Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

* Stalin’s speech in February 1946 wasn’t a declaration of war.
* It wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been said in the past.
* He issued no direct threats toward the United States, and emphasized above all else the security of the Soviet state and the communist experiment.
* Rather, Stalin showed, if his previous words and actions had been insufficient, that he regarded the postwar world as a continuing realm of competition in which the Soviet system would fight for its survival in the face of capitalist encroachment.
* Close ties with the West were not in the cards.
* The situation, as far as he was concerned, was the same as it had been before the Great Patriotic War: rivalry was inevitable, broad-ranging cooperation all but impossible.
* And that’s when George F. Kennan, counselor at the American embassy in Moscow, when asked to explain Stalin’s position, wrote his famous 5,500-word answer (not 8000 words, as it’s often referred to) in the form of a telegram he sent to the State Department.
* It’s known as the “Long Telegram”
* We’ve mentioned Kennan a few times in the past, but I think we should stop for a minute and do a small bio.
* After all, the man did more to shape United States policy during the cold war than any other person.
* George FROST Kennan was born in 1904
* His mother died two months later from a ruptured appendix.
* But for a long time Kennan thought she died giving birth to him.
* Which has to be some kind of burden as a kid.
* Growing up he wasn’t close to his father or stepmother.
* But at the age of 8 he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German.
* It was the first of numerous languages he would eventually master: Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese and Norwegian.
* So this would have been around 1912.
* Just before WWI.
* He eventually got a bachelor’s degree in History from Princeton in 1925 and went to work for the United Stated Foreign Service which had only been created the previous year.
* his first job was as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland
* Then he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany where he was selected for a linguist training program that lasted three years.
* In 1929 Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin’s Oriental Institute.
* He was following in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger cousin, also called George Kennan,who was a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia.
* And by 1931 he was in Latvia, where he worked on Soviet economic affairs.
* When the U.S. began formal diplomacy with the Soviet government during 1933, Kennan went to Moscow with the U.S.Ambassador, William C. Bullitt.
* Who of course Steve McQueen portrayed in the 1968 film BULLITT.
* Joking.
* Bullitt was actually fired from that job in 1936 when a journalist blew the whistle on him for being involved in the illegal money exchanges in Russia.
* He was briefly engaged to Roosevelt’s personal secretary and lifelong companion, Missy LeHand (Job), but she broke off the engagement after a trip to Moscow during which she reportedly discovered him to be having an affair with Olga Lepeshinskaya, who was Stalin’s favourite ballet dancer, and maybe mistress.
* Bullitt’s second wife, BTW, was Louise Bryant, author of Six Red Months in Russia, played by Diane Keaton in the 1981 film REDS.
* He divorced her when he found out she was having a lesbian affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne.
* ANYWAY.
* Back to Kennan.
* Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946.
* Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
* Kennan wrote his long telegram to Secretary of State James Byrnes, outlining a new strategy for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
* In his “Long Telegram”, Kennan explained that at the “bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”.
* After the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy”.
* So The Soviet Union’s relations with the West were merely the latest rendition of the long Russian tradition of diplomatic cynicism and duplicity.
* Russian statesmen regarded international cooperation as a ruse to lower the guard of the gullible.
* Only fools kept their word on the international stage.
* This had always been the attitude of Russian leaders, and such cynicism was only magnified and given ideological depth by the struggle between Soviet socialism and the imperialist West.
* Nothing the United States might do would earn Moscow’s trust, so irreducibly hardened were these views.
* according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule.
* Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand … Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability”.
* Now – you’re going to like this.
* Here’s the opening paragraph to the long telegram.
* Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification.
* Sound familiar?
* I want to read Part 1 of the telegram, because it does a pretty good job of setting out the worldview of Stalin.
* Part 1: Basic Features of Post War Soviet Outlook, as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine Are as Follows:
* (a) USSR still lives in antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers:
* “In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”
* (b) Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. These conflicts are insoluble by means of peaceful compromise. Greatest of them is that between England and US.
* (c) Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars. Wars thus generated may be of two kinds: intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states, and wars of intervention against socialist world. Smart capitalists, vainly seeking escape from inner conflicts of capitalism, incline toward latter.
* (d) Intervention against USSR, while it would be disastrous to those who undertook it, would cause renewed delay in progress of Soviet socialism and must therefore be forestalled at all costs.
* (e) Conflicts between capitalist states, though likewise fraught with danger for USSR, nevertheless hold out great possibilities for advancement of socialist cause, particularly if USSR remains militarily powerful, ideologically monolithic and faithful to its present brilliant leadership.
* (f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be “objectively” favorable to interests of USSR These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.
* (g) Among negative elements of bourgeois-capitalist society, most dangerous of all are those whom Lenin called false friends of the people, namely moderate-socialist or social-democratic leaders (in other words, non-Communist left-wing). These are more dangerous than out-and-out reactionaries, for latter at least march under their true colors, whereas moderate left-wing leaders confuse people by employing devices of socialism to seine interests of reactionary capital.
* So much for premises. To what deductions do they lead from standpoint of Soviet policy? To following:
* (a) Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity most be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.
* (b) Soviet efforts, and those of Russia’s friends abroad, must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an “imperialist” war, this war must be turned into revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries.
* (c) “Democratic-progressive” elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.
* (d) Relentless battle must be waged against socialist and social-democratic leaders abroad.
* The rest of the telegram makes for fascinating reading and his description of Stalin-era U.S.S.R. really sounds a LOT like the present United States.
* Take this, for example: The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world.
* And let me finish by reading his conclusions:
* As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, following comments:
* (1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.
* (2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown. It may also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian-American relations. I feel that if there is any real risk here involved, it is one which we should have courage to face, and sooner the better. But I cannot see what we would be risking. Our stake in this country, even coming on heels of tremendous demonstrations of our friendship for Russian people, is remarkably small. We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have; and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.
* (3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meets Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit–Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.
* (4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.
* (5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After Al, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

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* In October 1945, Navy Day 1945 in New York City, at the Commissioning of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman gave a speech.
* Here’s a clip.
* https://youtu.be/BjUz4BPWwbc?t=2m21s
* FAKE TRUMAN ACCENT: “We don’t seek any more land – because we already took as much as we could from the Native Americans, and the Mexicans, and the Hawaiians, and the Spanish.”
* He went on to say The world “cannot afford any letdown in the united determination of the allies in this war to accomplish a lasting peace.”‘
* So he’s all about working with the Soviets and finding a lasting peace.
* Or is he?
* Privately it seems like he didn’t believe peace with the U.S.S.R. was possible.
* Like FDR before him, Truman envisioned a world with open international trade – something the U.S. economy desperately needed – which meant global capitalism.
* But the U.S.S.R. had just turned back the Nazis, fighting them for years without much support, and had played a huge role in their final defeat.
* and they had the world’s largest land army.
* They weren’t about to kowtow to the American new world order.
* The only way the USA could force the Soviets to go along with it was war.
* And the Soviets had just proven – again – how difficult their country was to invade.
* And the American people wouldn’t support another war.
* Especially not to overthrow a recent ally, just because they wanted to enforce their own new world order.
* Not yet, anyway.
* Some in Washington believed the U.S. had no real choice but to find a way to work with the USSR
* Other believed the Soviets couldn’t be trusted, and pointed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.
* They conveniently ignored the places where the Soviets had kept to their agreements – Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.
* As of October 1945, Truman and his inner circle seem to have no grand strategy regarding working with the Soviets at this stage.
* But over the next few months, they started concluding that they weren’t going to be able to work with Stalin.
* And by late 1947, the term “Cold War” had already entered the political lexicon.
* and America’s containment strategy had been implemented.
* At the end of World War II the United States possessed far and away the world’s largest economy.
* Its GDP was five times that of Great Britain, four times that of the Soviet Union.
* As we’ve pointed out many times – this was mostly due to the fact that the U.S. was the only major economy not flattened by the war.
* And now it also had the bomb.
* Initially Truman and Byrnes, his new Sec of State, thought they could dangle the bomb in front of Stalin as a way to induce him to accept their view of the world.
* Not in a “do it or we’ll drop it on you” approach, although that was always an unspoken threat, but in a “do it and we might share our atomic secrets with you” approach.
* Of course, what they didn’t know at the time, was they didn’t HAVE any secrets.
* Stalin knew it all.
* In the first Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) conference, which took place in London from September 11 to October 2, Byrnes tried to use a combination of threats and sweets to get Molotov to budge on a range of issues – the control of Germany and eastern Europe – but Molotov just laughed in his face.
* By December, Byrnes had been told by Truman to stop trying to woo the Russians.
* In fact, Truman got all up in his face for trying to conclude a deal without the White House’s approval.
* He felt Byrnes had over-stepped his authority.
* It’s like Truman has become Stalin and Byrnes is Molotov.
* Truman is beginning to mistrust and sideline Byrnes already and he’s only six months into the job of SoS.
* Now Truman is going to start playing tough again with the Russians.
* In September the departing secretary of war, Henry Stimson, suddenly made an impassioned plea for international atomic control, spelling out to the president and the rest of the cabinet very clearly exactly what was required.
* “I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb;” the veteran statesman said in a secret White House meeting.’
* His logic was simple.
* The United States and Great Britain had kept the building of the bomb a secret from their Soviet ally and had used it ruthlessly to end the war in Japan.
* This collusion and secrecy with respect to a manifestly powerful weapon was so threatening to the Kremlin that it would take all steps necessary to build a comparable weapon for itself.
* Once it did so, Stimson maintained, an arms race would ensue and the prospect of international cooperation would disappear. Hence the necessity of moving quickly to reach a deal with the Soviet Union that could lead to the establishment of a truly international agency in control of all atomic technologies.
* Without such an agency, the two new powers would sooner or later commence an atomic arms race.
* But his plea fell on deaf ears.
* Speaking to reporters “on the record;’ Truman vowed that the United States would never transfer its atomic material and scientific facilities to an international agency, and added that if other nations wanted the bomb they should acquire it “on their own hook.”
* In a speech to Congress in December he called for a foreign policy built on military power.
* He was quite clear – The United States would not cooperate seriously with the Kremlin on the question of atomic control and would not use its bomb monopoly as a negotiating tool to secure Soviet concessions either.
* This was partly about domestic politics.
* Truman wanted to look tough on the Soviet issue to disarm any criticism of him or the Democrats so they could maintain their majority in Congress after the 1946 midterm elections.
* But there was another reason.
* In September, just as Stimson was pleading for cooperation and as Byrnes and Molotov were meeting in London, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed Truman that a massive spy ring operating out of Ottawa had infiltrated the Manhattan Project with Canadian and American spies working for Moscow.
* Washington officials had known of this network since 1942, but new revelations from the Canadian government indicated that the scale of the espionage was much greater than had been previously suspected.
* Truman was incensed!
* How DARE Stalin put spies inside the Manhattan Project?!
* It’s almost like he didn’t trust the Americans to share the knowledge with him, their ally!
* Oh wait, that’s right, they didn’t.
* But STILL.
* He didn’t know that at the time!
* So all of a sudden, Truman better understood why Stalin was giving them the middle finger in negotiations.
* Maybe he knew he could build his own bomb.
* But a third reason Truman went tough on Stalin was that if the news got out that the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project on the Democrats watch, it was going to look VERY bad.
* Especially as many of its spies were American citizens, and – as Hoover would later make abundantly clear to Truman – that many of these individuals had connections to leading Democratic Party figures in the State Department and elsewhere, the damage to his party and to his own political stature could be devastating.
* if such revelations were made public at the same time that Truman was proposing to give away America’s atomic bombs to an international agency, the ensuing political assault on the White House would have been incalculable.
* The espionage revelations made serious international control a political impossibility for the president, and further inclined him to regard the Soviet Union with suspicion and hostility.
* None of this was yet public knowledge.
* As far as the American people were aware, the Soviet Union was still an ally, and the administration’s plans for the postwar world were still wholly undetermined.
* Truman faced an array of foreign policy criticism on this question in the first weeks of 1946.
* There was still a lingering suspicion of American internationalism throughout parts of both the Democratic and Republican parties, especially among politicians wary of Great Britain and those keen to reduce the power of the federal government now that the war had ended.
* Many liberals in the Democratic Party – led by Henry Wallace, vice president under Roosevelt during much of the war and now Truman’s secretary of commerce – Roosevelt appointed Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce in January 1945, shortly before Roosevelt’s death, as a sort of consolation prize for losing the vice presidency – were unhappy with the increasingly frosty nature of the Soviet-American relationship and demanded that Truman honor Roosevelt’s call for a perpetuation of the Grand Alliance to keep the postwar peace.
* Conversely, many influential Republicans, sensing a political opening, argued that the administration was dangerously slow to respond to the Soviet threat and pressed for a more resolute policy.
* Fortunately, the American public didn’t know about the Soviet spy ring.
* That all changed in February 1946, when the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson gave a radio address where he said a source inside the government leaked him secret details on an extensive Soviet atomic espionage network operating out of Canada.
* That source?
* Probably J Edgar Hoover.
* When the Canadians confirmed the story a couple of weeks later, there was “near-hysteria” in many newspapers and throughout Washington during the second half of February.
* Not only had America’s wartime ally run a major-and apparently quite effective-espionage operation during the war; the operation evidently had been conducted largely by American citizens, secretly working for Moscow while they went about their treacherous business in Los Alamos or Washington.
* The public effect of the Pearson revelations did not come to full fruition until the heyday of McCarthyism in 1950-1953, but the political impact on Truman’s foreign policy was immediate.
* Of course, after this revelation, an international atomic deal, especially with the Russians, was totally off the cards.
* In fact, Truman was so shaken by the Pearson scandal that he canceled an atomic cooperation deal with Great Britain, reneging on a promise Roosevelt had made to Churchill in 1944.
* Then, on cue, In a public speech on February 9, Stalin announced that his government would maintain its wartime (and prewar) policies of state control over the economy and would continue to divert maximum resources toward heavy industry and military production.
* Stalin did not attribute the policies he was announcing to American behavior as such but rather to the need for the USSR to maintain its military strength in a world of continuing imperialism.
* He endorsed Lenin’s line that the nations of the West were impelled by the logic of late capitalism toward unending conflict and war.
* The Soviet Union would not be caught up in this logic, but it could find itself-as it did in 1941-in a capitalist war not of its own making.
* Until the global triumph of communism, Stalin maintained, the world would be dangerous and the threat to the Soviet Union imminent.
* The aspirations of the long-suffering Soviet citizenry for prosperity and domestic reform would have to wait.

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* The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers.
* A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”
* In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of U.S. bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects.
* The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.
* A rare article about what it called this “sensitive” dispute appeared in the New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been “Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years.”
* Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a “hold” on the Japanese using it — even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.
* Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend.
* It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
* From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.
* So he got his hands on it and made a short 16 film, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945”.
* He arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press.
* He approached the three TV networks that existed back then and offered them the film, but none expressed interest in airing it.
* Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release.
* When that footage finally emerged, journalist Greg Mitchell spoke with the man at the center of the drama: Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.
* McGovern told him: “I always had the sense, that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child….They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were sorry for our sins. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war.
* He later said: “The main reason it was classified was…because of the horror, the devastation.”
* Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
* Four days after Wilfred Burchett’s story – remember him from the last episode? Aussie journalist, first into Hiroshima? – splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico.
* Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times.
* Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test.
* His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site.
* Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.
* Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors.
* “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began.
* Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”
* Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.”
* Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”
* Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program.
* Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing.
* Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
* He was wrong about the Trinity site.
* Today the radiation levels at the site are 10 times greater than the region’s natural background radiation.
* Of course that’s probably one of the main reasons the U.S. wanted to discredit the connection between atomic bombs and dangerous radiation.
* THEY HAD BLOWN ONE UP IN NEW MEXICO.
* Imagine what the locals would do if they thought they were eating irradiated food and breathing in irradiated air?
* Which, of course, they were.
* For years, many of the residents of Tularosa, a small town roughly 35 miles from the Trinity site, have experienced unusually high rates of cancer.
* They are known as “downwinders”.
* For the past several years, a bill to list residents near the Trinity site under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has been rejected repeatedly by Congress.
* Of course, the U.S. didn’t stop testing nuclear weapons after Trinity.
* United States has conducted 1,054 nuclear weapons tests to date, involving at least 1,151 nuclear devices, most of which occurred at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
* Lots of downwinders in Arizona, Nevada and Utah but also in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
* Chrissy’s hometown in Utah as well.
* Several severe adverse health effects, such as an increased incidence of cancers, thyroid diseases, CNS neoplasms, and possibly female reproductive cancers that could lead to congenital malformations have been observed in “downwind” communities exposed to nuclear fallout and radioactive contamination.
* From 1951 to 1962 the AEC detonated more than 100 bombs, sending huge pinkish plumes of radioactive dust across the stony valleys and canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona.
* It gave each “shot” names like Annie, Eddie, Humboldt and Badger.
* The official advice: enjoy the show.
* “Your best action is not to be worried about fallout,” said an AEC booklet.
* Families and lovers would drive to vantage points for the spectacle, then drive home as ash wafted down on their communities.
* It was a cheap date.
* At first the local press cheered the chance to beat the Russians and be part of history.
* “Spectacular Atomic Explosions Mean Progress in Defense, No Cause For Panic,” said an editorial in the The Deseret News.
* Eleven bombs were detonated in 1953, including several between March and June that coated St George, Utah, a small town about half an hour away from Chrissy’s hometown, and other towns in grey dust.
* A year later St George hosted the filming of The Conqueror, a big budget blockbuster about Genghis Khan, starring John Wayne.
* Of course.
* Who else?
* A People magazine article in 1980 reported that of 220 cast and crew, 91 had contracted cancer, with 46 of them dying.
* Including The Duke, plus leading lady Susan Hayward, director Dick Powell and dozens of other cast and crew members.
* Wayne’s two sons, Patrick and Michael, who were on location, also got cancer.
* Back to journalist William L. Laurence, the guy who wrote there was no radiation from Trinity.
* Apparenlty he was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times.
* He was also on the payroll of the War Department.
* In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons.
* The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.”
* Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
* A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence).
* He has long been confused with William L. Laurence.
* Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett.
* W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945.
* He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.”
* He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”
* Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN.
* For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.”
* W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”
* Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.
* I even found an article from 09 August1945 where Robert Oppenheimer was quoted as saying he didn’t think there would be any residual radiation in Hiroshima.
* And in case you’re thinking they didn’t know any better – from the same article, Dr Harold Jacobsen from Columbia University, who specialised in atomic research, said he thought the radiation at Hiroshima could linger for 70 years.
* As it turns out, the radiation levels at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki today are neglible.
* Why?
* A bomb which detonates near or on the ground has a greater chance of producing radioactive fallout than one which is detonated high in the air.
* If a bomb was detonated in the air, the hot, radioactive ball of fire travels up high into the stratosphere.
* It does this quickly, usually within minutes.
* The cloud then cools down and begins to look like a regular (albeit irregular shaped) cloud.
* But don’t let this fool you, it is still hot and radioactive.
* Prevailing winds will blow this cloud over a huge area.
* The residual heat and lightness of the particles will keep it in the atmosphere for a few weeks, after which, the particles begin to “fall out” and come back down to earth.
* By this time, the radioactive particles have been dispersed and diluted over a thousands of square miles with the most dangerous radioactive elements already rendered inert by decay.
* The bombs dropped on Japan were detonated high up in the air so the radioactive fireball did not touch the ground.
* This dramatically reduced the radioactive fallout.
* However, the U.S. didn’t do this out of consideration, rather, it just happened to be the ideal height to maximize the destruction of the structures within the city.
* Also – during the re-building of the cities, radioactive materials, like rubble, would be cleared away.
* Rain and snow would wash more of it away, below ground and into rivers where it would be dispersed.
* Since then, approximately 1,900 people in Hiroshima, or about 0.5% of the post-bombing population, are believed to have died from cancers attributable to Little Boy’s radiation release.
* No data on subsequent cancer deaths attributable to radiation exposure from Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, is readily available.

* In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Hiroshima – 71 years after the bomb was dropped.
* He said: We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.
* Some day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade.
* It was a good speech.
* But he didn’t apologise on behalf of his country.
* Should he have?
* Whenever I read Americans discussing the question of an apology to Japan, I normally read a few common arguments for it.
* The first is “They started it.”
* Well no, they didn’t start it.
* As I’ve pointed out before, America was already engaged in an economic war with Japan, they had put economic sanctions on them before Pearl Harbour.
* And the U.S. had moved their fleet to Hawaii which was obviously signalling their intention to attack Japanese troops in China.
* When you’re acting aggressive towards another country, and they decide to retaliate, are they striking first?
* The other argument I hear is DRESDEN.
* People say “more civilians died in Dresdan than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and we didn’t apologise to them”.
* Both of which are true.
* But that’s not a great argument either.
* I didn’t apologise to THIS guy so why should I apologse to THAT guy?
* Do the Japanese want an apology?
* It seems that some don’t.
* A secret 2009 state department cable published by Wikileaks in 2011 indicated Japan was cool to the idea and worried that it would only serve to energize anti-nuclear activists in the country.
* In 2007, during Shinzo Abe’s first term as prime minister, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma referred to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “something that couldn’t be helped.”
* While opposition leaders took issue with that position, the government’s official stance was that it would be more meaningful for the U.S. and Japan to “aim for a peaceful and safe world without nuclear weapons.”
* One of their concerns might be that if the U.S. apologises to Japan, then the Japanese will face pressure to apologise to China and Australia and the Phillipines for their own war crimes during WWII and other conflicts.
* But is that a bad thing?
* Why is it such a bad thing to apologise for things we, as nations, have done?
* “It’s in the past” some people say.
* Well duh doy.
* Everything we ever apologise for is in the past, you dumbass.
* Is that how you handle your personal relationships?
* Do you say to your spouse, “I’m not going to apologise, it’s in the past”??
* Good luck with that if you do.
* Why do we ever apologise for things we’ve done?
* Because it’s a sign of humility.
* It’s a sign of maturity.
* It’s a sign of sincerity.
* It’s a sign that we care about others and want to mend their hurt in order that we might have a healthy relationship with the moving forward.
* I think the real reason people, especially politicians don’t want to apologise, is that they are afraid it’s an admission of guilt, which could lead to lawsuits.
* But that’s a legal matter.
* From a moral perspective, I say, let’s apologise, often and sincerely.
* Even if we don’t think we are totally in the wrong.
* If I say something that hurts Chrissy’s feelings, even if I think it was innocent, or if I think she was mean first, I can either dig my heels in, in which case we’re going to have a bad couple of days, or I can just say “I’m sorry” and we can move on.
* Why is it different between nations?
* And let’s be clear.
* Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishment is a war crime.
* ARTICLE 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states:
* No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
* Now, you will say, “but that wasn’t written until 1949”.
* True.
* But the fact that it *was* written a mere four years after WWII, implies that people living in that day KNEW that collective punishment was immoral.
* Is there any sensible argument that the nuclear attacks on Japan, and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and other cities, weren’t a form of collective punishment as defined by the Geneva Convention?
* I can’t think of one.
* And if they are wrong, wrong now, wrong then, shouldn’t the countries who committed them, apologise for them?
* I asked the question on Facebook and my old mate Rod Adams gave the best reply:
* As I understand “collective punishment” it’s about holding innocent people accountable for offenses committed by others. Large scale strategic bombing wasn’t, in the minds of most decision makers, aimed at punishing anyone. It was ostensibly a tactic design to contribute to achieving victory. By the time those actions were taken, the generally accepted definition for victory in WWII was “unconditional surrender.”
* But I don’t think the justification for attacking civilians makes much of a difference as to whether or not it’s classified as collective punishment.
* Today a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law is that parties to a conflict must distinguish between combatants and civilians, and may not deliberately target civilians or civilian objects.
* Article 33 of the 4th GC states “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.”
* I think the bombing of a civilian population to try to force politicians to surrender would today be considered ‘Measures of intimidation or of terrorism’.

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* TRUMAN ANNOUNCES THE BOMB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN_UJJ9ObDs
* On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow.
* Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others.
* Mr. Akihiro Takahashi was 14 years old, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
* He was standing in line with other students of his junior high school, waiting for the morning meeting 1.4 km away from the center.
* “The heat was tremendous . And I felt like my body was burning all over. For my burning body the cold water of the river was as precious as the treasure. Then I left the river, and I walked along the railroad tracks in the direction of my home. On the way, I ran into an another friend of mine, Tokujiro Hatta. I wondered why the soles of his feet were badly burnt. It was unthinkable to get burned there. But it was undeniable fact the soles were peeling and red muscle was exposed. Even I myself was terribly burnt, I could not go home ignoring him. I made him crawl using his arms and knees. Next, I made him stand on his heels and I supported him. We walked heading toward my home repeating the two methods.”
* He was under medical treatment for about year and half.
* Eiko Taoka, then 21, was one of nearly 100 passengers said to have been on board a streetcar that had left Hiroshima Station at a little after 8:00 a.m. and was in a Hatchobori area, 750 m from ground zero, when the bomb fell. Taoka was heading for Funairi with her one year old son to secure wagon in preparation for her move out of the building which was to be evacuated. At 8:15, as the streetcar approached Hatchobori Station, an intense flash and blast engulfed the car, instantly setting it on fire. Taoka’s son died of radiation sickness on August 28.
* When we were near in Hatchobori and since I had been holding my son in my arms, the young woman in front of me said, ‘I will be getting off here. Please take this seat.’ We were just changing places when there was a strange smell and sound. It suddenly became dark and before I knew it, I had jumped outside…. I held [my son] firmly and looked down on him. He had been standing by the window and I think fragments of glass had pierced his head. His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory. He did not comprehend what had happened. And so he looked at me and smiled at my face which was all bloody. I had plenty of milk which he drank all throughout that day. I think my child sucked the poison right out of my body. And soon after that he died. Yes, I think that he died for me.
* Ms. Akiko Takakura was 20 years old when the bomb fell. She was in the Bank of Hiroshima, 300 meters away from the hypocenter. Ms. Takakura miraculously escaped death despite over 100 lacerated wounds on her back. She is one of the few survivors who was within 300 meters of the hypocenter.
* Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away. For a few years after the A-bomb was dropped, I was terribly afraid of fire. I wasn’t even able to get close to fire because all my senses remembered how fearful and horrible the fire was, how hot the blaze was, and how hard it was to breathe the hot air. It was really hard to breathe. Maybe because the fire burned all the oxygen, I don’t know. I could not open my eyes enough because of the smoke, which was everywhere. Not only me but everyone felt the same. And my parts were covered with holes.
* On August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige was 32 years old, living at home in Midori-cho, Hiroshima.
* His home was 1.7 miles away from ground zero, just outside of the 1.5 mile radius of the total destruction created by atomic blast effects.
* Miraculously, Matsushige was not seriously injured by the explosion.
* With one camera and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures, he tried to photograph the immediate after effects of the bombing of Hiroshima.
* During the next ten hours, Matsushige was only able to click the shutter seven times.
* He said, “It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”
* In addition, he was afraid the burned and battered people would be enraged if someone took their pictures.
* Matsushige could not develop the film right away but eventually did so after twenty days, in the open, at night, using a radioactive stream to rinse the photographs.
* Only five of the seven photographs were developable.
* His photos would be the only immediate record of the destruction at Hiroshima.
* A few weeks after the atomic bombing, the American military confiscated all of the post-bombing newspaper photographs and/or newsreel footage, but failed to confiscate many of the negatives.
* As a result, photographs from the Hiroshima atomic bombing were not published until the United States occupation of Japan ended in April 1952.
* The magazine Asahi Gurafu initially published Matsushige’s photographs in a special edition on August 6, 1952.
* “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence,” described Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett in his September 5, 1945 article “Atomic Plague” in the London Daily Express
* Burchett was the first Western journalist to enter Hiroshima after the bombing – Armed with a pistol, a typewriter and a Japanese phrasebook
* which is my plan for our trip to europe
* He travelled 400 miles from Tokyo alone and unarmed carrying rations for seven meals
* He was shocked by the devastation.
* Under the banner “I write this as a warning to the world”, Burchett described a city reduced to “reddish rubble” and people dying from an unknown “atomic plague”.
* At the time it was ignored by most Western newspapers.
* General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan, and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital.
* U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda.
* They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness.
* The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.
* I want to close out this episode by reading the entire article by Burchett.
* In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly — people who were uninjured by the cataclysm — from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague.
* Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
* When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25, perhaps 30, square miles you can hardly see a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.
* I picked my way to a shack used as a temporary police headquarters in the middle of the vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets, of buildings, homes, factories and human beings.
* There is just nothing standing except about 20 factory chimneys — chimneys with no factories. I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing.
* The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city. With the local manager of Domei, a leading Japanese news agency, he drove me through, or perhaps I should say over, the city. And he took me to hospitals where the victims of the bomb are still being treated.
* In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects.
* For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And the bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth.
* At first the doctors told me they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle.
* And in every case the victim died.
* That is one of the after-effects of the first atomic bomb man ever dropped and I do not want to see any more examples of it. But in walking through the month-old rubble I found others.
* My nose detected a peculiar odour unlike anything I have ever smelled before. It is something like sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still smouldering, or at a spot where they were still recovering bodies from the wreckage. But I could also smell it where everything was still deserted.
* They believe it is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity released by the split uranium atom.
* And so the people of Hiroshima today are walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their mouths and noses. It probably does not help them physically. But it helps them mentally.
* From the moment that this devastation was loosed upon Hiroshima the people who survived have hated the white man. It is a hate the intensity of which is almost as frightening as the bomb itself.
* The counted dead number 53,000. Another 30,000 are missing, which means “certainly dead”. In the day I have stayed in Hiroshima – and this is nearly a month after the bombing – 100 people have died from its effects.
* They were some of the 13,000 seriously injured by the explosion. They have been dying at the rate of 100 a day. And they will probably all die. Another 40,000 were slightly injured.
* These casualties might not have been as high except for a tragic mistake. The authorities thought this was just another routine Super-Fort raid. The plane flew over the target and dropped the parachute which carried the bomb to its explosion point.
* Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.
* The American plane passed out of sight. The all-clear was sounded and the people of Hiroshima came out from their shelters. Almost a minute later the bomb reached the 2,000 foot altitude at which it was timed to explode – at the moment when nearly everyone in Hiroshima was in the streets.
* Hundreds upon hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young.
* Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes – except that there were no ashes.
* If you could see what is left of Hiroshima you would think that London had not been touched by bombs.
* The Imperial Palace, once an imposing building, is a heap of rubble three feet high, and there is one piece of wall. Roof, floors and everything else is dust.
* Hiroshima has one intact building – the Bank of Japan. This in a city which at the start of the war had a population of 310,000.
* Almost every Japanese scientist has visited Hiroshima in the past three weeks to try to find a way of relieving the people’s suffering. Now they themselves have become sufferers.
* For the first fortnight after the bomb dropped they found they could not stay long in the fallen city. They had dizzy spells and headaches. Then minor insect bites developed into great swellings which would not heal. Their health steadily deteriorated.
* Then they found another extraordinary effect of the new terror from the skies.
* Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.
* All these phenomena, they told me, were due to the radio-activity released by the atomic bomb’s explosion of the uranium atom.
* They found that the water had been poisoned by chemical reaction. Even today every drop of water consumed in Hiroshima comes from other cities. The people of Hiroshima are still afraid.
* The scientists told me they have noted a great difference between the effect of the bombs in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki.
* Hiroshima is in perfectly flat delta country. Nagasaki is hilly. When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima the weather was bad, and a big rainstorm developed soon afterwards.
* And so they believe that the uranium radiation was driven into the earth and that, because so many are still falling sick and dying, it is still the cause of this man-made plague.
* At Nagasaki, on the other hand, the weather was perfect, and scientists believe that this allowed the radio-activity to dissipate into the atmosphere more rapidly. In addition, the force of the bomb’s explosion was, to a large extent, expended into the sea, where only fish were killed.
* To support this theory, the scientists point out to the fact that, in Nagasaki, death came swiftly, suddenly, and that there have been no after-effects such as those that Hiroshima is still suffering.

* We went to great lengths to explain the road to the decision to use the bomb on Japan.
* But listen to how it was presented to American children
* TRUMAN CLIP showing the propaganda fed to Americans https://youtu.be/Hxk3qS2TQ8?t=2m3s
* But the decision to drop the bombs is just one aspect of the start of the nuclear arms race that was hidden from Americans.
* The other aspect was the destruction the bombs caused.
* Within weeks of the bombings, Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha sent Japanese camera crews to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shoot footage of the devastation and its victims.
* Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman.
* His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ).
* That film, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is aptly known in Japan as the maboroshi, or “phantom,” film.
* From the very beginning, the way the atomic bombing of Japan was presented to the American public was a carefully handled PR issue.
* At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda).
* George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, who won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize as a Daily News war correspondent, slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there.
* Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors.
* His newspaper never even received his story.
* As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”
* His notes from his trip were finally published posthumously by his son in a book called First Into Nagasaki – in 2006.
* BTW – can you guess what he won his Pulitzer for?
* He wrote an article where he interviewed crew members who were eyewitnesses to an emergency appendectomy performed in a submarine, partly with a tea strainer and spoons.
* Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored.
* Life magazine would later observe that for years “the world…knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction.”
* Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities.
* Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.
* in early 1946 a special U.S. military unit shot twenty hours of film footage, in blazing color, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
* Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot Sanshiro Sugata, the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.
* the footage was hidden for decades and almost no one could see it
* no one outside military, official or archival circles saw any of it.
* The 90,000 feet of color film – enough for 30 full-length movies – was classified as top secret for 30 years.
* For decades all that most Americans saw of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the same black-and-white images: a mushroom cloud, a panorama of emptiness, a battered building topped with the skeleton of a dome – all devoid of people.
* On the morning of 9 August 1945, 16-year-old Sumiteru Taniguchi was 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) from the hypocenter of the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki, delivering mail on his bicycle without a shirt on due to the warm summer weather, when “Fat Man” exploded in the sky.
* The bomb’s heat flash heavily injured Taniguchi with near instant burns resulting, but the blast that arrived afterward did not cause any severe injuries to him, as he clung to the ground while buildings were blown down around him.
* Heavy burns melted skin from his back and left arm, but Taniguchi states that he did not bleed or feel any pain due to the nerve endings being burned away.
* Tired and disoriented, he walked over to a nearby munitions plant, where a female survivor assisted in cutting off loose portions of skin and rubbed machine oil on his damaged arm.
* Come nightfall Taniguchi was carried to a hill to rest, where he was surrounded by confused and thirsty survivors.
* The next morning everyone but Taniguchi was dead.
* During the next two days rescue teams passed by without noticing him, as he was too weak to muster a call for help.
* He was found 2 days later.
* He was eventually taken to Omura Navy Hospital, where he spent the next 21 months lying on his stomach due to the severe burns on his back.
* And you can see photos and film of that – from the American crew that were there in 1946.
* It’s not a pretty sight.
* Imagine a guy whose entire back has had the skin removed.
* The film was finally released to the public in 1982, in a documentary called Prophecy, made by the Japanese, during the height of anti-nuclear demonstrations.
* 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy footage from the USG to make the film.
* The guy who made it, Iwakura, traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for the original U.S. film crew in 1946.
* One of the Americans who shot this footage in 1946 was Herbet Sussan.
* He ended up becoming director of special programs for NBC, supervising 250 special telecasts.
* And he spent a lot of his life trying to get his footage released.
* He took his request to Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow.
* None of them could – or would – help him get it released.
* Meanwhile – when US servicemen returned from Japan, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores.
* Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer (such as multiple myeloma or the form of lymphoma that Sussan himself had) associated with radiation exposure.

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* Truman met often with Byrnes in the first few months of his Presidency.
* But there are almost no records or notes of what they discussed.
* And that was apparently Byrnes’ preference.
* He was known as being paranoid about leaks.
* a very devious politician
* Truman referred to him as his “conniving” secretary of state
* Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who liked Byrnes and found him personally charming, nevertheless had no illusions about him: “He was an operator. He was a kind of prior Lyndon Johnson.”
* Throughout this period Byrnes spoke with the authority of—and personally represented—the president of the United States on all atomic bomb-related matters in the Interim Committee’s deliberations.
* It is also quite clear that by early July 1945 when he was sworn in as secretary of state, Byrnes was firmly in control of U.S. foreign policy.
* And as we’ve seen before – while Truman seems to have looked up to Byrnes as a mentor, Byrnes privately didn’t like Truman.
* One of Truman’s close friends and advisers, his appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, later said that Byrnes thought Truman was “a nonentity, with no abilities to speak of, no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy, or much else for that matter.”
* Matthew Connelly later described Byrnes without reservation as “a very Machiavellian character,” adding that “I never trusted him.”
* Similarly, Robert G. Nixon—who served as White House correspondent for the International News Service at the time—would later remark that “Byrnes looked down on Truman. He had a superior attitude.… He, in a sense, despised Truman … he looked upon Truman as an accident of history and not a very good accident at that.”
* According to Clark Clifford, Admiral Leahy, who initially was favorably disposed towards Byrnes, came to regard him as a “horse’s ass.”
* Bernard Baruch, the financier who presented Truman’s first nuclear arms control proposal at the United Nations in 1946, regarded his friend Byrnes as “power-crazy—that he wants to decide everything himself.…”
* Averell Harriman recalled that after Potsdam, “I was through with Jimmy Byrnes … I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.”
* Almost immediately after taking office, Truman demonstrated his great trust in Byrnes by informing him of his intention to appoint him secretary of state sometime that summer—as, of course, he did. It should be kept in mind that the position of secretary of state carried far more weight in 1945 than it does today.
* At the time, before the post of national security adviser was established, it was the premier Cabinet office.
* Under then-existing law—with no vice president in office once Truman succeeded Roosevelt—the secretary of state was next in line of succession.
* If anything happened to Truman, Byrnes would become president.
* And of course, everyone knew that Byrnes *should* have been President.
* He was going to be FDR’s Veep in the 1944 election – up until the very last moment, when Truman was picked instead.
* Byrnes also appears to be a logical candidate for the adviser who convinced Truman to postpone meeting Stalin until the atomic bomb had been tested—one of the truly fundamental strategic decisions of the spring and summer.
* Although our information is even more sketchy in this area, we have seen that his mandate—and his alone—included both atomic and diplomatic issues.
* Moreover, all the other top advisers directly involved in diplomacy were pressing for an early meeting with Stalin, Thus, either Truman made the decision against their advice on his own or some other highly placed adviser concerned with the atomic bomb convinced him the new weapon would be critical in his approach to Stalin.
* So everything points to Byrnes as the man who made the decision to bomb Japan.
* Not to win the war – but as a message to Stalin.
* Byrnes, we should remember, was at Yalta.
* He helped draft the “Declaration on Liberated Europe” which vaguely promised consultation on how to achieve future free elections in Eastern Europe.
* And FDR sent him back to the U.S. early to be his representative, selling America on their new relationship with Stalin and the Yalta agreements.
* After attending an off-the-record briefing given by Byrnes, a reporter in the New York Sun’s Washington bureau had this to say about Byrnes’ view of Stalin: “Like everyone who has returned from Russia, [Byrnes] has been tremendously impressed by Joseph Stalin.”
* Indeed, on the Polish issue [Byrnes] said that time after time Stalin proved his readiness to compromise; that throughout he proved to be tractable and to possess a malleable mind. He made concession after concession. He points out that Russia will come out of this war as the most powerful nation in the world. Stalin has definite plans in the Pacific, he reported, but apart from that wants only to rebuild Russia and to bring it to the standard of living that it ought to enjoy with its vast resources. He believes that once Stalin has settled with the Japs, we can trust him to keep the peace.
* And as we know, in the intervening months, Stalin had annoyed the Anglo-American allies with his behaviour in Poland and Eastern Europe.
* Sounds to me like Byrnes felt personally embarrassed and wanted to use the bomb to pull Stalin back in line.
* He was personally identified with the Yalta accords and was about to become Sec of State.
* In his mind, I think, he was actually becoming the President.
* On April 30 he wrote Walter Lippmann:
* Peace in the future will not depend on what is written in any document at the conference. It will depend upon what is in the hearts of the people of Russia, Britain and the United States. We cannot promote it by promoting distrust of the Soviets. We must have confidence in each other.…
* If only he was still around today.
* We get a small hint of Truman’s thinking just before Potsdam with this comment from Jonathan Daniels—a man who had worked on Truman’s 1948 campaign staff and was close to the president.
* According to notes Daniels made after a 1949 discussion of the atomic bomb, Truman explained that as the Potsdam meetings were about to begin he felt: “If it explodes as I think it will I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys.”

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* By June 18 events had progressed to the point where Admiral Leahy was able to note privately in his personal diary:
* It is my opinion that at the present time a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against any future trans-Pacific aggression.
* This is two months before Hiroshima.
* But also on June 18, when Grew spoke to Truman about brokering peace with the Japanese, The President shut him down.
* He said he wanted to hold off until the Potsdam meeting.
* Which, as we know, he was putting off to coincide with the Trinity test.
* About 5000 American troops died between May and August. (page 22)
* A total of 24,000 casualties during that period.
* The Battle of Okinawa 1 April until 22 June, 1945.
* If saving American lives was the objective, why not talk peace with the Japanese during this period?
* Unfortunately we don’t know much about what Truman was thinking during these months.
* Contemporaneous documents concerning Truman’s attitude at this time are scarce.
* We have far fewer hard facts illuminating his calculations than we have concerning the thinking of Marshall, Stimson, and Grew.
* Truman did give a public speech in June where he said his main priority was minimizing the loss of American lives.
* And yet the invasion was set for November 1, 1945.
* Which everyone knew was going to be a bloodbath.
* Admiral Leahy said that he could not agree with those who said to him that unless we obtain the unconditional surrender of the Japanese that we will have lost the war.
* Which suggests at least some people were worried about the optics.
* McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, claims that at the June 18 meeting, he strongly advocated to Truman that they should spell out terms of surrender to the Japanese, assuring them that they could keep the Emperor,
* The President said that is just what I have been thinking about. “Why don’t you draft something and take it to Jimmy Byrnes.”
* Byrnes, as we know, was acting as a special advisor to Truman and was soon to become the Sec of State.
* He also thought HE should be the President.
* And he disliked Truman.
* When McCloy took his proposal to Byrnes, it was shot down because Byrnes thought it would be considered a weakness on America’s part to conclude the war without a total surrender.
* So twice on June 18, Truman told people that he agreed with the idea of offering the Japs a deal.
* But then Byrnes said no.
* And it never happened.
* Like the official Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, the internal War Department report concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war.
* Its assessment of the impact of the Soviet declaration of war paralleled that of American historian Ernest May: It was a “disastrous event which the Japanese leaders regarded as utter catastrophe and which they had energetically sought to prevent at any cost.…”
* Had the atomic bomb not been available or not been used, the study concluded, it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.…”
* The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies.
* The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext, and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable.
* And, as we know, American leaders had been trying to get the Soviets to engage with the Japanese since a few days after Pearl Harbour.
* General George C. Marshall, June 18, 1945: “An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if we land in Japan.”
* There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Japs also knew Russia’s entry into the war meant the end.
* On April 29, Colonel Tanemura — Chief of the Planning Bureau of the General Staff — stated: “Needless to say, moves of Soviets could be fatal in continuing the Great Asian War, and this has been the matter of greatest concern in planning of the war since before the beginning of the war.…”
* Even though Japan may have to give up Manchuria, South Sakhalin, Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, [w]hich means reverting to the borders before the Sino-Japanese War, Japan has to avoid the Soviet entry into the war no matter what, and has to accomplish fighting with the U.S. and U.K.
* The Supreme Council for the Direction of the War held on May 11, 12, and 14, Umezu, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, urged the central importance of preventing a Russian attack.
* A formal Council decision taken at this time stated:
* While Japan is fighting with the U.S. and U.K., once the Soviets enter the war Japan will face inevitable defeat; therefore, whatever happens in the war with the U.S. and U.K., Japan has to try as much as possible to prevent the Soviet Union from entering the war.
* And Umezu was one of the guys who opposed the surrender in August.
* He was personally ordered by Hirohito to sign the instrument of surrender on behalf of the armed forces on September 2, 1945 and thus, was the Army’s senior representative during the surrender ceremonies on the battleship USS Missouri.
* In prison he converted to Christianity… and died of rectal cancer a few years later.
* So… thanks a lot, Jesus.
* In 1946, Albert Einstein’s wrote that in his opinion, the bombing flowed from “a desire to end the war in the Pacific by any means before Russia’s participation.”
* And that “if President Roosevelt had still been there, none of that would have been possible. He would have forbidden such an act.”
* Also in 1946, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, Norman Cousins—writing together with former assistant secretary of state and, subsequently, secretary of the air force Thomas K. Finletter—suggested that:
* The first error was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Not the making of the atomic bomb; that we were forced to do out of sheer national preservation, for the enemy was working on atomic weapons as well. It was what we did with the atomic bomb after we made it that was a mountainous blunder.…
* Can it be that we were more anxious to prevent Russia from establishing a claim for full participation in the occupation against Japan than we were to think through the implications of unleashing atomic warfare?
* On April 24, 1945, at the height of the tense stand-off with Moscow over Poland—indeed, the day after Truman’s White House session with his top advisers and his “showdown” with Molotov—Stimson sent the following letter to Truman:
* Dear Mr. President: I think it is very important that I talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.
* The next day Truman met with both Stimson and Leslie Groves to get brief in detail about the Manhattan Project.
* It’s important to realise the timing – it happened the day after the showdown with Molotov – and Stimson’s wording about “our present foreign relations” and it having “such an important effect upon all my thinking”.
* Groves’ notes from that meeting say “A great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations and particularly on the Russian situation.”
* Truman and Byrnes both later said that Byrnes had brought Truman up to speed about the bomb during the first days of his Presidency.
* Including Byrnes’ belief the bomb “might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”
* And, as we know, Truman deliberately kept pushing back the date of the Potsdam meeting to coincide with the planned Trinity test.
* There’s a very interesting paragraph in Stimson’s diary from May 14.
* After having lunch with British FM Anthony Eden, Stimson met alone with Marshall and McCloy.
* He wrote:
* I told them that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. They have rather taken it away from us because we have talked too much and have been too lavish with our beneficences to them. I told him this was a place where we really held all the cards. I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it. They can’t get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves.
* “Let our actions speak for themselves”.
* Sounds to me like Stimson is saying “let’s show the Russians what we’ve got… by bombing Japan.”
* On May 28, three scientists—Leo Szilard, the brainchild behind the bomb, Walter Bartky, and Harold C. Urey—met with Byrnes to discuss atomic bomb-related issues at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
* They were worried about an atomic arms race between America and Russia
* Szilard subsequently reported that at their meeting, “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war . . . ”
* He said Byrnes “was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior.”
* “Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania; Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw . . . and that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might.”
* “I shared Byrnes’s concern . . . but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable . . . .”
* So according to one source, Byrnes didn’t think they needed to use the bomb to defeat Japan.
* And we have a sense of what Stimson and Byrnes thought.
* But what about Truman?
* It’s a strange thing – we know nearly nothing about Truman’s thoughts about using the bomb from when he became President through to the dropping of them in August.
* It’s not like he wasn’t talking about it with his inner circle.
* But for some reason none of them have recorded his thoughts at the time.
* We only have his post-hoc explanations in his own memoirs.
* The man responsible for dropping the world’s only nuclear weapons used against human targets – and we have no record of what he was thinking at the time.
* We do have the record of the Interim Committee.
* So called because it was anticipated that a permanent committee to manage America’s nuclear weapons would be set up after the war.
* We’ve talked about them before.
* Stimson himself was chairman. The other members were: James F. Byrnes, former US Senator and soon to be Secretary of State, as President Truman’s personal representative; Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of the Carnegie Institution; Karl T. Compton, Chief of the Office of Field Service in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and president of Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and president of the New York Life Insurance Company who later went on to be the lead guitarist of The Beatles.
* WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
* Byrnes, as the President’s personal representative, was probably its most influential member.
* Most knowledgeable experts no longer credit the Interim Committee per se with significant influence on the decision to use the atomic bomb.
* In fact, so far as we know the question of whether the atomic bomb should or should not be used was never seriously discussed by the Interim Committee. Historians pondering this point have suggested that the committee simply assumed the bomb would be employed; the only thing it apparently discussed during its May 1945 deliberations was “how” to use it, not “whether.”
* The committee decided to use the bomb against Japan, on a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses, without any warning – and the only dissent was from Bard, the Under Sec of the Navy.
* Bard later said he had the impression that instead of having a meaningful debate about how and where to use the bomb, the Committee just ratified a decision that had already been made.
* Groves was later to comment privately: “… the story as to the Interim Committee having any influence on [the decision to use the atomic bomb] … is just plain bunk.”
* One questions about the Interim Committee is whether or not they were made aware that the Japanese had been trying to surrender.
* We do know that Truman knew.
* On July 18, a handwritten entry in Truman’s journal shows him referring to the intercept of a cable from the Japs after a conversation with Churchill as the “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.”
* But the public and historians didn’t get to see this until it was declassified in 1979.
* One reason Byrnes’ powerful role in the early Truman administration is often forgotten is that Truman and Byrnes subsequently had a major falling-out: Byrnes was replaced as secretary of state by George Marshall in January 1947, and after he and Truman parted ways Byrnes seemed to fade in significance.
* Byrnes was, in fact, secretary for under nineteen months (and only a brief six weeks before Japan surrendered).

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* On 15 August 1945, about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, Truman tasked the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to conduct a study on the effectiveness of the aerial attacks on Japan, both conventional and atomic.
* Did they have an effect on the Japanese surrender?
* The Survey team included hundreds of American officers, civilians and enlisted men, based in Japan.
* They interviewed 700 Jap military, government and industrial officials.
* And had access to hundreds of Japanese wartime documents.
* Less than a year later they published their conclusion – that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without it, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion.
* “It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.”
* It goes on to say that there wasn’t a unanimous agreement amongst the military, especially the War Minister, and the Army and Naval Chiefs of Staff.
* They wanted to fight on.
* But that’s why the Emperor was brought into the discussions to accept the Potsdam terms.
* According to the report:
* “So long as the Emperor openly supported such a policy and could be presented to the country as doing so, the military, which had fostered and lived on the idea of complete obedience to the Emperor, could not effectively rebel.”
* The report says the only thing the atomic bombings achieved was that they sped up the process.
* The War Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff were looking for a way to surrender without losing face.
* And the nuclear attacks gave them that.
* Because the military were able to conclude that there was no way of defending the home islands against further atomic attacks.
* So they could surrender without losing face.
* But the report strongly suggests the Japanese would have surrendered anyway and probably pretty quickly after the Emperor got involved.
* They had been trying to get the Soviets to intercede with the United States.
* The Soviets, as we know, kept stalling until the Potsdam Declaration on 25 July.
* Then they declared war on 9 August.
* The made the decision to surrender on August 10 and they publicly accepted the Potsdam terms on August 15.
* But in the 73 years that have passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified—and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.
* 56% of Americans according to a poll in 2015.
* Which is down from 85% in 1945.
* But it’s a lot considering that the Strategic Bombing Survey concluded as early as 1946 that it wasn’t necessary to get Japan to surrender.
* And considering senior American military leaders from Admiral Leahy to MacArthur, Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson all said they didn’t think the bombing was necessary.
* So if it wasn’t necessary, why did it happen?
* WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
* In 1990, J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:
* The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.
* But does this mean dropping the bombs was wrong?
* Not necessarily.
* We obviously can’t put ourselves in the shoes of American leaders in 1945.
* But I think there are two questions we CAN ask.
* 1. Did American military and government leaders in 1945 think they had to use, or should use, the bomb to bring about Japan’s surrender?
* 2. why do the majority of Americans still think all these years later that it was necessary, if the historians say it wasn’t?
* I think the answer to the last question is partly to do with the media.
* Over the past fifty years most journalists have reported what government officials said about the decision as if it were fact—evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
* And partly I think it has to do with Americans wanting to believe in the Great American Myth – that America can do no wrong.
* And when it *does* do wrong, well it was either an accident, the result of bad intel – or it was necessary.
* So how was the decision made?
* And why?
* As we have discussed in the past, the Potsdam Declaration was demanding “unconditional surrender”.
* Truman inherited this from Roosevelt.
* But what this meant was unclear.
* Did it mean, for example, that Japan, like Hawaii before it, would become an American colony?
* Did it mean the execution of the Emperor?
* We know, of course, that in the end, Truman did not hesitate to modify the “unconditional surrender” policy after the atomic bomb was used.
* The Emperor stayed.
* BTW, did you know – Currently, the Emperor of Japan is the only head of state in the world with the English title of “Emperor”.
* Although that’ll change as soon as Trump stages his false flag attacks.
* And speaking of the Emperor.
* Did you know that Hirohito’s name changed when he died?
* His posthumous name is Emperor Shōwa.
* The word Shōwa is the name of the era (Shōwa period) potentially “period of enlightened peace/harmony” or “period of radiant Japan” that corresponded with the Emperor’s reign, and was made the Emperor’s own name upon his death.
* The name Hirohito means “abundant benevolence”.
* So…. nice to know that’s how they Japanese think about his reign.
* Some Americans today seem to think that demanding an unconditional surrender was obvious back then.
* But it wasn’t so obvious to Americans at the time.
* If the goal was to end the war as quickly as possible, to prevent further American deaths, why not negotiate the quickest possible surrender on agreeable terms?
* On May 9, 1945, the Washington Post published an article that called for a CONDITIONAL surrender.
* It took the position that demanding an unconditional surrender would just drive some elements of the Japanese military to choose to die fighting rather than be enslaved or see their Emperor executed.
* The British Foreign Office had long since concluded the same thing.
* In his May 13 weekly report to London, British Ambassador Lord Halifax cited the Post editorial as an early indication of support.
* And it wasn’t only in England.
* On April 18, a Joint Intelligence Committee report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded:
* [W]e believe that the Japanese Government will endeavor to find some formula for ending the war, without having the stigma of absolute “unconditional” surrender attached to it. If such a formula can be found which would be acceptable to the Allies, we believe that Japan might surrender without the invasion of Japan proper.
* That was nearly four months before Hiroshima.
* In an April 25 review of Pacific strategy, the Joint Staff Planners had gone even further in their critique of the existing language:
* The concept of “unconditional surrender” is foreign to the Japanese nature. Therefore, “unconditional surrender” should be defined in terms understandable to the Japanese, who must be convinced that destruction or national suicide is not implied. This could be done by the announcement on a government level of a “declaration of intentions” which would tell the Japanese what the future holds.… Unless a definition of unconditional surrender can be given which is acceptable to the Japanese, there is no alternative to annihilation and no prospect that the threat of absolute defeat will bring about capitulation.
* So it seems pretty clear that the highest levels of advice to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, months before Hiroshima, were making it very clear that demanding an unconditional surrender was not going to work and the language needed to change.
* But the language didn’t change.
* Now – also keep in mind that FDR died on April 12 and Hitler died on April 30.
* So things are a little crazy around this time.
* But it’s 3 months before Potsdam and nearly four months before Hiroshima.
* I know Truman had a lot of catching up to do, but ending the war with Japan was PRETTY HIGH on that list.
* And yet the language still did not change.
* Although on May 9, Truman did give a speech where he declared the unconditional surrender of Japan did NOT mean their enslavement or extermination.
* But there was no mention of what it meant for Hirohito.
* However, the Joint Chiefs took the report seriously and started discussing there was general agreement that “unconditional surrender” should refer explicitly to the armed forces of Japan and that explicit reference should now also be made to the authority of the existing Imperial Institutions.
* On May 28, 1945, Acting Secretary of State, and former ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew visited President Truman with a proposal to conclude the war quickly.
* He argued that the Allies should modify their terms of unconditional surrender to permit Japan to retain the Imperial Institution if the people desired it.
* Grew supported America’s primary goals of destroying Japan’s military machine and blotting out the cult of militarism, but warned, “The Japanese are a fanatical people and are capable … of fighting to the last ditch and last man.”
* He went on to say, “the greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne.”
* Grew insisted that if the United States compelled the Japanese people to defend their Emperor, untold number of Americans would die.
* He recommended that America permit Japan to determine its own political structure in order to allow the country a means of saving face—a position Chang Kai-Shek also held.
* Truman agreed asked Grew to pull together a meeting with Stimson, Marshall, Forrestal and a few other guys, to discuss the issue, which he did and they met on May 29.
* Meanwhile former president Herbert Hoover, a Republican, met with Truman on May 28 and recommend that the Allies make sure to state clearly that they had no desire to destroy either the Japanese people or their government, or to interfere in the Japanese way of life.
* Truman passed Hoover’s memorandum to Grew and Stimson for comment.
* Stimson in turn referred it to staff for review.
* A week later, on June 14, a staff assessment of Hoover’s paper came back. It observed:
* The proposal of a public declaration of war aims, in effect giving definition to “unconditional surrender,” has definite merit if it is carefully handled.
* So the Washington Post, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former President, and the acting Secretary of State all agreed that the terms of surrender should be clarified.
* On May 29, Grew met with Marshall, Forrestal and a few other guys, who all apparently agreed that the surrender terms needed to be clarified – but claimed it was not yet time for the President to make any statements for “certain military reasons.”
* What those reasons were, they didn’t say.
* Stimson’s diaries, which were published decades later, explained the reasons – the bomb.
* Some of the people in the room weren’t aware of its existence.
* One guy who was in the room and who did know about it was Assistant Secretary of War McCloy.
* He said the guys who knew about the bomb had a meeting afterwards.
* In that meeting he said General Marshall said he thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers.… Every effort should be made to keep our record of warning clear. We must offset by such warning methods the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.
* Which seems to suggest that one of Marshall’s reasons for wishing to delay a statement was related to the idea that the bomb would first be used against a military target.
* Thereafter a clear “warning” would be issued—including, specifically, a warning to Japanese citizens to leave any targeted cities or population centers.
* Only then would the bomb be used against an urban center.
* It is often suggested that a so-called “demonstration” of the atomic bomb was not seriously discussed at the highest levels (except once, informally over lunch, by the Interim Committee on May 31)—and, further, that a “demonstration” was impractical. In subsequent discussions the idea of a desert island explosion has often emerged (and been discounted).
* It may therefore be important to note that Marshall—one of the most respected military figures in modern history—apparently did not see insuperable obstacles to a carefully designed “demonstration”—against a military target.
* Also on May 29, the U.S. intercepted a discussion between Molotov and Japanese Ambassador Sato.
* Molotov asked Sato’s view of how long the Pacific War would last, and Sato replied:
* Japan follows Russia’s example in her desire to end hostilities as quickly as possible. The Pacific War, however, is a matter of life and death for Japan and, as a result of America’s attitude, we have no choice but to continue the fight.
* Note it was “America’s attitude” that was driving their choice to fight to the end.
* Roosevelt’s former aide Harry Hopkins, on a presidential mission to Moscow at this time, reported Stalin as saying, along similar lines, that “according to his information the Japanese would not accept unconditional surrender,” and that “if we stick to unconditional surrender the Japs will not give up and we will have to destroy them as we did Germany.”
* on June 2, 1945 An OSS report – the OSS was the predecessor to the CIA – to Truman of a late May meeting with a Japanese representative in Portugal.
* It stated that peace terms were unimportant as long as the term “unconditional surrender” was avoided.
* On June 22 the Joint Chiefs of Staff received an message that Fujimura, one of the principal Japanese Naval representatives in Europe, insisted that the Japanese would require assurances that the Emperor would be retained before surrendering.
* Look – I could go on citing evidence that the upper echelons of the American government and military all understood that clarifying the terms of the surrender involving the Emperor could have brought about an early peace.
* If ending the war as quickly as possible was the ultimate goal, why didn’t they do just that?
* I can only think of a few possible reasons.
* 1. They wanted to grind Japan in the ground as revenge for Pearl Harbour. And yet all of the indications are that the top military and political leaders of the U.S. stated they did NOT want to do that.
* 2. They didn’t want to leave Japan with any military or political capabilities. Like Stalin wanted to destroy Germany’s. But surely there was a way of doing that AND also assuring the Japanese about the future of the Emperor?
* 3. They wanted to use the bomb. If it worked. But they were pretty sure Little Boy worked. And they would know about Fat Man by mid-July.
* 4. Optics. They didn’t want it to appear as though America gave up.

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Our guest today is Alex Wellerstein, a self-described “historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons”. He’s a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He blogs here and is on Twitter here. He is also the creator of the NUKEMAP. Alex joined us to talk about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Did Truman know Hiroshima contained civilians? Did he know the military were going to bomb Nagasaki a few days later? How much deliberation went into the question of whether or not the bomb should be used? And was it necessary to end the war with Japan? These questions and more on this episode.

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• Kistiakowsky and his team armed the device shortly after 5am and retreated to the control bunker.
• Their final task was to switch on a string of lights on the ground that would serve as an ‘aiming point’.
• The air force wanted to know what the effect of the blast would be on a B-29 30,000 feet up and some miles away.
• In case of an accident, Groves left Oppenheimer in the control bunkers and joined Bush and Conant at base camp another 5 miles to the south.
• There they picked up the countdown by FM radio.
• Those in shelters heard it over the PA system.
• Some of the scientists were with a party of onlookers 20 miles away on Compania Hill.
• Teller said, ‘We were told to lie down on the sand, turn our faces away from the blast and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.’
• However, though it was not yet dawn, they smothered their faces with suntan lotion.
• Teller himself wore a pair of dark glasses and heavy gloves and pressed a welder’s glass to his face.
• At precisely 5:30am on Monday, 16 July 1945, the atomic age began.
• As the firing circuit closed, 32 detonators fired around the outside of the high-explosive shell.
• The shockwave produced hit the tamper, squeezing and liquefying it.
• The plutonium sphere inside shrank to the size of an eyeball.
• In the centre, polonium alphas kicked neutrons from the beryllium – one, two, maybe as many as nine of them.
• This was enough to start a chain reaction in the plutonium.
• It went through 80 generations in millionths of a second, generating millions of degrees of heat and millions of pounds of pressure.
• The X-rays given off super-heated the air, generating another shock wave.
• The explosion vaporized the tower and turned the asphalt around the base into green sand.
• The bomb released approximately 18.6 kilotons of power, and the New Mexico sky was suddenly brighter than many suns.
• Some observers suffered temporary blindness even though they looked at the brilliant light through smoked glass.
• Here’s an eyewitness account:
• Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 Eyewitness Report by Victor Weisskopf, an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist, one of the giants of 20th century physics.
• He died in 2002, aged 93.
• You have asked me to submit to you an eye witness account of the explosion. I was located at base camp and watched the phenomenon from a little ridge about 100 yds. east of the water tower. Groups of observers had arranged small wooden sticks at a distance of 10 yds. from our observation place in order to estimate the size of the explosion. They were arranged so that their distance corresponded to 1000 ft. at zero point. I looked at the explosion through the dark glass, but I have provided for an indirect view of the landscape in order to see the deflected light.
• When the explosion went off, I was first dazzled by this indirect light which was much stronger than I anticipated, and I was not able to concentrate upon the view through the dark glass and missed, therefore, the first stages of the explosion. When I was able to look through the dark glass I saw flames and smoke of an estimated diameter of 1000 yds. which was slowly decreasing in brightness seemingly due to more smoke development. At the same time it rose slightly above the surface. After about three seconds its intensity was so low I could remove the dark glass and look at it directly. Then I saw a reddish glowing smoke ball rising with a thick stem of dark brown color. This smoke ball was surrounded by a blue glow which clearly indicated a strong radioactivity and was certainly due to the gamma rays emitted by the cloud into the surrounding air. At that moment the cloud had about 1000 billions of curies of radioactivity whose radiation must have produced the blue glow.
• The first two or three seconds, I felt very strongly the heat radiation all over the exposed parts of my body. The part of my retina which was exposed to the indirect light from the surrounding mountains was completely blinded and I could feel traces of the after image 30 minutes after the shock.
• The reddish cloud darkened after about 10 or 20 seconds and rose rather rapidly leaving behind a thick stem of dark brown smoke. After this, I remember having seen a white hemisphere rising above the clouds in continuation of the breakthrough of the explosion cloud through the ordinary cloud level. The path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky where it was covered by clouds. After about 45 seconds the sound wave arrived and it struck me as being much weaker than anticipated.
• V. Weisskopf
• I watched a great interview from 1988 with Weisskopf where he said something I agree with.
• He said a sunset is made ever more beautiful if you understand something about the science that causes it.
• Science doesn’t deprive us of beauty – it enhances it.
• A steel container weighing more than 200 tons, standing half a mile from Ground Zero, was knocked over.
• As the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread, a second column, narrower than the first, rose and flattened into a mushroom shape, giving the atomic age a visual image that has become the very symbol of power and awesome destruction.
• Oppenheimer then uttered his famous quote
• Later he recalled that the experience brought to his mind the legend of Prometheus, punished by Zeus for giving man fire.
• He also thought fleetingly of Alfred Nobel’s vain hope that his discovery of dynamite would end wars.
• Did you know the guy who created the Nobel Prize invented dynamite?
• He also invented gelignite and ballistite, a predecessor of cordite.
• He also owned Bofors, a company that manufactured cannon.
• It was after he read a premature obituary which condemned him for profiting from the sales of arms, that he bequeathed his fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes.
• Without telling his family!
• At base camp, Bush, Conant and Groves shook hands.
• Hubbard heard Groves say: ‘My faith in the human mind has been somewhat restored.’
• Bainbridge said to Oppenheimer immediately after the test, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
• “My personal nightmare,” he later wrote, “was knowing that if the bomb didn’t go off or hangfired, I, as head of the test, would have to go to the tower first and seek to find out what had gone wrong.”
• In the sweepstake, Isidor I. Rabi of the MIT’s Radiation Laboratory had put his money on 18 kilotons and swept the pot.
• He broke out a bottle of whiskey and everyone had a swig.
• The terrifying destructive power of atomic weapons and the uses to which they might be put were to haunt many of the scientists from the Manhattan Project for the rest of their lives.
• But for the moment, the success of the Trinity test meant that a second type of atomic bomb could be readied for use against Japan.
• Oppenheimer and Groves wrote a report for Stimson who was now in Potsdam with Truman.
• Along with Little Boy, the untested uranium gun model Fat Man, a plutonium implosion device similar to that detonated at Trinity, now figured in American Far Eastern strategy.
• Newspaper coverage that day did not enlighten the public.
• Pre-written press releases claimed that an ammunition magazine accidentally exploded on the Alamogordo Air Base.

• Meanwhile – it was clear to the Japanese that the war was lost.
• In an attempt to achieve surrender with honour, Emperor Hirohito had instructed his ministers to open negotiations with Russia.
• On June 30, Tōgō told Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to try to establish “firm and lasting relations of friendship.”
• Satō was to discuss the status of Manchuria and “any matter the Russians would like to bring up.”
• The Soviets responded with delaying tactics to encourage the Japanese without promising anything.
• Mostly because the Russians wanted payback for the war of 1905.
• Satō finally met with Molotov on July 11, but without result.
• On July 12, four days before the Trinity test, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tōgō directed Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to tell the Soviets that:
• His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated. But so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland.
• The Emperor proposed sending Prince Konoe as a special envoy, although he would be unable to reach Moscow before the Potsdam Conference.
• Satō advised Tōgō that in reality, “unconditional surrender or terms closely equivalent thereto” was all that Japan could expect.
• Moreover, in response to Molotov’s requests for specific proposals, Satō suggested that Tōgō’s messages were not “clear about the views of the Government and the Military with regard to the termination of the war,” thus questioning whether Tōgō’s initiative was supported by the key elements of Japan’s power structure.
• On July 17, Tōgō responded:
• Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind …
• Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians’ mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender.
• In reply, Satō clarified:
• It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the imperial family].
• On July 21, speaking in the name of the cabinet, Tōgō repeated:
• With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. …
• It is in order to avoid such a state of affairs that we are seeking a peace, …
• through the good offices of Russia. …
• it would also be disadvantageous and impossible, from the standpoint of foreign and domestic considerations, to make an immediate declaration of specific terms.
• American cryptographers had broken most of Japan’s codes, including the Purple code used by the Japanese Foreign Office to encode high-level diplomatic correspondence on their 97-shiki injiki Type B Cipher Machine.
• As a result, messages between Tokyo and Japan’s embassies were provided to Allied policy-makers nearly as quickly as to the intended recipients.
• However, the Russians refused to help when the Japanese put out peace feelers.
• Forty years before, Japan had soundly beaten Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, sinking two Russian fleets and putting an end to Russian expansion in the east.
• They had clashed again at the Battle of Nomonhan in Mongolia in the summer of 1939, when Japan’s attempt to invade Siberia was thwarted, weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland started World War II.
• Now, with the imminent defeat of the Japanese, Stalin hoped to make territorial gains.

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• Back to Alamogordo.
• The army leased a ranch in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto site and converted it into a military police station and field laboratory.
• They thoroughly vacuumed it to make a makeshift clean room and sealed its windows with black electrical tape.
• Just like Ray’s infamous kill room.
• Nearly 2 miles to the northwest, they marked out the spot for Ground Zero.
• Three concrete-roofed observation bunkers with bullet-proof glass portholes were dug 10,000 yards north, west and south of Ground Zero.
• From there, the test would be controlled and the explosion would be filmed and measured.
• Scientists wanted to determine the symmetry of the implosion and the amount of energy released.
• They also wanted to get estimates of the damage that the bomb would cause and study the behaviour of the resulting fireball.
• The biggest concern was the radioactivity the test device would release.
• It was hoped that favourable meteorological conditions would carry the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere.
• As they were proposing to do the test in the middle of the thunderstorm season, the army stood ready to evacuate the people in surrounding areas.
• Two towers were built.
• One was 800 yards south of Ground Zero.
• Made of heavy wooden beams, it was 20 feet high, topped with a broad platform like an outdoor dance floor.
• One day, the contractors returned to find that it had disappeared.
• Harvard physics professor Kenneth T. Bainbridge, recruited from MIT’s radar project, the man in charge of Project Trinity, had loaded the platform with canisters of radioactive waste from Hanford and surrounded it with 100 tons of high explosives.
• Before dawn on 7 May, he detonated the largest chemical explosion ever set off to test the instruments and procedures in a practice firing.
• The tower at Ground Zero had been prefabricated in steel and was shipped in sections to the Trinity site, where concrete footings had been sunk 20 feet into the rocky desert floor.
• The four feet were 35 feet apart and the tower rose 100 feet above the ground.
• Near the top was a platform with a removable centre section and corrugated iron sheets on three sides.
• The open side faced the camera bunker to the west.
• Above the platform was a $20,000 electrically driven heavy-duty winch.
• On 12 July, the plutonium core was taken to the test area in an army sedan.
• The non-nuclear components of the bomb left for the test site at 12:01 am on Friday the 13th.
• The idea was to put a ‘reverse English’ on the ill-luck of that day.
• ‘reverse English’ – Billiards. a spinning motion imparted to a cue ball in such a manner as to prevent it from moving in a certain direction.
• As they rode through Santa Fe in the small hours, the convoy sounded a siren.
• At midnight because the army did not want to risk some late-night drunken driver speeding out of a side street into a truck full of high explosives.
• Final assembly of “the gadget” –  which was its nickname – took place in the ranch house.
• Before it began, one of the physcists, Robert Bacher, asked for a receipt from the army.
• As Los Alamos was technically part of the University of California, he didn’t want the university to be liable for the several million dollars-worth of plutonium they were about to vaporize.
• Imagine that conversation – so…. Where’s our plutonium? Ummm we blew it up. You WHAT? That’ll be $2 billion, bucko.
• Then the team installed the neutron initiator that would trigger the explosion between the two hemispheres of plutonium.
• These were hot to the touch due to the alpha particles they were already giving off.
• HOT JAMES BROWN (Bowie FAME riff, Carlos Alomar)
• The plutonium ball was then placed inside a cylinder of U-238 tamper.
• The core was then driven out to Ground Zero, where it arrived at 3.18pm.
• The five-foot sphere of high explosives had arrived that morning.
• Remember the way a plutonium implosion bomb works is that want to compress is using convention explosives wrapped around the outside of the shell – the beer can experiment.
• This was wrapped around a hollow globe of U-238.
• At 1pm, the winch was used to hoist the 2 ton ball of high explosives from the back of the truck and lower it onto a skid.
• Norris Bradbury, the navy physicist in charge of the assembly, said ‘We were scared to death that we would drop it,’ ‘because we did not trust the hoist and it was the only bomb immediately available. It wasn’t that we were afraid of setting it off, but we might damage it in some way.’
• A white tent was erected over the assembly, ready for the cylindrical plug containing the plutonium spheres and the initiator to be slid into place in the centre of the ball of tamper inside the explosives.
• Boyce McDaniel, one of the assembly team, said   ‘Imagine our consternation when, as we started to assemble the plug in the hole, deep down in the centre of the high-explosive shell, it would not enter,’ ‘Dismayed, we halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces, and stopped to think about it. Could we have made a mistake?’
• To maximize the density of uranium in the assembly, the clearance between the plug and the spherical shell had been reduced to a few thousandths of an inch.
• Three sets of the plugs and tamper spheres had been made back in Los Alamos.
• In the haste of their construction, not all the plugs fitted into all the holes.
• Surely they could not have brought the wrong ones.
• Then Bacher realized what had happened.
• In the heat of the ranch house, the plug had expanded, while the tamper sphere, insulated by the explosives wrapped around it, was still cool from Los Alamos.
• The world’s smartest guys forgot that heat makes shit expand.
• So feel better the next time you forget something obvious.
• Reminds me of that time I tried to insert a plug into your ass and your shit had expanded.
• The team left the metal of the plug and the sphere in contact and took a break.
• Later, when they checked the assembly again, the temperature had equalized and the plug slid smoothly into place.
• That evening, the last block of explosive was Scotch-taped into place.
• The detonators were installed the following day.
• At 8am on 15 July, the device was hoisted up the firing tower, stopping at 15 feet for a team of GIs to stack army-issue mattresses under it in case it should fall.
• While this was being done, news came that measurements from the test-firing indicated that Trinity would fail.
• Everybody blamed George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky, the Ukrainian born physicist who ran X-Division – the team that developed the shaped charges for the imploding the ball, and also developed Wolverine’s skeleton.
• but he was adamant.
• Get it? Adamant? Wolverine’s skeleton was made of adamantium?
• he said. ‘Oppenheimer became so emotional that I offered him a month’s salary against ten dollars that our implosion charges would work,’
• While this was going on, Little Boy, the uranium bomb with its gun mechanism, was leaving Los Alamos for Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
• From there it would be flown to San Francisco, where it would be loaded on to the USS Indianapolis and padlocked to the deck in an anonymous 15 foot crate for shipment to Tinian.
• They apparently didn’t need to test it.
• Although all of its components had been tested, no full test of a gun-type nuclear weapon occurred before the Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima.
• Then came good news.
• After a night analysing the data from the test-firing, Hans Bethe called to say that something was wrong with the instruments and even a perfect implosion would have registered as a dud.
• ‘So I became acceptable to local high society,’ said Kistiakowsky.
• Groves, Bush, Conant, Lawrence, Farrell, Bethe, Teller and Chadwick, head of the British contingent at Los Alamos and discoverer of the neutron, arrived in the test area.
• It was pouring with rain.
• In the control bunker 5.7 miles to the south, Groves and Oppenheimer discussed what to do if the weather did not break in time for the test scheduled at 4am.
• At 3.30 they pushed the time back to 5.30, when the meteorologist Jack M. Hubbard forecast there would be a break in the weather.
• ‘You’d better be right on this, or I will hang you,’ Groves told Hubbard.
• Then he Called the governor of New Mexico, getting him out of bed to warn him that he might have to declare martial law.
• Many precautions were taken to prepare for all sorts of doomsday scenarios.
• Soldiers were posted in several nearby towns in the event that they needed to be evacuated.
• Groves, who was already concerned for the safety of Amarillo, Texas, a city of 70,000 only 300 miles away, placed a call to New Mexico Governor John J. Dempsey explaining that martial law might need to be implemented in the event of an emergency at the site.
• The Army Public Relations Department prepared somber explanations in the event that disaster occurred and lives were lost.
• I’d love to see a draft of that to see how they were prepared to spin it.
• These days Trump would just call it fake news.
• Fermi spent the wait annoying Groves.
• ‘He suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world,’ Groves recalled.
• ‘He also said that after all it wouldn’t make any difference whether the bomb went off or not because it would still have been a well worthwhile scientific experiment. For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.’
• A betting pool was also started by scientists at Los Alamos on the possible yield of the Trinity test.
• Yields from 45,000 tons of TNT to zero were selected by the various bettors.
• Fermi was willing to bet anyone that the test would wipe out all life on Earth, with special odds on the mere destruction of the entire State of New Mexico!
• At 4am the rain stopped.

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