Hauntings

On August 6, 1945, the decision was made for the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 9, after the Japanese refused to surrender following the first devastating blast, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

The spector of these two attacks has as much resonance in contemporary society than most people realize. After the intense devastation from the relatively untested, unknown devices, Japan was permanently scarred; America lunged into an intense race for more destructive power. The Cold War brought thousands of still more powerful warheads, and the fall of the Soviet Communists has left many of their warheads unsecured. This, with a growing effort among underdeveloped countries to build a nuclear weapon to build their relevence on an international stage of fear, and the black market dealings in nuclear arms, and today potentially the greatest current threat of terrorism is the looming question of the Nuclear Bomb being unleashed once again by groups unaccountable to anybody, hellbent on this level of destruction.

The Family Tree of the nuclear weapon has sprouted many limbs. And yet, the lineage of the nuclear weapon is traced back to America, and these two ghostly explosions that ended the war in the Pacific. These are the testament; the historical record; the shadows of men, women, children seared onto what walls remained.

My grandfather faught in the Pacific in WWII and held many secrets from those years of his life. One of his war buddies entered Nagasaki after the bomb and witnessed first hand the new-world wasteland. Brought upon by a single destructive force. He saw the fresh wounds that would heal only so far as to become an itching scar of 60 years of fear of nuclear weapons through the world.

And on September 8, an American Journalist named George Weller became the first westerner to gain access to Nagasaki, the quieter sister of the two destroyed cities, and filed reports. These were immediately censored and suppressed. Mainichi Daily News has just begun to serially publish them .

NAGASAKI, Saturday, Sept.8 (odn) -- In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast's center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way. The human beings whom it has happened to spare sit on (illegible) One tiny family board their platforms in Nagasaki's two largest (illegible) hospitals, their shoulders, arms and faces are strapped in bandages.

Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to knew: "What do you think?"

What this question means is: do you intend saying that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write.

Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures with them. About one in five is heavily bandaged, but none of showing signs of pain.

Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband, shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.
...

NAGASAKI, Sept.9 (cdn) -- The atomic bomb's peculiar "disease," uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here.

Men, woman and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.

The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer - the first Allied observer to Nagasaki since the surrender - that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their eyes.

Kyushu's leading X-ray specialist, who arrived today from the island's chief city Fukuoka, elderly Dr. Yosisada Nakashima, told the writer that he is convinced that these people are simply suffering from the atomic bomb's beta Gamma, or the neutron ray is taking effect.

"All the symptoms are similar," said the Japanese doctor. "You have a reduction in white corpuscles, constriction in the throat, vomiting, diarrhea and small hemorrhages just below the skin. All of these things happen when an overdose of Roentgen rays is given. Bombed children's hair falls out. That is natural because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially and sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose."

Nakashima differed with general physicians who have asked the regiment to close off a bombed area claiming that returned refugees are infected from the ground by lethal rays.
...