Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Transcription

1 Section II: Social History and Politics JANET FARRELL BRODIE Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki Abstract Although U.S. officials celebrated the powerful blast effects of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, they worked hard to censor information about the radiation. This article analyzes the diverse ways that civilian and military officials worked to contain knowledge about the radiation effects. The article also explores the reasons why the radiation deaths and other residual effects elicited such censorship attempts. In particular, American officials did not want the atomic bombs linked with chemical and biological warfare and some objected to radiological warfare. The article draws on numerous archives and manuscript collections, many little known, to underscore the context for the censorship activities as the war ended and the U.S. moved into a new kind of militarized peace. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan is one of the most studied events in modern history. From the Manhattan Project s invention of the atomic bomb to the decisions about where and when to drop the bombs, to the reasons for those decisions, to the aftermaths all have received detailed attention from biographers, novelists, artists, cinematographers, and, of course, historians, particularly in recent years from social and cultural historians. Yet, significant aspects of that bombing have not been deeply analyzed. In this article, I examine the many kinds of censorship that surrounded the radiation from the two atomic bombs. Other historians have noted the silences surrounding that radiation, but my focus here is new. 1 I examine the attempts to suppress knowledge by diverse groups and individuals in diverse venues. I draw on little used archives for a deeper understanding of who knew what and why. The archives also enable deeper understanding of the censorship. Immediately after the Hiroshima bombing American authorities worked to suppress information about the radiation. 2 Although the world quickly learned a few details that some type of atomic plague related to the atomic bomb was causing death and illness in the two bombed cities, U.S. authorities in Japan and at home moved quickly to contain deeper knowledge about the radiation and its effects. Officials censored, suppressed, and distorted information through campaigns of misinformation and campaigns of reassurance; they used an array of Journal of Social History vol. 48 no. 4 (2015), pp doi: /jsh/shu150 The Author Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please journals.permissions@oup.com.

2 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 843 techniques from trying to maintain wartime censorship to new attempts at persuasion based on scientific expertise. Knowledge about the bombs radiation became caught up in a broader process theorized as agnotology the cultural production of ignorance. Epistemology has an ancient place in philosophy and intellectual history, but scholars in the field of agnotology focus on the complex historical ways that lack of knowledge has been fomented, cultivated, and maintained. 3 This article focuses on a short transition period from the bombing of Hiroshima August 6, 1945, through the official beginning of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947, when to the intense disquiet of many military and civilian officials, U.S. atomic energy matters transferred to civilian control. In those sixteen months the preservation of atomic secrets became, briefly, more porous than under stricter wartime censorship, arousing special anxiety among officials knowledgeable about the atomic bomb project. This intensified once the war formally ended and the U.S. began its transition into a militarized peacetime. 4 Throughout the war, the civilian Office of Censorship restricted military news provided to the public by newspapers and radio while at the same time the Army and Navy added their own systems censoring information. That military oversight continued even after civilian censorship lifted. 5 It became harder in peacetime, however, for the military to exercise the same degree of strict control over the flow of information about the bomb that officials wanted, particularly as scientists returned to civilian life and gave interviews, as the wartime labs returned to civilian or semi-civilian status, and as the public sought fast demilitarization and a restoration of peacetime normality. In those months controlling knowledge required renewed vigilance and new techniques. Although everything related to the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was defined as a military secret, U.S. officials treated the three main effects blast, fire, and radiation very differently. President Truman s radio announcement celebrated the powerful blast of the Hiroshima bomb. He told the world that the Japanese city had been hit by a single bomb, a new kind of bomb with more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British Grand Slam which is the largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare. 6 Next, Truman justified the use of the bomb: The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. He warned that additional bombs were in production. Then Truman then told the public: It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. 7 Articles in the New York Times underscored officials willingness to emphasize the blast and fire damage. From August 7 31 the newspaper carried sixteen articles about the physical destruction of the two cities; within one week of the Hiroshima bomb, the New York Times printed photographs of the devastated city. 8 The fire damage caused by the atomic bombs received less official attention than the blast both at the time and for decades later, but not because officials took special measures to keep it secret. Historian Lynn Eden has analyzed why the American nuclear weapons effects community of scientists, civilians, and military officers paid so little attention for decades to the fire damage of nuclear weapons. She concludes that it was not censorship or lack of information. After all, given the firestorms created by the Allies strategic bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, the American firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, and the

3 844 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 atomic bombings in Japan, US officials and the public worldwide had considerable knowledge about the fire damage caused by diverse types of bombs. Eden s explanation focuses on the social construction of organizational knowledge, and she argues that it took years before experts began to apply that knowledge to their imaginative scenarios about nuclear weapons. 9 In spite of American officials censorship attempts, knowledge about the radiation deaths and radiation sickness from the atomic bombs could not be entirely suppressed. One month after the Hiroshima bombing, the London Daily Express carried an account of the strange deaths in Hiroshima written by Peter Burchett, an Australian journalist who was the first westerner to enter the city. Burchett titled his article Atomic Plague although he did not yet fully identify the suffering with exposure to radiation. 10 In the months after the war ended and on into 1946 American magazines featured fictional stories about cities ravaged by radiation. 11 John Hersey s searing account, Hiroshima, became a bestseller in 1946 just as the summer s Crossroads atomic bomb tests in the Pacific received massive publicity including reports about the disastrous radioactive spray that contaminated eighty of the Navy s unmanned test vessels. 12 David Bradley s 1948 bestseller, No Place to Hide, minced no words about the frightening radioactivity released after that second test in the Bikini atoll. He concluded the book with the observation that the Crossroads tests certainly proved, beyond all expectations, what was feared concerning the poisoning of land, sea, and air with radioactivity. He added a meaningful postscript: Scientifically, what was learned in the crude laboratory of Bikini remains to be evaluated and declassified from the archives of military secrecy. 13 As historians have noted, the American public s earliest reactions to the bombs radiation proved to be complex, deeply ambivalent, and hard to interpret. In the months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the radiation censorship worked to limit general public understanding. When news about the radiation deaths and diseases from the bombs began to penetrate American consciousness and create fear, campaigns from governmental officials as well as military, scientific and industrial leaders sought to ease those fears with the alluring promises of miraculous medical cures and cheap energy from commercial nuclear power. 14 The results have proved hard to gauge. Robert J. Lifton describes American reactions to Hiroshima as muted ambivalence and psychic numbing. 15 John Dower observes that although Americans demonstrated a certain cyclical interest in what happened beneath the mushroom cloud, the nation s more persistent response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been the averted gaze. 16 The arguments that the atomic bomb brought an end to the Pacific War provided a salve to Americans grateful to see the terrible war concluded, although some historians believe that Hiroshima and Nagasaki demarcate the beginning of a slow unraveling of America s traditional triumphalist victory culture. 17 The point I wish to emphasize here is that the results of the radiation censorship campaign have been hard to pin down both because of the nature of the silencing itself (including its incompleteness), and because knowledge leaked into public awareness in many ways and forms. Historian Richard Miller observes that, In the long run, the radiation from the bomb was more significant than the blast or thermal effects. 18 Yet, for years that radiation remained the least publicized and least understood of the atomic bomb effects. In the days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki only a few observers noted the very significant omission of information about the bomb s

4 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 845 radioactivity. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the highly secret site where uranium for the atomic bombs was processed, a group of officers wives listened to Truman s announcement over the radio. Viola Warren, wife of Stafford Warren, the radiologist in charge of medical safety for the bomb project, recalled that as she and the other women listened to the radio and read the newspaper reports about Hiroshima, I found myself getting crosser and madder and more and more furious because my husband wasn t mentioned among all of the other distinguished people busy on the bomb. Only later did she realize that no one had yet admitted that the bomb was radioactive, and therefore my husband s share in the project could not be mentioned. 19 Part I: Censoring Knowledge of the Atomic Bombs Radiation U.S. officials controlled information about radiation from the atomic bombs dropped over Japan by censoring newspapers, by silencing outspoken individuals, by limiting circulation of the earliest official medical reports, by fomenting deliberately reassuring publicity campaigns, and by outright lies and denial. The censorship of the Japanese began quickly. As soon as Japanese physicians and scientists reached Hiroshima after the bombing, they collected evidence and studied what were to them the mysterious symptoms observed in many of the ill and dying. One early clue that the bombs produced gamma radiation came from the blackening of X-ray film and sensitive photographic papers while other investigators found neutron-induced radioactivity. 20 The physician Michihiko Hachiya and his colleagues could not understand the symptoms and the patterns of death of the patients in their Hiroshima hospital. Hachiya noted rumors that a poison gas or deadly germ had been loosed in Hiroshima... Perhaps a gas bomb had been dropped. 21 He wondered if the deaths were caused by a germ bomb. Four days after the bombing he heard the words atom bomb for the first time, used by a Japanese naval officer bringing information from the naval hospital at Iwakuni where we are studying and treating victims from Hiroshima who seem to have some dreadful disease. By late August autopsies Hachiya conducted revealed deaths caused by decreased blood platelets: all of the blood-forming organs had been harmed, and hemorrhage was the cause of death in all our cases. He and his colleagues concluded that they were looking at radiation sickness. No one had yet established the terminology so Japanese reports referred to radiation sickness, atomic bomb illness, roentgen disease, atomic poisoning, and, atomic plague. American officials confiscated Japanese reports, medical case notes, biopsy slides, medical photographs, and films. 22 Much of the confiscated material was sent to the U.S. where some were translated into English; much remained classified for years (some for decades), stored at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. 23 Details about the censoring of the Japanese research data were not publicized until decades later. 24 Because the Japanese materials were obtained within days of the atomic bombings, weeks before the first U.S. investigating teams arrived in either city, they provided invaluable information about the early radiation effects to those given security clearances to read them. The Japanese materials aided diverse groups in the U.S. interested in the medical and biological effects of the atomic bombs, from medical personnel seeking

5 846 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 knowledge about radiation sickness to people studying chemical, biological, and radiological warfare. 25 Historian Monica Braw notes the irony of American Occupation officials claiming to bring democratic traditions to Japan, including a new freedom of the press, but censoring what the Japanese said in print about the atomic bombs. 26 Before the surrender, although the Japanese War Cabinet officially ignored the atomic bombing, some newspapers and radio broadcasts from Japan protested what they called the inhumanity of the new bomb. 27 U.S. officials in Japan and at home labelled as propaganda scattered reports in Japanese papers and on Japanese radio that the new bombs had unleashed a type of poison gas. At the same time, however, Allied Occupation authorities welcomed accounts that publicized the power of the atomic bomb, even as they censored accounts of the radioactivity. 28 In his study of the censorship of Japanese newspapers after Hiroshima, Glenn D. Hook writes that by late October 1945, Occupation authorities restricted public criticism of the U.S. actions in Japan and denied any radiation aftereffects from exposure to the nuclear bombs. 29 In the United States itself, censorship of the radiation effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs took diverse forms in the period this article covers. The country s major newspapers appear to have maintained in only slightly abated form the wartime censorship, particularly with respect to radiation, even though the Office of Censorship ended in the Pacific War on August The Army Brigadier General overseeing the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, probably had a hand in this, as he did in perpetuating other kinds of censorship as the war wound down. In one telling example from the archives, Groves sent a telegram to the University of Chicago business office only hours after the Hiroshima bomb, reminding university officials that even though there would now be revisions of security rules on the entire project of the MED [Manhattan Engineer District]... pending receipt of further instructions which are now being issued all publicity must be cleared with my Washington office... I am asking you personally to continue the existing complete cooperation by your entire organization and by each of your subcontractors in the maintenance of national safety. 31 In a well-known case, Columbia University geneticist Harold Jacobson made newspaper headlines around the country immediately after the Nagasaki bombing with a claim that anyone entering the bombed area of Hiroshima would be committing suicide because the terrific force of the explosion irradiates every piece of matter in the area. He claimed that the city would be a radioactive wasteland for 70 years and people would die of leukemia-like symptoms. Rain falling on the area would pick up the lethal rays and carry them to rivers and then to the sea, endangering fish and other life. 32 Newspapers printed Jacobson s remarks but also immediately sought to quell public fears. The New York Times placed a rebuttal article immediately adjacent to Jacobson s, titled Army Denies Theories of Dr. Jacobson. The rebuttal included a long quote from Robert Oppenheimer: There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground in Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly. 33 Jacobson, retracted his statements after being questioned at his home for several hours by the FBI and Army Military Intelligence which threatened him with prosecution under the Espionage Act for violating government secrecy rules. His retraction was followed in the New York Times by an article by Oppenheimer

6 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 847 stating that everyone who worked on the bomb project hoped it would lead to peace and to everlasting benefit to mankind. Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists drew on the reverence with which the public greeted their every word to send reassurances. Oppenheimer, as noted above, refuted Jacobson s claims in widely reprinted newspaper articles; he also accompanied Groves and scores of reporters on a carefully staged tour of the Alamagordo, New Mexico, site of the first bomb test, providing false reassurance about the lack of radiation at the site and elsewhere in the area. 34 The New York Times published 132 news items related to the bomb in the days between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but omitted or obscured anything about radiation or ongoing radioactivity. 35 In the ten months after Nagasaki, the newspaper published some fifteen articles referring to the bombs radiation. Nine minimized radiation effects or sought to assuage any fears the public might harbor. 36 The other six articles carried more ambiguous messages. The first, on August 25, 1945, presented an upbeat message about the potential medical and biological benefits to be gained from radiation. The article ended with a warning however, noting that until physicists who gave us the bomb and physiologists told the public what to believe, we can do no more than hope that Tokyo has exaggerated in an effort to arouse world sympathy. 37 The most egregiously doctored reporting about the bomb s radiation came from the science reporter for the New York Times, William L. Laurence, who had been selected earlier by Groves to receive exclusive access to work at the bomb project. Laurence, the only journalist allowed to visit Los Alamos, later to watch the Trinity test, and to witness the Nagasaki bombing from his vantage point in the instruments plane, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his Manhattan Projectapproved, behind-the-scenes articles. As historian Beverly Keever notes, Laurence s articles either denied the existence of radiation from the atomic bombs or ignored it entirely. 38 His first article for the New York Times sent from Japan, September 12, 1945, carried the headline, No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin. The article quoted T. F. Farrell, (identified as chief of the War Department s atomic bomb mission ) in Hiroshima, as denying categorically that the bomb had produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity in the ruins of the town, or caused a form of poison gas at the moment of explosion We don t know whether Laurence knew that what he wrote in his many reports was false, but it was. Jack Schubert and Ralph E. Lapp, nuclear scientists prominent in postwar radiation research, explained in 1957, For a long time the impression was given that there was no radioactive fall-out from the two bombs dropped on Japan. Carefully using the passive voice, they noted Later it was learned that the first impression was deceptive, as a report released by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1956 shows. At Nagasaki, for example, where the cloud traveled eastward, there was a fall-out at the Nishiyama reservoir area, where a total dosage of as much as 100 roentgens may have been delivered. This hilly area is about one mile away from the bomb ground zero point. 40 In the first months after the atomic bombings, U.S. mass-circulation magazines published some information about atomic radiation, all with mixed messages. Life Magazine did not mention the atomic bomb itself until an August 20, 1945 article depicting aerial views of the damage done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That article said nothing about radiation; a second article in the same

7 848 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 issue mentioned radiation but made no comment about effects. 41 Not until an article on January 27, 1947, did Life Magazine describe radiation sickness, but the article concluded by touting the safety measures instituted in the plants of the Manhattan District that saved atomic energy workers lives. On the other hand, Life also published in 1947 a powerful article by Stafford Warren about the unexpected radioactive fallout at the Bikini tests and Warren minced no words about dire effects on navy vessels; photos displayed graphically the effects on experimental animals exposed to the radiation. 42 American medical journals demonstrated circumspection in their early postwar reporting about the medical effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. 43 Only one such article appeared in 1945, four in 1946, four in 1947, two in 1948, and three in The earliest articles appeared in relatively obscure medical journals from West Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. Navy physicians wrote several of the earliest articles because U.S. Naval vessels arrived in Japan earlier than the army. In this case longstanding Army-Navy rivalry also may have come into play. Navy officials could write more openly about the bombs effects in Japan because they did not face the same scrutiny as Army personnel from the Manhattan Project s Army heads. 44 Joseph J. Timmes, commander of the U.S.S. Wichita arrived in Nagasaki harbor thirty-three days after the initial blast and ten days before other American investigating teams. He studied bomb survivors and sent case records to Shields Warren, head of the U.S. Naval technical unit, and also to Stafford Warren, head of one of the Manhattan Project teams. Timmes published an article about his Nagasaki experiences in 1946 in the U.S. Navy Medical Bulletin. Ironically, some of what he published was still a military secret such as the detonation height of the Nagasaki bomb compared to the detonation height of the experimental bomb at the Trinity Test in July Also surprising, his comment that radioactive material remained in the New Mexico desert contradicted statements from Groves and Oppenheimer about the lack of residual radiation at the Trinity test site and provided information that other official reports kept classified for years. 45 Later American medical articles took pains to note that the authors had conformed to censorship requirements in all of the information presented. 46 When Shields Warren spoke to the Providence, Rhode Island Medical Association in November 1946, he showed slides of the blast damage, shadows caused by the bombs flash, as well as slides of Japanese radiation victims. However, when he published the talk in the Rhode Island Medical Journal the following month, he omitted the photographs of the radiation victims. Editors explained that the photographs referred to in the text were not reprinted owing to government regulations. 47 Warren s written interpretations apparently also passed the censors muster. He stated, As you know at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the bomb was so regulated that there was no residual effect of any significance. He wrote that the large number of casualties resulted, in part, because the Japanese were too disorganized to take care of the victims. The death rates in Japanese hospitals were high because the Japanese lacked blood for transfusions and penicillin. Shields Warren s political finesse as well as his radiological expertise (and quite possibly his navy background rather than experience with the Army/Manhattan Project) propelled him into becoming the first director of the Division of Biology and Medicine of the Atomic Energy Commission over less politically savvy contenders.

8 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 849 Four official U.S. investigating teams sent to Japan in the months immediately after the surrender wrote reports about the biomedical effects of the two atomic bombs. This included an official group from the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) (that later divided into two smaller groups), a group from the Navy, a specially-appointed Joint Commission (Army, Navy, Manhattan Project), and a team from the official U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). 48 A close reading of the reports the groups issued illustrates the ways that radiation censorship took place. Although some information from the reports made its way into newspaper accounts in 1946 and 1947, the reports all received classifications as secret or top secret so the circulation of the majority of their information remained constrained for years. Even most historians have read only a few. No single archive includes all of the final versions but the silence in the archives tells significant stories. The Army-authorized report by Major Noland Varley, Physical Damage Hiroshima, vol I. (originally stamped Secret ) notes: The serious casualty producing effects caused by the various forms of radiation are discussed under the Medical Section of this report. No medical section, however, remains in the folder or the box at the National Archives. 49 Many of the medical reports about the bombings in this collection were originally classified Secret and were declassified in However, they contain a second set of stamps indicating a new declassification in the 1990s. It is unclear whether they were reclassified between the 1960s and 1990s or whether they underwent a more vigorous classification scrutiny in the 1990s. The result, however, suggests continuing concern in official circles about the nature of the radiation-effects evidence. 50 The timing of the reports suggests that their authors kept close tabs on their colleagues/rivals conclusions. 51 The most graphic and straightforward account came from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey published June 7, Perhaps the sheer number of investigators (some 110 sent to Japan) and the nonattribution of individual authorship provided courage, for that report minced few words about the radiation, observing that the awesome lethal effects of the atomic bomb and the insidious additional peril of the gamma rays speak for themselves. 52 The report provided a straightforward (and by later standards accurate) explanation of the stages of radiation sickness and it mentioned the increased sterility and miscarriages suffered by bombing victims (their term). The report stated that even with the best medical care only about 5 8% of the deaths from the atomic bombs could have been prevented. The report singled out Stafford Warren for special criticism, disputing his statement before the Senate Committee on Atomic Energy the previous winter in which he estimated that radiation was responsible for only 7 to 8 percent of the total deaths in the two cities. The USSBS authors observed that, Most medical investigators who spent some time in the areas feel that this estimate is far too low; it is generally felt that no less than 15 to 20 percent of the deaths were from radiation. 53 A report issued by The Manhattan Engineer District, clearly overseen and probably actually commissioned by Leslie Groves, seems to have been a deliberate rebuttal to the USSBS report. Issued ten days after that report appeared, it ignored the role of radiation sickness entirely in its accounting of the total casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It listed as possible causes of death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in order of importance, burns, mechanical injury, and gamma radiation but the report emphasized that the gamma radiation occurred only at the moment of explosion. 54 Its Summary of Damages and Injuries listed

9 850 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 blast, primary fires, secondary fires, the spread of original fires to structures, flash burns ( caused directly by the almost instantaneous radiation of heat and light at the moment of the explosion ), burns from the fires, mechanical injuries caused by collapse of buildings, and last, Radiation injuries caused by the instantaneous penetrating radiation (in many respects similar to excessive X-ray exposure) from the nuclear explosion; all of these effective radiations occurred during the first minute after initiation of the explosion, and nearly all occurred during the first second of the explosion. 55 The report insisted that no casualties occurred as a result of any lasting radioactivity of fission products from the bomb, or any induced radioactivity of objects near the explosion. 56 The Navy team s report differed from the Manhattan Project teams reports. Issued in December 1945 by Shields Warren and Nello Pace, the first conclusion stated starkly, The atomic bomb is the most terrible agent of destruction known to man. 57 The team and their translators worked with Japanese physicians and scientists and utilized Japanese records; they conducted autopsies on fourteen patients who died from atomic radiation and obtained samples from autopsies conducted by Japanese officials. The Navy report differed from others in noting deaths caused by secondary radiation and secondary radiation burns from induced radiation in objects. The investigators stated that the two bombs gave rise to residual radioactivity in both cities but at dangerous levels only in the Nishiyama reservoir area of Nagasaki up to sixty days after the bomb. The Navy had less at stake than the Army in the way the world viewed the atomic bomb in 1945 and this may be why Warren and Pace demonstrated less concern with censoring the bomb s radiation. (As noted earlier, Shields Warren self-censored when it seemed advisable for his career.) Navy ships arrived in Nagasaki harbor shortly after the bombing and Navy physicians and scientists conducted some of the earliest Allied studies of biomedical effects. Navy personnel also demonstrated greater openness than Manhattan Project officials to publicizing details about radiation sickness and deaths, publishing (as noted above) some of the first medical journal articles about the radiation effects. Although its authors recommended immediate publication of their report, it took thirty years before it was finally declassified in Part II: Why the Censorship? One explanation for the exceptional attempts to censor information about the bombs radiation in Japan is that U.S. officials themselves, in their shock, surprise, and ignorance, tried to cover up their lack of knowledge with denial and silencing. It has in fact taken many studies over six decades for U.S. and Japanese scientists to reconstruct the dosages of different types of ionizing radiation released by the two bombs, to trace how far those radiations travelled, and to estimate their effects. Controversies have continued for decades about the lethality of the neutrons versus gamma rays released in those explosions along with the health impacts and political implications of low-level exposure. 58 Scientists conducted experiments at the Nevada Test Site in the early 1950s to better understand the radiation released by the two bombs in Japan; complex computer simulations at Oak Ridge and Livermore from the 1960s through the 1980s shaped understanding of those radiations. 59 It has all remained politically and scientifically challenging: careers and reputations have rested on evidence about whether neutrons or

10 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 851 gamma rays caused the most health damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; if gamma rays were the major source of deaths in Hiroshima rather than neutrons (as scientists believed in classified reports in the 1960s and 1970s), then the implications about the danger of exposure to low levels of such radiation became a politically-charged issue in the face of the commercial U.S. nuclear power industry and the exposure of workers in the national atomic energy nexus. 60 A major preoccupation of U.S. officials in August 1945 was reassurance that Allied troops landing in Japan would not be endangered by any remaining radiation. The U.S. investigating teams sent to Japan attest to that powerful concern. All of the official U.S. reports emphasized that by September 1945 when the Americans first conducted studies no appreciable level of dangerous radiation remained in either city. Donald Collins, an engineer and dosimeter specialist for the Manhattan Project, recalled years later that as his team prepared to enter Japan they were told by Thomas Farrell, the Army s commanding officer in the Pacific, specifically that our mission was to prove that there was no radioactivity from the bomb. Their arrival in Nagasaki was delayed by a typhoon and the men were surprised to read in the Stars and Stripes the results of our findings! 61 An authoritative and respected 1981 Japanese published report, compiled by a committee of Japanese scientists and physicians, brings up more ambiguous evidence suggesting residual radiation in both cities. Japanese who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombing or who cared for victims often suffered from exposure to remaining radiation; they presented a sufficiently strong case that the Japanese government in 1954 offered benefits to those early entrants. 62 Manhattan Project scientists had paid surprisingly little attention to ionizing radiation in their first tests of the atomic gadget in New Mexico in May and July Radioactive fallout turned out to be a significant long term effect from the Trinity test but at the time all but a few of the scientists essentially ignored all aspects of the ionizing radiation. 63 In memos circulated in the spring and summer of 1945, a few scientists at Los Alamos theorized that a bomb would create radiation in the seconds following the initial explosion, but concern focused on the safety of the bomber crew. 64 As historian Sean Malloy argues, the extraordinary degree of secrecy and the system of compartmentalization precluded widespread circulation of such information even within the Manhattan Project scientists themselves. 65 In the rest of this article, I will focus on another reason for the secrecy about the bombs radiation. Government officials, civilian and military, who made decisions about use of the bomb and those with the Manhattan Project who created the atomic bomb wanted it to be viewed as a regular military weapon, one far more powerful than other bombs, but above all a just weapon in a just war: a traditional combat bomb. 66 When Japanese radio and newspapers reported people dying of radioactive poison gas and European newspapers reported poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity by the split uranium atom, U.S. officials labelled it propaganda. The claims, however, also aroused considerable fear among U.S. officials. Very few people associated with the creation of the atomic bomb wanted it to be linked to chemical or biological warfare which continued to be widely stigmatized in civilian circles and, interestingly, also, in military. 67 No one wanted the U.S. to be subject to an international stigma as the first nation to use chemical weapons in World War II. American officials recognized the still considerable ongoing onus against Germany for

11 852 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 initiating the use of poison gas in World War I. 68 The U.S. had unofficially adopted the principle of no first use of chemical and biological weapons since the 1920s although Congress had never signed the official Geneva Protocol. 69 In the wartime U.S., advocates for chemical and biological warfare found little support. Even at the floodtide of World War II patriotism, the American public continued to harbor pre-war reservations about chemical and biological warfare. This antipathy persisted even as proponents of such warfare campaigned that chemical and biological poisons were simply another type of weapon system and no moral opprobrium should be attached to them. 70 Nevertheless, during and immediately after World War II, funding for chemical warfare and biological warfare quietly increased, even though deep pockets of resistance remained within the White House (including Franklin Roosevelt), Congress, and within the military. 71 The Secretary of the Navy in 1942 openly opposed the idea of using gases in warfare. 72 American officials who feared that the atomic bomb would be labeled a weapon of chemical or biological warfare because of its radiation had good reason for such concerns. Archival records illustrate the early recognition of the close linkage between toxicological research into ionizing radiation and that of chemical and biological warfare agents. Even before the U.S. entered the war, a National Academy of Science report linked radiation and chemical warfare. In that report (May 1941), physicists E. Wigner and H. D. Smyth noted that a nuclear reactor produced fission products that some thought could be used like a particularly vicious form of poison gas. A later report in December mentioned three uses for fission: radioactive poisons, atomic power, and atomic bombs. 73 Fission products came to be studied during the war in some of the same institutions and by the same researchers studying chemical and biological toxicants. War contracts at the University of Chicago funded two secret laboratories where scientists conducted research into the military potential of radiological fission products. The Metallurgical Lab (the Met Lab) concentrated on building a nuclear reactor to create a controlled chain reaction to produce plutonium. In addition, however, employees in its Health Division studied the hazards of both radiation and toxic chemicals, developed radiation detectors and dosimeters, and designed ways to screen workers for radiation exposure. Another section of the Met Lab investigated offensive and defensive aspects of radiological warfare. 74 Joseph Hamilton, a physician and radiation expert from the University of California s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, worked during the war for the Met Lab exploring the respiration effects of inhaled toxic dusts such as plutonium, uranium, and other fission products. After the war Hamilton became one of the leading civilians in the research and development of radiological warfare, including studies of which radiological products made the best weapons and what dispersal mechanisms worked the most effectively. 75 Near the Met Lab on the small wartime University of Chicago campus a second secret laboratory also conducted classified studies into chemical and biological warfare; after the war it became a major civilian lab for radiological warfare research and then an Air Force lab. Founded by the Chemical Warfare Research Division of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1942, the University of Chicago Toxicity Laboratory (UCTL) remains far less known than the Met Lab, but it was one of the major institutions from the 1940s through the 1960s combining research into chemical, radiological, and biological warfare.

12 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 853 A Chicago newspaper right after the war touted the classified work conducted at the Toxicity Lab: Fifteen hundred chemical compounds, many of them far more lethal than those used in WWI, were tested in a secret laboratory which was another of the University of Chicago s major war contracts.... For four years, the gas house scientists handled daily, with complete safety to the surrounding community, substances many times more poisonous than any known in the last war. 76 Researchers at the UCTL recognized that the reduced white blood cell counts that they had begun to recognize as symptoms of exposure to radiation mirrored those of mice exposed to nitrogen mustards, since World War I the most common chemical warfare agent. The symptoms of the exposed mice, many fewer white blood cells than normal and bone marrow and lymph nodes that no longer formed blood cells, were the same as what physicians in Hiroshima puzzled over among atomic bomb survivors. 77 Those similarities interested University of Chicago physician Leon Jacobson, a hematology expert working at the UCTL during the war. Jacobson was one of the U.S. biomedical experts to make a very early study of the confiscated reports from Japan. His papers in the University of Chicago archives still retain over a half-dozen of those reports about early postbomb radiation effects. This area of his expertise surely aided his appointment after the war as director of the new Argonne Cancer Research Hospital funded by the Atomic Energy Commission. 78 In the late 1940s through 1950s the Argonne Hospital continued human radiation studies begun during the war at earlier University of Chicago medical sites. 79 Individuals careers also underscore the interconnections between chemical/ biological warfare, ionizing radiation, and radiological warfare. The first director of the University of Chicago Toxicity Lab, Franklin C. McLean, worked first as a professor of medicine at the University in the 1920s and then as a professor of pathological physiology in the 1930s. During his stint at the Toxicity Lab McLean worked closely with the Army s Chemical Warfare Service testing and studying chemical toxicants. When he left the Toxicity Lab in August 1943, he moved directly into the Army s Chemical Warfare Service where he became director of toxicology at the main U.S. chemical warfare site, the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. After the war McLean worked as Medical Director of the Office of Santa Fe Directed Operations, chiefly at Los Alamos until 1948 when he was appointed to head one of the nation s foremost radiological warfare committees, the one that advised the Atomic Energy Commission. 80 McLean continued to work on chemical, biological, and radiological warfare the rest of his life, producing a large body of such heavily classified reports that the majority of his career writings could never be publicly acknowledged. Other U.S. investigators of radiation effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki became involved in biological and chemical warfare research after the war. George V. LeRoy, who served on the Joint Commission in Japan and who also edited medical-biological sections of the MED s report on Japan, chaired a meeting in 1949 to select biological experiments for the upcoming Eniwetok nuclear tests. The list he compiled of proposed research projects illustrates officials overlapping interests in biological, chemical, and radiological warfare. One proposal recommended study of the combined action of biological warfare agents and atomic bomb injury. 81 Another proposed the effect of atomic bomb radiation on biological warfare agents and on simulated biological warfare. Several

13 854 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 proposed studies illustrate officials continuing desire to understand the radiation connected with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: toxicological studies which included studies of particle size distribution of dust from the bomb and a proposal to determine amounts of gamma and neutron radiation at varying distances. 82 As interest in the potential battlefield uses of radiation expanded, a growing number of officials recognized similarities between radiation and chemical warfare. Alden Waitt, chief of the Chemical Corps and a tireless advocate of its expansion, gloated in 1945 that the application of atomic energy to warfare, rather than rendering gas obsolete, may well extend the field for atmospheric attack. 83 For well over a decade ionizing radiation came to be treated formally as a third branch of toxic warfare. Millions of dollars flowed into research and development for CBRW or CEBAR (chemical, biological, radiological warfare). The Atomic Energy Commission created several different groups to study radiological warfare including (as noted above) a committee headed by McLean, another headed by Alfred Noyes, a University of Rochester chemist, and a third group run jointly by the Department of Defense and the AEC. In addition, the Air Force Special Weapons Project, competing with the civilian AEC in many arenas pertaining to the bomb and in its early years headed by Leslie Groves, created its own RW committee. 84 Operational details of the Army and Navy censorship offices during World War II remain under-investigated by historians but the role of Leslie Groves merits attention. Groves took an active role in orchestrating the earliest denials of the radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 85 He did not want the weapon that he had helped usher into the world to be regarded as a weapon of chemical warfare. He did not want the atomic bomb to be associated with or identified with its radioactivity. He wanted it known as a combat weapon a regular bomb but a big bomb. 86 Groves s actions pertaining to the uses of radiation as a wartime weapon illustrate his distaste. Very early in the war, just as the atomic bomb project was getting under way Groves recognized a potential danger if Germans were to use fission products to poison a battlefield. He urged the National Research Council to make a study of such a possibility and he warned Allied leaders of the potential threat, sending radiological experts and Geiger counters to England. 87 At home during and after the war, he resisted military interest in using fission products for radiological warfare. 88 After the Trinity test of the experimental bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, when it became evident that the atomic bomb would work as a powerful weapon, Groves became even more hostile to the use of radiation as a weapon. Framed in this way, his otherwise strange actions in July and August 1945 become comprehensible. In the days just before and after the Trinity shot, Groves became enraged when Stafford Warren openly expressed fears about radiological dangers. Groves adopted a strange pattern of denial to superiors and to himself about the lack of danger from the bomb s radiation. In one instance Groves took a position that, in the words of historian Sean Malloy, was shocking, bizarre and careerthreatening. 89 In late July, just days before the first bomb was to be dropped in Japan, Groves assured his superior, Chief of Staff George Marshall, that if the U.S. used radiation to poison a battlefield in Japan, American troops would be safe crossing the terrain within hours. He made such a reassurance even after having received five days earlier a memo from Stafford Warren that, read in one

14 Radiation Secrecy and Censorship 855 way, warned of the dangers to unprotected troops crossing such a radiologicallypoisoned battlefield. 90 One can read Warren s memo another way, however and I believe that such a reading explains Groves s reassurance to Marshall. Stafford Warren knew how to write ambiguous memos to his superiors. He recognized in the days following the Trinity test that he had offended Groves with his fears about the possible consequences of radioactive fallout affecting the test personnel and local New Mexico residents; Warren intended his subsequent written memos to minimize the radiation dangers and placate Groves. His memo on July 25 can be read as a masterful blend of reassurance and of realistically honest assessment of radiological dangers, the latter however he couched in statistical data and a table that Warren may well have known would be scarcely heeded by an impatient Groves. 91 The second incident pointing to Groves acute unease about the bomb s radiation comes in two telephone calls he made after reading newspaper reports about Japanese claims of horrific radiation deaths in Hiroshima. On August 25 and 26, 1945, Groves made phone calls to the clinical chief, Dr. Charles Rhea, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, apparently to seek reassurance that no deaths in Hiroshima could have been caused by radiation. Transcripts of these calls portray a distraught Groves asking for information about radiation burns and lethality, appearing ignorant of the radiation findings from the Trinity test, and appearing ignorant of levels of radiation possible from the atomic bomb. 92 Groves understood very well that all telephone calls were recorded; he took personal charge of preserving the transcripts along with other top secret materials from the MED for decades before they were turned over to the National Archives. It seems highly unlikely that Groves feared legal prosecution as a war criminal ( winners in wars are seldom charged with war crimes), but he appears to have had a strong desire to protect his historical reputation and for reasons personal to him for some reason he did not want that reputation associated with radiological warfare. 93 In the November 1945 Congressional hearings about the bomb, Groves downplayed the issue of radiation dangers and testified that small amounts might cause a person to die later without undue suffering. In fact [doctors] say it is a very pleasant way to die. 94 To writer Murray Sayle, radiation sickness constituted the ugliest secret of the atomic bomb, one that came to cast much doubt on the legitimacy of the bomb. 95 Groves could not directly face those aspects of the bomb he had helped usher into the world. So he denied that radiation and its effects--to himself, in his orders to underlings about what they were to find in Japan, in his manipulation of the materials he left for posterity. Many people and groups in the U.S. worked hard in the years after World War II to obscure, to censor, to stage-manage knowledge about the radiation released from atomic bombs; they created an anti-epistemology that lasted, in varying degrees, for decades. As noted above, immediately after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings American governmental and military officials wanted reassurance that Allied troops sent to occupy the Japanese mainland for months, perhaps years would not be harmed by residual radioactivity. So the official reports that none existed in either city proved immensely reassuring. In addition, if America were to make nuclear weapons a key component of the nation s military arsenal, the public needed to remain ignorant and quiescent about costs and dangers. The secrecy surrounding the radiation from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had serious and long-lasting consequences. For several years after the war