On August 6, 1945, the U.S. used an atomic bomb for the first time in history, against the city of Hiroshima. The U.S. dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Experts estimate that the two bombs instantly killed more than 100,000 people.
The movie Oppenheimer has rightly received critical acclaim as a masterful recounting of the American effort to build those bombs and some scientists’ ethical anguish over their development and use. The movie presents the witch hunt and dismissal of the project’s scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, in the vicious government war on science and culture during the Red Scare moral panic of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
But an equally disturbing and important story should not be forgotten—the fate of the more than 500,000 hibakusha, those Japanese civilians who survived the nuclear bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
American leaders wanted information about the human cost of fighting what many thought was an inevitable nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Japanese survivors of nuclear bomb attacks were drafted for study with no informed consent and no discussion of the risks of radiation. Within six weeks of the bombings, U.S. and Japanese expert teams were in both cities studying the biological impact of radiation while saying nothing about their suppositions of its dangers. The survivors’ enrollment began just as the victorious Allies concluded Nuremburg trials of Nazi doctors and scientists, which ended with convictions for atrocities including treating unwilling people as guinea pigs.
On November 26, 1946, President Harry Truman authorized the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) “to undertake long range, continuing study of the biological and medical effects of the atomic bomb on man.” The authorization noted that Japanese people who were exposed to radiation “[offered] a unique opportunity for the study of the medical and biological effects of radiation which is of utmost importance to the United States.” The ABCC was formed not out of concern for helping Japanese civilians who survived, but to manage future risks associated with atomic energy including a possible nuclear war involving Americans.
American researchers did not consider the physical damage caused by blowing up large Japanese cities to be of great importance. They were more interested in who survived, who died later and how badly hurt others were, post-detonation, in order to prepare a medical triage response for American cities. The longer-term effects of exposure to the radiation emitted by the bombs on fetuses in utero and future generations was also of deep concern.
