[lit-ideas] A Great Nuclear-Age Mystery Solved

From: Eric Yost <Mr.Eric.Yost@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 11:00:22 -0400

EXTRACT of

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963439

SPECIAL REPORT: A Great Nuclear-Age Mystery Solved


By Greg Mitchell

Published: June 16, 2005 11:45 PM ET

NEW YORK One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved today: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945?

The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which might have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. Carbon copies were found just two years ago when his son, who talked to E&P from Italy today, discovered them after the reporter's death.

Four of them were published today for the first time by the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, which purchased them from Anthony Weller. He old E&P he hopes to put them and others together into a book.

The articles published in Japan today reveal a remarkable and wrenching turn in Weller's view of the aftermath of the bombing, which anticipates the profound unease in our nuclear experience ever since. "It was remarkable to see that shifting perspective," Anthony Weller says.

The first article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8, 1945 -- the day after he reached the city, before any other journalist -- hailed the "effectiveness of the bomb as a military device," as his son describes it, and makes no mention of the bomb's special, radiation-producing properties.

But later that day, after visiting two hospitals and shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease X" that was killing people who had seemed to survive the bombing in relatively good shape. A month after the atomic inferno, they were passing away pitifully, some with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots in patches."

The following day he again described the atomic bomb's "peculiar disease" and reported that the leading local X-ray specialist was convinced that "these people are simply suffering" from the bomb's unknown radiation effects.

Anthony Weller, a novelist who lives near Gloucester, Mass., told E&P that it was one of great disappointments of his father's life that these stories, "a real coup," were killed by MacArthur who, George Weller felt, "wanted all the credit for winning the war, not some scientists back in New Mexico." Others have suggested that the real reason for the censorship was the United States did not want the world to learn about the morally troubling radiation effects for two reasons: It did not want questions raised about the use of the weapon in 1945, or its wide scale development in the coming years. "Clearly," says Anthony Weller, "they would have supplied an eyewitness account at a moment when the American people badly needed one."

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

[lit-ideas] A Great Nuclear-Age Mystery Solved

Other related posts: