled in the techniques of the cyclotron, through a small machine built at the Riken, Nishina's laboratory in Tokyo, and by sending a much younger physicist, Ryokichi Sagane, to Berkely to work under E.O. Lawrence. Lawrence arranged for the contribution of a 200-ton magnet for a second cyclotron at the Riken. The cyclotron was not finished until 8 years later, shortly before the war's end.
While Japanese physics at the outset of the war was strong enough to carry researchers naturally into the problem of the fission weapon, it was "too brittle," to bring the project to a successful conclusion. Nishina, Sagane, and some others were clearly world class physicists; but Japanese physics included a "comparatively large number of nonadvanced fields."
Scientists Suggest Project
The scientists themselves initiated atomic bomb research in September 1940. Army sponsorship was arranged, and "fairly large-scale research" began at the Riken "from December, 1940."
The years 1940 and 1941 were a period of intense military interest in the possibilities of atomic weapons. In 1941, Prime Minister and War Minister Hideki Tojo's order for investigation of the possibilities for a fission weapon were passed on to the Riken.
But in the first of what was to be a series of uncoordinated orders to the scientists, the Navy also engaged the Riken's services, and launched an inquiry into the feasibility of the weapon in late 1942. This led to the "Physics Colloquium," a galaxy of Japan's leading scientists who met for ten sessions between December 1942 and March 1943, to investigate the feasibility of Japan's achieving a weapon.
The Colloquium's conclusion, relayed to the Navy in March 1943, was that an atomic bomb would be impossible "even" for the United States for the current war. Another account says that it estimated Japan would need "ten years" to develop such a weapon. So it seems that the scientists viewed the project as extremely long term at best, or, as one of them would later write: "if not for this war then in time for the next one."
On the other hand, the military viewed the bombs as something to be pursued immediately, although it often did not back up this commitment with resources. The planners of Pearl Harbor, it is known, assumed that the war in the Pacific would be short, brutal, and brilliant. They believed that America, then being irrevocably drawn into hostilities in Europe, would retreat quickly from fighting on a second front in the Pacific.
It is well established that another faction in the Japanese government was restrained and realistic, and probably this element took a wait-and-see attitude, and relegated the problem to the scientists. But the zealots were still there. A new book, Enola Gay*, quotes the physicist Tsunesabo Asada's recollection that discussions of the subject right after Pearl Harbor were characterized by a "mood of blind patriotism" and "promises of generous funding."
Arakatsu, writing after the war, said he did atomic bomb research to prevent young scientists from being sent to fight and die. Takeuchi, in his diary, which was also compiled after Japan had surrendered, says that he did the research only when ordered, and that other Riken scientists were equally unenthusiastic.
However well these rationales suited the postwar climate of opinion, there is evidence that the actual situation was different. At several junctures when the scientists might well have closed down the work altogether -- for they knew better than anyone how great were the odds against success -- they kept the work going.
September 1940 had been one such juncture; March 1943 was another. Following the physics colloquium's negative report, the Navy branch that had sponsored it lost interest in the atomic bomb. But Nishina managed to keep the Riken atomic research going. The Army, which had been funding the work since December 1940, became the sole sponsor of Riken atomic research.
But this was by no means the beginning of coordination among the military. Just as the Naval Institute of Technology bowed out of support of atomic research in March 1943, another Navy branch, the Fleet Administration Center, was sponsoring another group of researchers at Kyoto University, under Arakatsu, to work toward an atomic bomb.
The Kyoto project began in 1942 and was enlarged with a grant of 600,000 yen in 1943. Among other things, the money went to construct a cyclotron at Kyoto university. But the military's commitment to the work -- however strong in spirit -- was not backed up with material aid.
Takeuchi's diary also indicates that atomic research at the Riken was anything but coordinated. Takeuchi complains that although he was told to consider the possibility of separating uranium by electromagentic means, Miyamoto, who had developed such a method, had gone to another university. So Takeuchi gave up on electromagnetic separation because he couldn't have Miyamoto around to help. Similarly, although Takeuchi found gaseous thermal diffusion "the most promising" method, Eiichi Takeda, who had done small-scale thermal diffusion work using a glass column, was not assigned to the project. So, Takeuchi had to start from scratch.
After much delay and red tape the apparatus was ready in a separate building in early 1945. It took Takeuchi 18 months to do this work, whereas physicists in the United States were able to set up comparable or larger experiments in a matter of weeks.
In April 1945, as the gaseous thermal diffusion apparatus and the cyclotron were finally working together in an experimental mode, the building housing the apparatus -- but not the cyclotron -- was ruined in the American bomber raids over Toko. The wrecking of their experiment caused the scientists to give up on their atomic research -- that is, until after Hiroshima.
After Hiroshima, the government seems to have become interested yet again in having an atomic bomb. According to one account, the morning after the bomb was dropped, Nishina was summoned and asked first whether the bomb could have been atomic and "whether Japan could have one in six months."
Nishina was flown over Hiroshima on 8 August. The pattern of destruction and the presence of radiation convinced him the bomb had been an atomic one. Arakatsu reached a similar conclusion when he was flown over the city on 10 August.
After Hiroshima, the scientists at the Riken resumed their atomic studies, but with a different goal, namely to learn about the effects of the weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Philip Morrison, now of M.I.T., who served on the Manhattan Project, and arrived in Japan on the first day of the American occupation, recalled what he found when he visited the Japanese scientists.
Nishina was "guarded and self contained ... impassive and almost antagonistic," toward the arriving Americans. On the other hand, many other Japanese physicists seemed to welcome the Americans with "rueful pleasure." Morrison recalls that the feelings of internationalism, of a bond among physicists, seemed to reestablish itself between the Americans and Japanese -- with the exception of Nishina. And as for whether Japan had been developing an atomic weapon, he recalls, "they didn't talk about it and we didn't ask about it much."
The Riken buildings and laboratories "looked frayed, unrenovated, starved of attention." In places, work had just stopped and people had gone away. "As we looked around we concluded this could not have been the site of a Japanese Manhattan Project."
It is not surprising that U.S. scientists visiting Japan who knew firsthand the "panoply" of installations and people that was the American Manhattan Project, concluded that the Japanese could not have had a comparable project.
So it went in the fall of 1945. Visiting American scientists were sympathetic to Japanese "colleagues" and tended to find no evidence of a bomb project. The Japanese were silent to their American military interrogators; thus the military, by and large, also found no evidence of such a project.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered on 30 October that all research facilities and equipment "on atomic energy and related subjects be seized." "No research ... on atomic energy shall be permitted in Japan."
On 24 to 26 November 1945, on orders from General Groves' office, which oversaw the Manhatttan Project, American military teams proceeded to hack Japan's five cyclotrons, including the two at Riken, to pieces. The remains were dumped into the sea.
In the furor which arose in the United States, scientists' and citizens' groups protested to the Secretary of War. For the most part they were told that the destruction order had been a mistake. But this confession of error only whetted the appetites of many of the scientists, who had now become embroiled in a fight for future civilian control of atomic energy. The destruction of the cyclotrons was used to show how insensitive the military would be to the special needs of science and scientists.
Admiral Nakamura "Talks"
But was the destruction completely mindless?
There is a U.S. Army document, dated before the order to destroy the cyclotrons, in which a Rear Admiral Nakamura reports in detail on atomic bomb research conducted during the war at Kyoto University. Among other things, it says that the project included the construction of a cyclotron.
So far there is no evidence that the report reached Groves' office. But its existence suggests that some Americans learned of the wartime atomic research and concluded that the cyclotrons should be destroyed.
On 31 December when Lee DuBridge, director of the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory, wrote to the acting secretary of war on behalf of the scientific community, suggesting that U.S. scientists restore "at least Dr. Nishina's 60-inch [cyclotron]" in view of the great loss to physics and the world, Acting Secretary of War Kenneth C. Royall replied:
It is unsound to intimate that scientists are citizens of
the world alone, are internationalist and not loyal to
their native lands and are never willing participants in
the ambitions of dictators or tyrants. The evidence to the
contrary is too overwhelming for the American public to
accept this thesis, for modern war is scientific and total
war in toto. Without the scientist or the technical worker
the terrible instruments of destruction of the present day
would not have been possible.
In the interests of the country and of the American
scientists themselves, I believe you should exert your
influence to prevent any campaign for the restoration of a
cyclotron to the Japs at this time. ...
The Riken was dissolved "as a result of the defeat," although Nishina later raised money to reestablish it on a different footing. Elsewhere in Japan, physicists were restrained from atomic research, and allowed only to work on applications to biology and medicine. But without the big equipment to support pioneering work, Japanese physics did not reattain the prominence it had in the 1930's.
Could the Japanese have had an atomic bomb in World War II? All the historians, Japanese and American, echo the conclusion of the Physics Colloquium, that Japan did not have the uranium, resources, or organization for a full-scale Manhattan-style project. So the danger -- as turned out to be the case with the Germans -- was not a real one.
But the historical importance of the project lies not in the fact that Japan failed but that she tried, and that Japan's postwar attitude that she, as the one nation victimized by atomic weapons, is above seeking to acquire them for herself, is not historically accurate. The historical record shows -- on the basis of the eagerness of her military and the willing cooperation of her scientists -- that if other factors had made a
bomb possible, the leadership -- which by the end of the war were placing their own youth in torpedoes to home them on the advancing U.S. fleet -- would not have hesitated to use the bomb against the United States.
--- Deborah Shapley
*G. Thomas and M.M. Witts, Enola Gay (Stein & Day, Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., 1977). $11.95.
--------------------[First insert (p. 153:2)]--------------------
Derek de Solla Price, Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale, with Eri Yagi Shizume, a Yale graduate student, investigated Japan's wartime atomic bomb effort and published a letter in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1962, seeking more information on the project. But none was forthcoming. Price believes the effort was serious enough to "change the moral and ethical relationship between Japan and the United States."
"Japan's attempt to acquire an atomic weapon during the World War II changes the moral and ethical relationship between Japan and the United States that has grown up over the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. The story has been that the Americans were guilty and the Japanese were innocent and blameless; that the Americans developed this terrible new weapon and proceeded to commit an atomic rape of the then-helpless Japanese."
"But the fact that the Japanese were trying to develop the bomb, too, means that America was in an arms race with Japan as much as she was with Germany."
ebrown_p wrote:
Given the current situation in the US, this is the most frightening thing I have ever read.
I think your comment reflects taking my comment out of its context and applying it to the present. My comment was meant for our war with the Japanese in WWII. Don't make quantum time leaps with my thoughts, please. The current situation in the US is not a
life and death struggle with a militaristic, imperial enemy. Our country is not a militaristic imperial power that
vanquishes its enemies (as Japan did to the Chinese). We actually
saved Germany from Nazism and
saved the Japanese from their Emperor's militaristic ways.
If you remember WWII stats, we lost 500,000 soldiers in WWII, and that was with ending the war with Japan quickly by using the bomb.
The current loss of life is sad. It is not a life and death struggle that has taken one-half million lives. Let's compare apples with apples.
We are really talking at cross purposes, since I consistently state I value the life of one American over the lives of any number of enemy. So whatever we did in WWII to end the loss of American lives is acceptable to me. If it wasn't acceptable to you, don't try to change my position based on some "universal" ethics. I subscribe to a different set of ethics. Please don't try to convince me that there are "objective" ethics, and therefore are correct.
But, as long as you think that civilians are innocent, and should not be targets in a war, do you think German civilians were "innocent" of the Holocaust? Did they really "know nothing"? Did they enjoy the homes and belongings of the Jews that went to the camps? Did they internalize the efficacy of "the Final Solution" (including the millions of children)? Mind you, we didn't nuke Germany. We did firebomb Dresden, and lately we are hearing comments that that too was unnecessary. War is not Kindergarten ("Children, play nice!")
Like I said, we are talking at cross purposes. You subscribe to one world view, and I to another. Let's agree to disagree, without the need to prove one person is wrong, and one person is right.
Historical information I had was that the Japanese has already detonated a triggering mechanism and an "appliance". The next step was full scale. The statement that they had no U is bullshit. They occupied the Malay peninsula and the carnotite deposits of China.
Im curious e. Brown, how would you have ended the war, Hindiste is a great thing to impose moral superiority. We wanted a war to be over and we had a new growing thrat from our Soviet allies already taking the choice cuts of eastern europe.
The fact that USSR came into the estern war was as much a matter of their own civilian exhaustion as "power play" Remember, after Germany attacked Russia THAT ws when the European war began its end.,
Would you have slogged to the bitter end to achieve unconditional surrender by a massive invasion that would, by the way JApan armed its civilians, meant that many "innocent children and women would have been killed". I saw a story in Reuters of a rifle platoon of US Expid-Marines who "left a mall group of kid goatsherds " go their way only to have them get to a stash of AK's and murder 4 of the rifle platoon and get themselves killed by the remaining men . The officer of the platoon is faced with the decision he made to not take the kids out in the first place. Japan , as it began losing, initiated kamikaze and guerilla tactics that employed the youngest of their population. If you think I have a moral dilemma from using the bomb, you are incorrect sir. I have had the pleasure of being surrounded by my family (Including my father) who may have been killed in an all out invasion of the mainland.
We had a demand , UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, the Japanese did not acquiesce and payed dearly. Unfortunate circumstances, but it ws the most brutal warsince our own civil war , and brutality needs to be queled with no chance of resurrection.
Revisionist crap about the use of the bomb serves no purpose except to denigrate the memories of the brave soldiers and marines who slogged their way by bloody inch to dominate a fierce enemy who wouldnt go back under the refrigerator because you feel that less than unconditional surrender would have been an OK outcome. WE disagree mightily on that point. The target cities for the A bombs had strategic points also, lets not forget. Our latest nuclearbombs have "enhanced radiation" so that they mostly kill the people but leve the infrastructure. See how more civilized weve become.
I wonder what our response will be if we are hit by a suitcase nuke or dirty bomb (which I pray never happens), but after all, it is Monday morning.
ebrown_p wrote:
An atomic bomb kills indiscriminately. It vaporizes women, children, babies, pets-- everybody. Saying that there were no innocent lives lost implies that the thousands of babies who were killed in the nuclear attack were guilty of the actions of the emporer. This doesn't make any sense.
O.K. innocent lives were lost. But, Japan, not just Japanese soldiers were the enemy, get it. Therefore, in my simple thinking, we did what was necessary to win the war against Japan, and in effect save American lives that would have been lost in continuing to fight the war against Japan. Yes, babies, innocent ones, were killed. However, they weren't killed as part of planned genocide, a la Nazi extermination camps. Do we get a plus for not being genocidal?
ebrown_p wrote:
You are also missing the question I am raising...
Under what circumstances would it be acceptable for an enemy to use a nuclear device against an American city? If America ever became a "militaristic imperial power that vanquishes its enemies" would a nuclear attack against use become justified?
America is very powerfull right now, but we are one country of hundreds of countries. The rules that apply to other countries do apply to us as well.
No, I am not missing the question you are raising. It has nothing to do with my point. It is a hypothetical question that has nothing to do with the historical facts that transpired in WWII. Let's discuss history, not hypothetical futuristic political scenarios. Otherwise, this thread can degenerate into sophism!
ebrown_p wrote:
You are arguing that under some circumstances it is justified to use weapons of mass destruction to kill millions of civilians in a large city.
No, I am not arguing that it is justified to use weapons of mass destruction to kill millions of civilians in a large city. I am pointing out my position that when war is waged, we have the right to minimize our casualties and maximize the enemy country's casualties, for the only purpose of ending the war.
Your need to differentiate between soldiers and civilians seems to be based on some unfathomable reasoning. Is your belief that those adult males, that get drafted into a war, are more deserving to die in the war than those citizens of the other gender? I would guess that many a (civilian) mother would have been happy if the Lord took her, rather than her son, in battle.
At this point, I'm starting to wonder if this thread is beginning to resemble proselytizing, rather than discussion. I'm not promulgating my position, I'm just stating it and also thanking Farmerman for his intelligent input. I do hope, for the sake of this country, that there are more citizens like Farmerman in our 50 states.
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