Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The Plutonium Files (19 page)
G: [Reading from article] “The death toll at Hiroshima and at Nagasaki, the other Japanese city blasted atomically, is still rising, the broadcast said.
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Radio Tokyo described Hiroshima as a city of death. 90% of its houses, in which 250,000 had lived, were instantly crushed.” I don’t understand the 250,000 because it had a much bigger population a number of years ago before the war started, and it was a military city. “Now it is peopled by ghost parade, the living doomed to die of radioactivity burns.”
R: Let me interrupt you here a minute. I would say this: I think it’s good propaganda. The thing is these people got good and burned—good thermal burns.
G: That’s the feeling I have. Let me go on and give you the rest of the picture. “So painful are these injuries that sufferers plead: ‘Please kill me,’ the broadcast said. No one can ever completely recover.”
R: This has been in our paper, too, last night.
G: Then it goes on: “Radioactivity caused by the fission of the uranium used in atomic bombs is taking a toll of mounting deaths and causing reconstruction workers in Hiroshima to suffer various sicknesses and ill health.”
R: I would say this: You yourself, as far as radioactivity is concerned, it isn’t anything immediate, it’s a prolonged thing. I think what these people have, they just got a good thermal burn, that’s what it is. A lot of these people, first of all, they don’t notice it much. You may get burned and you may have a little redness, but in a couple of days you may have a big blister or a sloughing of the skin, and I think that is what these people have had.
G: You see what we are faced with. Matthias [the young engineer in charge of the Hanford Engineer Works] is having trouble holding his people out there.
R: Do you want me to get you some real straight dope on this, just how it affects them, and call you back in just a bit?
G: That’s true—that’s what I want.… Then they talk about the burned portions of the bodies are infected from the inside.
R: Well, of course, any burn is potentially an infected wound. We treat any burn as an infected wound. I think you had better get the anti-propagandists out.
G: This is the kind of thing that hurts us—“The Japanese, who were reported today by Tokyo radio, to have died mysteriously a few days after the atomic bomb blast, probably were the victims of a phenomenon which is well known in the great radiation laboratories of America.” That, of course, is what does us the damage.
R: I would say this: You will have to get some big-wig to put a counter-statement in the paper.
Groves planned to do just that, but first he needed more reliable information on what was happening in Japan. On September 2 two Japanese representatives signed surrender documents on the deck of the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay. Six days later, on September 8, Stafford Warren’s team landed in Hiroshima. Always eager to please his volatile boss, Warren cabled Washington on September 10 and reported: “Number dead or injured by radiation unknown, but preliminary survey indicates that there are only a small percent of injured survivors.”
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On the same day the cable arrived, Groves led a caravan of thirty-seven reporters and photographers to the Trinity site. Accompanying him were J. Robert Oppenheimer, Louis Hempelmann, and many other scientists and military officers. The scientists and newsmen donned white
booties and shuffled “like kittens with paper shoes tied to their feet” across the fused green sand of the Trinity crater.
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The green glass, which covered an area eight hundred yards in diameter, was strewn with globs of glazed soil. For three weeks the area had reeked of the stench of death from the small desert animals killed in the blast. The site was still so radioactive, an Associated Press science writer reported, that it made “spending a day and night right in the crater a possibly risky business.” The writer continued:
The tour’s purpose was dual.
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One, to tell the almost incredible story. Two, to show first hand that the facts do not bear out the Japanese propaganda that apparently tried to lay the foundation for claims that Americans won the war by unfair means. This New Mexico bomb was big, its effects comparable to those bombs dropped on Japan. What happened here was studied purposely to avoid the chances the actual bombings would inflict bizarre and non-military suffering.
His brown Army uniform rumpled and stained with sweat, Groves allowed the photographers to take a few pictures of the crater, warning them to be quick or their film would fog. He explained that the lingering radioactivity at Trinity was due to the fact the bomb was detonated from a tower at a much lower height than the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese bombs were exploded high above the two cities, he said, thus allowing the heat of the blast to carry the radioactive debris upward and away. “There were evidences of some Japanese deaths due to radioactive rays, but the information now available indicates that this number was relatively small,” he told the newsmen.
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Wearing his famous pork-pie hat to ward off the sun, Oppenheimer added that the heights of the Japanese detonations were selected specifically to ensure “there would be no indirect chemical warfare due to poisoning the earth with radioactive elements and no horrors other than the familiar ones due to any great explosion.”
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Oppenheimer said that one hour after the blast it was probably safe for rescue workers to enter the area. Satisfied with the pronouncements by the two prominent leaders,
Life
magazine opined: “It seemed certain that the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had died within the grotesque legality of wartime killing.”
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In reality, Oppenheimer and Groves were engaged in a wholesale distortion of the facts. While it is true that air bursts, such as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, produce less residual radiation than
weapons detonated from towers, some radioactivity nevertheless occurs when neutrons are captured by atoms in the air and soil. Radioactive fallout from the two bombs also delivered significant doses of radiation to Japanese who lived downwind of the two cities. Furthermore, Groves told members of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy that the weapons were detonated above the Japanese cities not to protect the inhabitants from radiation effects but to “give us the maximum possible explosive force.”
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And finally, Groves’s statement that only a few Japanese were dying of radiation injuries was patently untrue. Even as Groves and Oppenheimer were walking like kittens across the green sand, a second wave of bombing victims was dying from internal complications caused by severe radiation damage. But it would be years, even decades, before the rest of the world learned the full extent of the injuries because on September 19, General MacArthur prohibited any further press reports on the bombings.
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On September 15, shortly after the publicity show staged by Groves and Oppenheimer, Harry Daghlian died. When General Groves learned of his death, he instructed Los Alamos officials to cut a $10,000 check for Daghlian’s mother and sister and to prepare a legal document that family members were to sign releasing the University of California, the War Department, and the federal government from liability. The transaction was completed on the same day as Daghlian’s death.
Notwithstanding the optimistic cable he had sent General Groves on September 10, Stafford Warren had found thousands of Japanese dying from radiation exposure when his team arrived in Hiroshima. Many had already been cremated. Thousands more were lying on mats, anywhere there was a roof over their heads. Those who could eat and drink were given rice and tea. The floors of the first-aid stations were slick with vomit and bloody diarrhea. Outside the relief stations were piles of wooden sandals from cremated patients. “When we got there it stunk terribly, and there were flies everywhere,” Warren remembered.
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“The flies were so bad that we had to close up the windows of the car to keep them out. You would see a man or a woman with what looked like a polka-dot shirt on, but when you got up close, there was just a mass of flies crawling over a formerly white shirt.”
The Japanese who were close to the hypocenter and received the largest doses of radiation often began vomiting within half an hour of the bombing. They suffered from severe and bloody diarrhea and intense
thirst. The downward spiral closely paralleled the symptoms suffered by Harry Daghlian: coma, delirium, and death.
By the time of Stafford Warren’s arrival, the second wave of death had begun taking its toll, due to the lethal effects of the radiation on victims’ bone marrow and gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The bone marrow is the blood-making factory where new cells, called stem cells, are produced. These cells mature and differentiate, becoming red cells, white cells, and platelets. When the whole body is irradiated, the number of cells in the bone marrow drops immediately, sometimes disappearing altogether. The bone marrow can regenerate itself if the damage is not too great. But if the exposure is large and nothing is done to counteract the damage, eventually fewer cells will be circulating in the bloodstream. The loss of red cells will cause anemia and fatigue; the reduction in white cells will reduce the body’s ability to fight infection; and the lack of platelets can lead to hemorrhages. The effects of radiation on the bone marrow are most noticeable between twenty and sixty days after exposure.
The GI tract, which contains many cells being created and undergoing cell division, also can suffer dramatic damage if the radiation dose is high enough. After 100 rem have been delivered, changes can be seen in the cells lining the mucosa of the small intestine, but the production of new cells will compensate for any cells that are killed or damaged. At doses ranging from 500 to 1,000 rem—the radiation exposures received by many Japanese near the hypocenter—the cells that make up the epithelial layer of the small and large intestine are killed or unable to replenish themselves fast enough. Diarrhea and dehydration begin. Bacteria from the intestine can flood into the bloodstream, greatly increasing the risk of infection, called bacteremia, or toxic shock syndrome. With the depletion of white cells, the body is even less able to fend off the infection.
Some of the effects of the bombing would not become visible for weeks, months, years, or even decades. Unlike the bone marrow and GI tract, many organs and tissues are composed of mature cells which are relatively resistant to radiation. These organ systems may not show damage until they require new cells, at which time the stem cells of these organs may be unable to divide. Then the organ may not have all the cells it needs to function efficiently, and its overall performance will be diminished. The result: a shortened life—one of the major biological consequences of radiation.
The Japanese doctors who were treating the injured with penicillin
and transfusions did not yet understand the mysterious sickness that the survivors were suffering from. To their dismay, they discovered that treatment seemed only to increase the suffering. Needle punctures caused “oozing that continued to death,” Warren observed.
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“Even pricks to obtain blood for blood counts caused oozing that could not be checked.”
Warren’s job was not to minister to the sick but to find out whether the two bombs had left any residual radiation, and if so, whether the radiation was causing deaths. Donald Collins, a member of the survey team, said many years later that the group had been instructed by General Thomas F. Farrell, one of Groves’s top aides, that their mission was to “prove there was no radioactivity from the bomb.”
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Apparently they didn’t even have to go to the bombing sites to offer that proof because while the team was still waiting to enter Japan, Collins said, “we read in the Stars and Stripes the results of our findings.”
Stafford Warren told members of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy that it was impossible to develop meaningful statistics on the death rate because all the records and all the record-keeping organizations had been destroyed. What made the mortality survey even more difficult, he said, were the unreliable memories of the Japanese. “It often took an hour of careful questioning of a patient, even an intelligent one, like a doctor or a nurse, to find out precisely what happened on that day.…
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Our conclusion was that we could trust very little of the factual information that came to us through interpreters, from these Japanese, these patients.” He estimated that only 5 to 7 percent of the fatalities were caused by radiation. “I think the radiation has been exaggerated,” he testified.
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(The number of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still a matter of dispute; the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which had assessed the damage of the air attacks on Germany and was ordered by President Truman to survey the destruction in Japan, estimated that 140,000 to 160,000 people in Hiroshima were killed or injured and 70,000 killed or injured in Nagasaki.)
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Two weeks after the Manhattan Project doctors began combing the bombed-out cities, a contingent of Navy officers and scientists arrived in Japan to do their own independent survey. That group, which included Shields Warren, the Harvard doctor who would take over the AEC’s new Division of Biology and Medicine after the war, reached a quite different conclusion: Most of the deaths in Japan were caused by radiation.
Shields Warren was deeply shaken when he saw Nagasaki. To reach the ruined city, his team first drove through miles of terraced hillsides and farming country. Then they passed through a tunnel that had been
converted to a war workshop. “When we came out the other side of the tunnel we shifted from a view of a peaceful countryside to utter devastation,” he recalled.
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“It was almost like stepping from the eighteenth century say, into the twentieth century—the countryside on the one side, and on the other, modern power.”
