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00:00:00A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness
00:00:28to the enemy.
00:00:33Get the drink that you don't pour. Now when you take one sip, you won't need any more.
00:00:41As small as a beetle, as big as a whale. Mmm, atomic cocktail.
00:00:49There was such a light in the bomb, the atomic bomb, and it had ended the war, and this would be our major weapon.
00:00:57A number of polls asked Americans, do you approve of the use of the atomic bombs? And the answer was, yeah.
00:01:06There was a small number of people who really wished that more atomic bombs could have been dropped on Japan.
00:01:12America's first impression about the bomb, no matter the news source, comes from press releases written by a single New York Times journalist working undercover for the War Department.
00:01:24I saw a world blow up in a burst of cosmic fire, and a new one born from its ashes.
00:01:35A lot of the coverage was as if it was like a gigantic conventional bomb, just much more powerful than the ones that had been used before.
00:01:43There was very little written about the radiation.
00:01:46As long as we're talking about getting atomic rings in your cereal box or school mascots, we're not thinking about skin falling off of human beings.
00:02:00We're not thinking of, could that happen to us in an arms race?
00:02:05As the U.S. and Soviet Union compete for nuclear supremacy, the Truman administration downplays the weapon's poisonous radioactive effects to shore up public support for the bomb.
00:02:19You want them to think that nuclear bombs are okay?
00:02:22A few journalists look beyond the propaganda to raise ethical concerns the government does not acknowledge.
00:02:30I felt staggered by what I'd seen.
00:02:33I write this as a warning to the world.
00:02:36But the government fights back to reestablish its version of the story.
00:02:42More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.
00:02:49And if the bomb shortens the war, it will save many thousands of American lives.
00:02:54Bomb away!
00:02:57These initial narratives that get set up between 1945 and 1947, these are still the terms in which people, by default, talk about the atomic bomb.
00:03:08To the point where, if you tell somebody this narrative, they'll say, right, that's the story, right?
00:03:13And in many ways, it's not true.
00:03:38The war is to die.
00:03:39It's yes.
00:03:40This war is to die before.
00:03:41You are wrinkle.
00:03:42You are worse.
00:03:43How about the generate from the war perform in a mode?
00:03:45And it's not true.
00:03:46The fighting of the war comes before it is to the stage of the war.
00:03:48To the freedom of the war comes from Nazi Germany.
00:03:49And a simpleatribeman till war comes across the war.
00:03:55By 1938, Adolf Hitler is consolidating Nazi power in Germany.
00:04:02And marshaling the force needed for the Nazis to control all of Europe.
00:04:07Hitler's intentions on the battlefield are clear.
00:04:12Less obvious, but just as important,
00:04:15German and Austrian scientists split a uranium atom in two.
00:04:21The process, called fission, gives Germany a head start
00:04:24toward a new type of weapon, the atomic bomb.
00:04:29The nucleus explodes, giving out dangerous radiations and heat.
00:04:34When you split atoms, you're left with these two half-atoms,
00:04:38and they are intensely radioactive.
00:04:40By the end of the 20s, people know that radiation equals death,
00:04:44and it's a horrible death. It's a wasting death.
00:04:49This is the first time that an atom has been broken in two.
00:04:53But almost no one paid attention to fission
00:04:56when it happened in December of 1938.
00:04:59Each new model, however, the scientists...
00:05:01One of the few paying close attention
00:05:03is New York Times science writer William Leonard Lawrence.
00:05:07It may be said that the atomic age is here to stay.
00:05:13The question is, are we?
00:05:16Lawrence is excited when there are reports coming out of Germany
00:05:19that chemists have split the uranium atom.
00:05:24He makes that front-page material for the New York Times.
00:05:28Lawrence thought, this is amazing.
00:05:31This could be a source of energy.
00:05:33But he also thought that maybe it could be used as a weapon.
00:05:37The Germans have extremely good scientists.
00:05:40They're on a war footing,
00:05:41and they're very good at organizing large-scale projects.
00:05:47Afraid of Germany's nuclear intentions,
00:05:50in August 1939, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard
00:05:54visits Albert Einstein on Long Island.
00:05:58Einstein signs Szilard's letter,
00:06:00which urges President Franklin D. Roosevelt
00:06:02to create an American atomic weapons program.
00:06:06The letter convinces Roosevelt
00:06:08to establish a secret advisory committee on uranium.
00:06:12Publicly, he pledges the U.S. will stay out
00:06:15of any European conflict.
00:06:16This nation will remain a neutral nation.
00:06:20But even a neutral nation
00:06:22has a right to take account of facts.
00:06:25Roosevelt has finally agreed to
00:06:27the possibility of agreeing to
00:06:29that the German war forces
00:06:31of the state of the United States
00:06:33and of the unabhängig nations
00:06:35do not attack
00:06:36Poland,
00:06:38Nürnberg,
00:06:42Denmark,
00:06:44Netherlands,
00:06:45Sweden,
00:06:47Luxembourg,
00:06:47Falkyrie.
00:06:48By 1941,
00:06:51on the opposite side of the globe,
00:06:53Japanese military aggression has led to the takeover of all Manchuria and
00:06:57brutal control of other parts of Asia.
00:07:02Hitler welcomes Japan's Foreign Minister in Berlin to celebrate the two
00:07:07countries alliance as Axis powers.
00:07:11And in December 1941 Japan reveals it has designs on more than just Asia.
00:07:23After their bombing of Manhattan, it is no, no, it is a real war.
00:07:31December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.
00:07:39When the U.S. enters the war, the Germans have a three-year leave in the race to build an
00:07:44atomic bomb.
00:07:46Roosevelt gambles $2 billion to build the weapon before the Germans do.
00:07:52This secret science experiment is known by its code name, the Manhattan Project.
00:07:59It will be headed by an ambitious officer from the Army Corps of Engineers.
00:08:06Leslie Groves is first and foremost an engineer.
00:08:09He made his reputation in building the Pentagon.
00:08:12He built the Pentagon ahead of schedule and under budget.
00:08:17Leslie Groves had really wanted to join the war effort and he was disappointed that he
00:08:22never got that.
00:08:25So when he was asked to lead the bomb project, this was a dream come true for him.
00:08:33Leslie Groves saw the Manhattan Project as an industrial project, not a scientific project.
00:08:39There were scientists involved, but it was really about industry.
00:08:42To direct the project's scientific research, Groves chooses a 39-year-old physicist from Berkeley,
00:08:54California, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
00:08:57Groves shocked people when he chose Oppenheimer, but it was a brilliant appointment.
00:09:05Oppenheimer could keep in his head the incredible complications of the science, but also handle
00:09:12the people.
00:09:13The biggest tool they had for keeping the Manhattan Project secret was taking all of the scientists
00:09:20who had worked on the subject and putting them under government oaths and secrecy arrangements.
00:09:28That deprived journalists of stories that they might have written about atomic bombs or something
00:09:33like that, and the journalists noticed this.
00:09:36At the New York Times, William Leonard Lawrence had a very good idea of what was going on.
00:09:43He had been putting together bits of string for months.
00:09:47Years later, Lawrence would recall his early suspicions.
00:09:50I noticed a strange phenomenon.
00:09:53I would come to a meeting and a couple of top scientists who had always been there were
00:09:57missing.
00:09:58I would call up their universities and I would get evasive answers.
00:10:02They weren't there.
00:10:04We don't know.
00:10:05Or they're not coming back.
00:10:11William Leonard Lawrence was born in Imperial Russia.
00:10:17And then he moves to the United States.
00:10:20He talked his way into Harvard, but he was caught up in a cheating scandal and never earned
00:10:25a degree.
00:10:26He came to New York and fell into a job at the New York World that was very sensationalistic.
00:10:32It was a great home for Lawrence who had wanted to be a playwright and had a great flair for
00:10:39drama.
00:10:45He wrote several stories about a researcher who claimed to have disproven Einstein's theory
00:10:48of relativity.
00:10:54The New York Times saw this story, hired him away, and they promoted him publicly as the
00:11:00first daily science writer.
00:11:05Which meant that he was under pressure to be constantly producing science stories.
00:11:10Lawrence is part of a group of journalists who collectively win a Pulitzer Prize for creating
00:11:17this field of science journalism.
00:11:22Lawrence had come to Groves' attention, not in a positive way.
00:11:26He came to Groves' attention because he was writing stories about atomic energy.
00:11:32Groves didn't like that.
00:11:34Groves didn't want anybody to be writing about these matters.
00:11:40Lawrence ached to write more about atomic science, atomic power, but he was frequently
00:11:48shut down by the government.
00:11:50But both he and the Times went along with that because they needed to be on the team to
00:11:56promote victory in this total war.
00:12:02World War II was seen as a live or die affair for the United States.
00:12:30And given that total commitment, journalists found themselves on the team.
00:12:38They were eating the same food, under the same fire, wearing the same clothing and uniforms
00:12:43and helmets as the people they were covering.
00:12:48They wouldn't do anything that would jeopardize America's chances of winning.
00:12:54It meant that they went along with a voluntary code of censorship.
00:13:00The press score in Europe includes 30-year-old freelancer John Hersey.
00:13:06Hersey was overseas as a war correspondent.
00:13:09He worked both for time and life.
00:13:21Hersey had been covering the Italian campaign.
00:13:27He'd seen war ruins.
00:13:29He had seen terrible destruction.
00:13:31He'd cover war from all different perspectives.
00:13:35Near the end of the war, he'd already covered a lot of combat, and he'd published a novel
00:13:40that had won a Pulitzer Prize.
00:13:44Hersey, under obviously typical conditions, just did remarkable work.
00:13:51And in the Pacific Theater, the Cleveland-Colin Post editor, Charles Loeb, embeds with segregated
00:13:58troops as a pool reporter and photographer for the black press.
00:14:02Charles Loeb logs more than 4,000 miles.
00:14:07He goes to Okinawa, to Guam, covering the activities of the 93rd Unit, the all-black unit.
00:14:23The black community, they get to see how their son or their brother or their husband is doing.
00:14:30It gives them a sense of pride.
00:14:33One of our fortunes is to tell the black side of any story, because the white media still
00:14:40suffers from lack of believability, the black humility.
00:14:45While journalists like Loeb and Hersey cover the war from the front lines, at home, General
00:14:52Groves makes sure that no word about the bomb project leaks, especially to the press or even
00:14:59to Congress.
00:15:02Groves values secrecy.
00:15:03He wants this project controlled.
00:15:06And the basic principle of security is compartmentalization.
00:15:09Everybody knows what they need to know, and not any more than that.
00:15:15Groves builds three big cities.
00:15:17At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at Hanford, Washington, and at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
00:15:22There are three big aspects of the project.
00:15:25One is to separate uranium.
00:15:29You need to do it in secret, and you need to do it with a lot of electricity.
00:15:33There aren't that many remote places that have a lot of electricity.
00:15:36But there is one, which is Tennessee.
00:15:41Because the Tennessee Valley Authority produced a huge amount of electricity, and that electricity
00:15:46gets poured into Oak Ridge.
00:15:50There's no precedent for something like Oak Ridge.
00:15:53This is genuinely a secret city.
00:16:02Tens of thousands of people and their families are living there.
00:16:06They have intramural sports leaks, baseball and football.
00:16:17The number of people who at one point worked on the Manhattan Project is about 500,000 people.
00:16:24So if you were not a soldier, or too old or too young to work, there's about a one in
00:16:28a hundred chance you worked on the Manhattan Project and probably didn't know it.
00:16:36There were 7,000 black workers at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant.
00:16:41They did maintenance work.
00:16:43They did construction work.
00:16:45And for three years, these workers did not know that they were at a plant that was involved
00:16:51in making the atomic bomb.
00:16:55Then when plutonium is discovered and people realize that that could power a bomb,
00:17:00for that you need to have a lot of water and you need to be isolated.
00:17:04So they put it on the Columbia River in Washington State.
00:17:10Then you need a place for your bomb designers.
00:17:13And bomb design requires isolation and a lot of very temperamental scientists.
00:17:19Oppenheimer, who'd spent time in New Mexico, selects a remote spot in the desert outside of Santa Fe.
00:17:25In a little town called Los Alamos.
00:17:28More than 5,000 scientists and their families relocate there.
00:17:34Groves had a pretty bad relationship with most of the scientists.
00:17:38He regarded them as prima donnas, overeducated eggheads.
00:17:44You didn't want their advice on almost any other thing.
00:17:47He didn't want them to think about the politics.
00:17:49They were bad at that in his mind.
00:17:53Los Alamos is a bit of a security risk because you have lots of scientists talking to each other
00:17:58about work that's going on in other groups on the Mesa.
00:18:02Groves tries to restrict that and Oppenheimer says, no, we need that.
00:18:06It's important for progress.
00:18:08We have to have that kind of thing happen.
00:18:09It's hard to believe that secrets didn't come out.
00:18:14Groves is afraid Congress would cancel the project if they knew about it.
00:18:19Because they wouldn't understand that the science fiction thing was a good plan.
00:18:26That's why Groves is committed to keeping so much secrecy.
00:18:29General Groves knew that this was going to be, if it happened, a shocking event.
00:18:41And people would have to be prepared for their entrance into a new world, the atomic age.
00:18:49Starting in spring of 1945, Groves knows he has to manage the public release of it
00:18:56because the whole point of this bomb is to change the equation.
00:19:03What do you tell people about this?
00:19:06What should they know? What shouldn't they know?
00:19:09This becomes a major official goal of the Manhattan Project.
00:19:15And so they are going to have to shift gears from absolute secrecy to an incredible amount of publicity.
00:19:22There's no way to do the publicity of the bomb without somebody who understands some physics.
00:19:29They need to explain it in a way that is both accurate and obfuscating enough so that you don't reveal anything you don't want to.
00:19:36Groves knows the right man for the job.
00:19:40He goes to the New York Times with hopes of recruiting its science journalist.
00:19:44Groves went to William Lawrence's editor and behind closed doors asked to use Lawrence for a military project of some importance.
00:19:54I was privileged to be tapped on the shoulder by the army and given the assignment that every newspaper man dreams of.
00:20:02Lawrence is plugged in. He knows about the topic. He knows many of these scientists and so they agreed on this relationship with the New York Times to basically loan them William Lawrence as a person who would write press releases.
00:20:18Journalism is still in the process of developing its ethical code during World War Two.
00:20:28For the publisher of the New York Times, the fact that one of the reporters could help with the war effort seemed to override any potential conflict of interest in this dual role.
00:20:42Lawrence didn't need any prodding to picture it in the most positive way.
00:20:50The Times got a really good deal. Their star science reporter got sole access to all sorts of information that he was able to use for years afterward.
00:21:01What he did not get was a lot of money.
00:21:04And it remains as a source of debate exactly how he was compensated. But the bottom line is he largely worked for the Manhattan Project for free.
00:21:15Lawrence's main task was to write press releases in the months before the bomb was dropped.
00:21:21They didn't really know when the bomb would be ready to be used. And so the need for all these background articles was profound.
00:21:29Groves gave Lawrence great license to go virtually anywhere he wanted to.
00:21:36Doors were unlocked for him that weren't unlocked for other reporters.
00:21:48Because they knew that he would produce the story that they wanted.
00:21:52He describes Hanford as Adam Land on Mars. It's so alien it's not even on this planet. And that's good. That's progress.
00:22:12Lawrence was effusive, perhaps more effusive than they wanted him to be.
00:22:24These stories, they're wild and wooly and enthusiastic. And that is not what these army lawyers who are reviewing them want to see.
00:22:31They tone them way, way, way down.
00:22:34But for him, this is the story of the century. He is the one built to write this story.
00:22:45In the spring of 1945, the U.S. suffers a staggering loss. The sudden death of its commander-in-chief, President Roosevelt.
00:23:06His successor is the little known Vice President, Harry S. Truman.
00:23:17Truman was succeeding this historically transformative president, Franklin Roosevelt, who had reshaped the country in so many ways.
00:23:24And Truman was basically a machine politician from Kansas City, Missouri, whose only foreign policy experience was being a GI in World War I.
00:23:37As Vice President, Truman had not even been told of the existence of the Manhattan Project.
00:23:43He first learns of it two weeks after taking his new oath.
00:23:46In Europe, the Allies from the West and Soviets from the East keep advancing on the German capital.
00:23:59When the Soviets take Berlin, the Nazis surrender.
00:24:05Back home, Americans are jubilant.
00:24:10But Truman warns them not to celebrate too soon.
00:24:17This is a solemn but glorious hour.
00:24:22As U.S. forces fight their way from island to island toward Japan.
00:24:29Much remains to be done. The victory won in the West must now be won in the East.
00:24:36With the surrender of Germany, suddenly Japan becomes a potential target for the atomic bomb.
00:24:44Germans quit, but that doesn't mean the war is over.
00:24:49By the time the Marine Corps got to Iwo Jima, a lot of blood hadn't spilled.
00:24:56We were going one island at a time at considerable cost in lives.
00:25:04And there was talk Japan was not going to surrender, that we would have to invade Japan itself.
00:25:11I think it's hard for people today to project back what it is like after four years of bone crushing total war.
00:25:22What people are used to in terms of violence.
00:25:28The violence they read about, the violence they hear about.
00:25:31You have a very battle-weary home population.
00:25:42To awake eagerly and passionately, the sacred honor of dying to haunt you.
00:25:49We'll stop at nothing to brush you.
00:25:51The Japanese were represented in American media as a savage horde.
00:25:58They committed plenty of atrocities, there's no question about that.
00:26:01But it was almost cartoonish, racist, and often dehumanizing enemy.
00:26:07And a terrifying one.
00:26:08People were very nervous about the invasion of Japan.
00:26:12This was going to be a long and bitter struggle.
00:26:16When is it going to end?
00:26:18So that was the mood of the country, you know.
00:26:20Glad that victory was in sight.
00:26:23But what were you going to have to do to get your hands on that victory?
00:26:31In the closing stages of World War II, a historic conference was called between the leaders of the big three nations of the Allies.
00:26:36Harry S. Truman arrived aboard the cruiser Augusta as the replacement for the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.
00:26:43Two months after the Nazis' surrender, President Truman sails to Potsdam, Germany to meet with his allies
00:26:50and divide up the spoils of Europe between the communist East and the capitalist West.
00:26:56Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wants to gain full control of all Eastern Europe.
00:27:01Truman wants to avoid a similar outcome in Asia.
00:27:06Truman was in a very difficult place in 1945.
00:27:10He's in charge of negotiating with Joseph Stalin, who has been controlling the Soviet Union for almost as long as Truman has been aware of the Soviet Union.
00:27:20Truman doesn't quite know where he is.
00:27:23But he knows one thing, which is he's a person who makes decisions.
00:27:31Publicly, Truman asked Stalin to join the invasion of Japan.
00:27:36Privately, he hopes the war ends before the Soviets invade.
00:27:40The Russians were going to sweep in and decimate the Japanese troops, and Truman knew that.
00:27:47He wanted to end the war before the Russians got into the war in a big way.
00:27:51Meanwhile, the first test of America's $2 billion superweapon is unfolding in the New Mexico desert.
00:28:04The Trinity nuclear test was to take place in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
00:28:10Truman needs the results quickly to gain leverage over Stalin, if the science works.
00:28:20This was a very tense period.
00:28:23They did not know whether this thing was going to work.
00:28:27Every time we tested some component that had to do with the test, it would fail.
00:28:31There had been some speculation that it might be possible to explode the atmosphere, in which case the world disappears.
00:28:45Groves is worried about what happens if there's publicity.
00:28:49He needs to have some kind of account.
00:28:52This is where Lawrence is useful.
00:28:54So Lawrence wrote a series of press releases of increasing level of mistruth.
00:28:59Release A was an ammunition dump exploded.
00:29:07There were no problems, no casualties.
00:29:09Move on.
00:29:11And he could go down B, C, D.
00:29:14Increasingly, things had gone wrong.
00:29:16And some of them had to pick spaces for, here's a list of people who are now dead.
00:29:20Because this was actually a scientific experiment gone awry.
00:29:29The test releases energy more than four times the power of what isбы.
00:29:30The test releases energy more than four times the power
00:29:58of what had been predicted.
00:30:02It felt like an earthquake.
00:30:05He got out of bed, and he says, I want you to come look.
00:30:09The sun's rising in the wrong direction.
00:30:12We were headed up to Albuquerque when we saw this great big flash of light.
00:30:18And my sister, she said, what happened?
00:30:22Was there anything odd about your sister asking about the light?
00:30:24Yes, because she was blind.
00:30:29Some of these local people from dozens of miles away called their newspapers and said, what happened?
00:30:36The local papers asked the press office what was going on last night,
00:30:40and they provided them with Lawrence's lowest level story.
00:30:45And the local media just accepted that, and that's what they wrote.
00:31:03Lawrence does exactly what Groves wants, and he's perfectly happy to work within those constraints.
00:31:27Lawrence's first act of loyalty was an act of lying, an act of mistruth, which is a cardinal sin for a journalist.
00:31:38It was known from the beginning that atomic energy posed risks of radiation.
00:31:49Before the Trinity test, there was much discussion about whether people who live nearby should be notified.
00:31:57To monitor the biochemical dangers of plutonium and uranium, Groves had hired Dr. Stafford Warren, a pioneer in the new field of radiology, to be the project's chief medical officer.
00:32:12Stafford Warren is little known, but he was a major medical figure for the Manhattan Project.
00:32:23As Oak Ridge and Hanford were picking up uranium and plutonium production, they were very concerned, but this sounds so cynical.
00:32:33Their concern about the radiation poisoning was to keep the secret of the Manhattan Project.
00:32:41If all of a sudden, this strange sickness began to emerge from these secret sites, some reporter would reveal what was going on.
00:32:50Warren was good at secrets, Groves appreciated that, so the two worked pretty well together.
00:33:05Prior to the Trinity test, Warren's team outlines the dangers of radiation in a memo to Groves.
00:33:13They wrote some alarming messages that Groves would have seen.
00:33:20That memo was basically ignored.
00:33:25A few days later, Warren sends a second memo, more to Groves' liking.
00:33:38In the following memo, Warren minimized the danger of radiation on the ground.
00:33:44He said, if American combat troops have to be sent into Japan, they're not going to be in danger from radiation.
00:33:54That's certainly what Groves wanted to hear.
00:33:58Somehow, Warren was able to persuade himself, justify, forget, deny, repress his own fears about the atomic bomb.
00:34:14After Trinity, the scientists went out and tracked the radioactive cloud.
00:34:28They were shocked to find it was spreading for many miles and at a higher level than they had anticipated.
00:34:34They soon found farm animals, cattle with hair burned off.
00:34:41An old man, Max Smith, had a black cat, just as black as the ace of spades.
00:34:46That thing had white spots all over it.
00:34:49By and large, this huge event escaped public commentary.
00:34:54And I think it speaks to the era.
00:34:57This is wartime.
00:34:58Don't talk about things.
00:35:02So Groves knew that the radiation existed and that it was a problem.
00:35:06But it was not part of the narrative that he wanted to have out there.
00:35:10The radiation is the part that people are generally going to grasp onto as the special nature of the weapon.
00:35:18And it's also the one that's associated with the most horror.
00:35:23Because of the unique health effects of radiation, this puts it in a category more like chemical weapons.
00:35:31Groves did not want any association with chemical biological warfare.
00:35:36The Germans used poison gas in World War I.
00:35:48Eventually, the British did too.
00:35:53We were frightened of the gas, of course.
00:35:56Because we kept putting it out and it was coming up our thoughts.
00:36:00The yellow stuff, yellow green it was.
00:36:03The world was revolted by that kind of warfare.
00:36:09It somehow didn't fit into what was moral in war.
00:36:15There's a lot of concern about using it in World War II.
00:36:22Hitler doesn't.
00:36:23The British don't.
00:36:24The Soviets don't.
00:36:25The Americans don't.
00:36:25The French don't.
00:36:26So Groves did not want the atomic bomb to be seen in that light.
00:36:36Groves could see what was coming down the road.
00:36:39They would have a bomb that they could use in war.
00:36:44Groves immediately reports to his superiors that the test surpasses all expectations.
00:36:50This news went to President Truman at the Potsdam Conference.
00:37:03He suddenly felt like he was in a place of great security.
00:37:07This influenced how he thought about Japan in the end of the war.
00:37:11He made the Potsdam Declaration a harsher thing than he might have otherwise done.
00:37:16And it influenced how he thought about the Soviet Union, how he was going to deal with
00:37:23them in the post-war.
00:37:27The Americans don't want a divided government.
00:37:31It's an American weapon.
00:37:32It's not a Soviet weapon.
00:37:34And that means the post-war settlement in Japan will look like something rather different
00:37:39than Berlin and Vienna, which are carved up into Soviet, British, French, and American sectors.
00:37:44As soon as the Trinity test was a success, there were orders to bring the bomb to Tinian.
00:37:551,500 miles off the coast of Japan, final steps are taken to ready and activate the bomb.
00:38:04Lawrence is on the island of Tinian, hoping with all his heart to be on that plane, to be
00:38:10on that mission.
00:38:11He wanted to be there to see the use of the bomb, but he was not allowed to go.
00:38:18He was almost in tears that he was not allowed to be on.
00:38:22But he had watched it take off, and he was waiting for it to come back.
00:38:26There was a photographer.
00:38:52There was a photographer for Hiroshima's main newspaper named Matsushigi, who was not
00:39:02far from where the bomb went off.
00:39:16He was so sickened by what he saw that he could only push the shutter about half a dozen
00:39:22times.
00:39:48These are the only photos that survived of that day in Hiroshima, and there was only
00:39:53a handful of them.
00:39:57His photos were seized when the Americans arrived.
00:40:01In 1945, Americans were only seeing the mushroom cloud, destroyed buildings, and not the human
00:40:10effects at all.
00:40:15On August 6th, the day of the Hiroshima blast, President Truman is returning by ship from
00:40:21the Potsdam Conference.
00:40:24His public announcement is filmed on board.
00:40:28We are now prepared to destroy, more rapidly and completely, every productive enterprise
00:40:35the Japanese have in any city.
00:40:38The release of the information is not neutral.
00:40:41The announcement is hyped up in order to induce the Japanese government to surrender, perhaps
00:40:46before the Soviets enter the war.
00:40:48We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history, and we have won.
00:40:56The goal was to briefly announce the use of the bomb and then describe the existence of
00:41:02the Manhattan Project, which would also be a bombshell for the American public.
00:41:05What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.
00:41:13It was really core that people suddenly know what had happened, because that was the sort
00:41:18of propaganda effect, that was going to be all the psychological effect.
00:41:23This was this moment in which they were going to go from total secrecy to partial openness.
00:41:30William Lawrence's months-long work suddenly hits front pages nationwide, and would dominate
00:41:36the news for weeks to come.
00:41:42Lawrence had written 14 press releases that were ready for release in a kind of a publicity
00:41:52blitz.
00:41:53Newspapers hungered for these press releases, and they disseminated them mostly verbatim.
00:42:03They're military press releases that are being sort of laundered through the press to make
00:42:07it look like it's organic, independent reporting.
00:42:15Part of the PR effort was not just to explain it to people, but to control what people learned.
00:42:22So the philosophy was, let's give them everything we think is safe and useful, and maybe that
00:42:29will satisfy their appetites and keep them from digging into places we don't want them to.
00:42:36The editors loved it.
00:42:38They wanted this information.
00:42:39They wanted to get it out.
00:42:40They knew the public wanted it.
00:42:41And so they did not raise any issues about, well, this is government propaganda.
00:42:45Where is the other side of the story?
00:42:50When you look at white newspapers after the bomb was dropped, they're basically just taking
00:42:53what the war department publishes and publishing that.
00:42:55So there's very little variety or nuance.
00:42:58The black press publishes the official narrative.
00:43:02But it also discovers stories overlooked by the mainstream press.
00:43:10And there's a sense of pride that shows up in those articles about the intelligence of
00:43:14these black scientists.
00:43:15When the bomb was first dropped, you would have stories about black scientists participating
00:43:20in the research on the bomb and participating in the making of the bomb.
00:43:24This is the moment where black Americans are striving to break new boundaries and get
00:43:29entry into different professions.
00:43:31But what does it mean to integrate a profession that's about causing devastation at the scale?
00:43:38Shortly after the Hiroshima strike, black leaders raise their voices.
00:43:42They're going to view the dropping of the bomb through a racial lens.
00:43:46And there's no reason why they wouldn't.
00:43:47If something bad was going to happen, it's going to happen to us first, right?
00:43:52If there's a bomb and it's going to be used, it's going to be used on a person of color first.
00:43:56The Japanese were people of color, just like they are.
00:44:02And so there is an understandable skepticism.
00:44:05One of the first to comment on the bomb was Langston Hughes, the great black poet and writer.
00:44:13He had a column in black newspapers called Jesse B. Simple, kind of folk hero character that didn't have traditional education, but had kind of folk wisdom.
00:44:25Jesse B. Simple asked the questions that maybe nobody else wants to ask.
00:44:29He says, we didn't want to use this on white folk, we used this on colored folks, we used this on Japs, that is the same conversation most likely that's happening in households throughout the black community.
00:44:47Black intellectuals and political leaders are outraged by the dropping of the bomb.
00:44:51Zora Neale Hurston called Truman the Butcher of Asia and W.E.B. Du Bois called Truman one of the greatest killers of our time.
00:44:57W.E.B. Du Bois says that the merging of science and technology should be a good thing for the world.
00:45:06This is the opposite. The government has used science and technology, and so it's for the worst thing of mankind.
00:45:14And he says what we have done will set back the progress of, quote, colored nations for decades to come.
00:45:20Black intellectuals are not alone in raising alarms about the bomb's effects.
00:45:30Harold Jacobson was a junior Manhattan project scientist at Oak Ridge.
00:45:38No big deal, no key figure.
00:45:40But in August, he wrote an article that got a great deal of attention.
00:45:48Hiroshima to be uninhabitable for 70 years.
00:45:55That's not the story the U.S. military wanted out.
00:46:04Groves wants to argue that it's not radioactivity that does the killing.
00:46:08The killing is caused by a big explosion.
00:46:10This is a different kind of big explosion, and it's really special, but it's not repulsively special.
00:46:15And here is Jacobson, one of our own scientists, saying Hiroshima would be uninhabitable for 70 years.
00:46:26I'm not quite sure how he arrived at exactly 70, but it made a great headline.
00:46:32Jacobson's prediction, which turns out to be inaccurate, doesn't garner nearly as much public attention as the government's heavy-handed response.
00:46:43They got a statement from Robert Oppenheimer saying that the lingering radiation would be minor.
00:46:52Oppenheimer was complicit in tamping down the radiation.
00:47:00I think he had hopes that atomic weapons could be contained after the war.
00:47:05I think he was denying the same thing that so many scientists were.
00:47:11They just didn't want to be connected to chemical warfare.
00:47:17Jacobson was certainly overstepping his knowledge, that's for sure.
00:47:21But the rebuttal, if it had been a little bit more truthful, would have said,
00:47:25we don't really know, but we're pretty sure that isn't the case.
00:47:29And they didn't quite do that.
00:47:32This is the first real challenge they have to their control over the narrative of the bomb.
00:47:39Leslie Nakashima was a popular and celebrated Japanese-American journalist in pre-war Hawaii.
00:48:04He worked primarily as a sports writer, but he also covered culture and politics as well.
00:48:19Nakashima's parents both came from a very small fishing village in Hiroshima Prefecture.
00:48:25And his father was part of the first wave of contract workers to work on Hawaii's sugar plantations.
00:48:35Many migrant workers had never intended to stay.
00:48:39This is the case for Leslie Nakashima's parents.
00:48:42They move back to Japan in the 1930s.
00:48:45And Nakashima gets offered a job working for the United Press in Tokyo.
00:48:50But when Pearl Harbor is bombed, Nakashima is out of a job and he starts working for the Japanese press.
00:48:58So he actually learns about the atomic bombing before the general public.
00:49:03And at the time his mother was still living in Hiroshima,
00:49:08he immediately books the first train ticket he can get.
00:49:11The first thing he sees when he arrives at Hiroshima Station is a sea of destruction.
00:49:26He finds his mother alive.
00:49:29He knows this is a really big story.
00:49:34He instinctively starts to record what he's seeing.
00:49:39He's looking out and he sees this city of 300,000 people that, as Nakashima said, had vanished.
00:49:48He also visits a school near his mother's house that had been turned into a makeshift hospital.
00:49:58And he writes that every day there's two or three people that are dying there.
00:50:03And not only that, but the majority of the cases that are being treated there are considered to be hopeless.
00:50:11Hopeless.
00:50:20Nagasaki, target for the second atomic bomb.
00:50:23Just three days after Hiroshima, this explosion was...
00:50:27Before the Japanese leadership in Tokyo and the Emperor had time to learn about and ponder the first one,
00:50:32the plutonium bomb was used against Nagasaki.
00:50:35So it really was a, as the US press put it at the time, a one-two punch, the one-two knockout blow.
00:50:48William Lawrence was on one of the chase planes that followed the bomber over Nagasaki.
00:50:53I saw a great city disappear in a mushroom cloud.
00:50:58The New York Times ran his piece about flying to Nagasaki on the mission.
00:51:04The paper proudly advertises Lawrence's role in the Manhattan Project.
00:51:11He goes from being a chief publicist to almost overnight back at the New York Times,
00:51:20and then wins Pulitzer for writing pieces that are derived from his status at the Manhattan Project.
00:51:27Yet the reporter whose first-hand account actually breaks the story gets overlooked.
00:51:34Leslie Nakashima's story, Hiroshima, as I saw it, gets syndicated, but gets sort of lost.
00:51:44What I think are the most interesting parts of his story, the survivor's experiences.
00:51:53Many of whom were acquaintances of his from Hawaii.
00:51:59As well as some of the more provocative language about radiation.
00:52:09Many newspapers choose to excise that out.
00:52:12There was a question of credibility.
00:52:15So much of it has to do with the anti-Japanese racism of the time.
00:52:28The New York Times, for example, buries it several pages in.
00:52:34Beneath Nakashima's article, the Times cites General Groves, who calls all reports out of Japan pure propaganda.
00:52:42The battleship Missouri becomes the scene of an unforgettable ceremony.
00:52:52General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander for the occupation of Japan, boards the Missouri.
00:53:03Cameramen and reporters of many countries record this historic moment.
00:53:07As United Nations...
00:53:08After the surrender, General Douglas MacArthur is determined to keep American journalists far away from the so-called atomic cities.
00:53:22One of the first things MacArthur did was enact a strict press code, which applied to American reporters who had to file their articles through his office.
00:53:32But at least one reporter defies his order.
00:53:37Chicago Daily Newsman, George Weller, quietly slips away to Nagasaki.
00:53:44MacArthur didn't want anybody to go there because this would lead to a lot of very compassionate stories.
00:53:50When he got there, he found pitiful conditions and observed dozens of victims who seemed to be wasting away.
00:54:03And so he wrote about it.
00:54:05Weller was very patriotic, didn't have an agenda.
00:54:24Weller sent his pieces directly to MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo.
00:54:29MacArthur's office held those stories and they didn't surface for decades.
00:54:35I was going to feed MacArthur as a gentleman and have him see the dispatches first.
00:54:42He had no right to stop this story.
00:54:45A month after the blast, Australian journalist Wilfred Bruchette catches a train to Hiroshima.
00:54:58Wilfred Bruchette was an extremely enterprising journalist.
00:55:02He went to places he wasn't supposed to go.
00:55:05Bruchette was taken to a leading hospital.
00:55:08These people were all in various states of physical disintegration.
00:55:15Then the flesh started to rot and then gradually bleeding, which I couldn't stop.
00:55:21And then the hair falling out.
00:55:23And the hair falling out was more or less the last stage.
00:55:25People were dying in a horrible, painful way that Americans back home were being told wasn't going on.
00:55:41Bruchette's article appeared in the British press and then reprinted around the world with the headline,
00:55:47The Atomic Plague.
00:55:48Bruchette's articles were not published in the U.S.
00:55:55They had to be published overseas.
00:55:59In papers that were not subject to the rules that the government was laying down for U.S. journalists.
00:56:11Groves was tremendously concerned about batting down claims of radiation disease.
00:56:19Groves calls Dr. Charles Rea, hospital director at Oak Ridge, who has no expertise in radiology.
00:56:28And a transcript has emerged, which is horrifying in many ways.
00:56:32The doctor at Oak Ridge does agree with Groves that the Japanese, no doubt, are exaggerating that people really aren't dying from radiation.
00:56:51It's interesting why Groves did this.
00:57:00It's interesting why Groves did this.
00:57:07Rea was not an important part of the Manhattan Project.
00:57:10He was not a known radiologist.
00:57:12It shows how distraught Groves was about the way the bomb was being seen.
00:57:29A star-shaped crater marks the New Mexican desert near Alamogordo where the first atomic bomb was tested.
00:57:34Press representatives get a personally conducted tour by General Groves.
00:57:38Alarmed by the growing accounts of radiation sickness, Groves invites friendly reporters to visit the Trinity site as further proof of no lingering radiation.
00:57:48Groves invited a number of journalists, including Lawrence, to show that there's no problem.
00:57:55Radiation? What do you mean?
00:57:57Geiger counters were brought out. The readings are relatively low.
00:57:59And so what are the Japanese talking about?
00:58:03That's how it was reported.
00:58:06Lawrence thinks he is telling you the right story.
00:58:12Everything he writes about how amazing this project is, Lawrence believes this. He is a true believer.
00:58:17Meanwhile, in Hiroshima, there is a press junket organized by the military to negate what they're calling Japanese propaganda of lingering radiation effects.
00:58:34After covering the surrender in Tokyo, the pioneering African-American journalist Charles Loeb turns his attention to Hiroshima.
00:58:41After the occupation, I stayed in Japan, the food went all over the islands, the food went everywhere.
00:58:47Charles Loeb is born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1905.
00:58:53He goes to Howard University and studies pre-med.
00:58:57He was not able to complete those studies because of finances.
00:59:03But he studied it long enough to understand science.
00:59:08And so he was able to carry that knowledge with him when he joined the Cleveland Call and Post in 1933.
00:59:15Vogue was in Tokyo for the surrender ceremony in 1945.
00:59:22At that time, a number of the other U.S. journalists traveled to Hiroshima to report on the bomb impact.
00:59:31When they came back, Vogue described them as being completely flabbergasted.
00:59:36He didn't take that trip to Hiroshima himself.
00:59:39Vogue starts reporting on this history as it was unfolding.
00:59:43He approached it clinically almost as though he was writing a scientific paper.
00:59:52He understood and recognized the human cost of it.
00:59:57But he was more focused on the long-term impact of radiation.
01:00:03Charles Loeb wrote that article in the newspaper in 1945, challenging the official story.
01:00:08And one of the best ways to challenge it was to quote Colonel Stafford Warren, the top physician from the Manhattan Project.
01:00:16Warren was responsible for evacuating Japanese wounded and observing their actions.
01:00:22The best thing he could have done was to say that Warren was the one that was saying this.
01:00:26It's not me. It's not Charles. I'm just a reporter.
01:00:27Colonel Warren actually downplays the potential impact of radiation, but Loeb uses it in a very crafty way.
01:00:42Just by the fact that he quotes Warren on this, he introduces the possibility that radiation is present.
01:00:47That's impacting Japanese civilians after the bombing.
01:00:49And so Loeb structures the entire article in a way that encourages readers to be reckoning with the long-term impacts of the bomb in ways that are years ahead of their time.
01:01:00By November, a month after Loeb's story runs, General Groves can no longer deny that radiation from the bomb is killing people.
01:01:21In November 1945, there were a lot of congressional hearings on the Manhattan Project.
01:01:29And so Groves was asked to testify many times.
01:01:32It is essential in the highest national interest that further development in the field of atomic energy be pursued.
01:01:41Groves was being asked in particular about the radiation effects, what actually happened.
01:01:46And he admitted that the Japanese reports of radiation sicknesses were correct.
01:01:54But Groves tried to put the most positive spin on that that he could.
01:01:58And he reported that, according to the experts he talked to, it was a, quote, pleasant way to die.
01:02:03Many people never forgave him for that.
01:02:07And it's colored his reputation.
01:02:09The New Yorker was known as a light, humorous magazine.
01:02:31But as the war went on, people started to take note of the seriousness and extent of the New Yorker war coverage.
01:02:43In the months following the atomic bombings, the New Yorker commissioned an article on Hiroshima.
01:02:50Editor William Sean meets with freelance journalist John Hersey.
01:02:58Everything written about the bomb at that point was focused on the property damage.
01:03:03That's what they were interested in.
01:03:06Well, John Hersey wasn't like that.
01:03:08When he sat down with William Sean, he said, I don't really want to do another piece on the level of destruction.
01:03:18I want to do it on how it affects people.
01:03:21John Hersey was a quite remarkable writer with a very long career ahead of him.
01:03:30Hersey was born in 1914. He was the son of American missionaries in China.
01:03:34Being a Mish kid, they're a very distinct kind of person, he thinks.
01:03:41Mish kids, as we call ourselves, are a strange lot.
01:03:46By and large, they turned out either to be very interesting scholars, preachers, doctors, or drunks.
01:03:55Hersey was an extremely moral person with humanistic principles.
01:03:59He wasn't religious in the conventional sense, but deeply, deeply moral.
01:04:05By the spring of 1946, America's nuclear program is ramping up.
01:04:13With more testing in the Pacific.
01:04:17Hersey is finishing up an assignment in China when he learns of pending nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll.
01:04:24Percy was feeling cold feet about the New Yorker assignment.
01:04:29He thought, timing's wrong, and there were going to be more nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll.
01:04:35He wondered and cabled to Sean whether that might be such an important newspeg
01:04:40that writing about Hiroshima would no longer be of interest to people.
01:04:45Sean cabled him back and he said,
01:04:48The more time that passes, the more convinced we are that peace has wonderful possibilities.
01:04:53Think it best, time it for anniversary.
01:04:58With just four months to go before the anniversary of August 6th,
01:05:02Hersey hops on a naval destroyer for Japan.
01:05:06When Hersey was on the ship, he was sort of thinking like,
01:05:10this Hiroshima thing, I can't get my mind around how on earth it would do this.
01:05:15While I was on the destroyer, I came down with the flu.
01:05:20And they brought me some books from the ship's library.
01:05:25One of them was The Bridge of San Luis Rabe,
01:05:28which is about five people who are on a rope bridge.
01:05:32The novel had just been adapted into a Hollywood film.
01:05:35The book weaves together each one's story that led them to be randomly on this bridge at the same moment.
01:05:44And the light bulb went off in Hersey's head.
01:05:50The bomb.
01:05:51The bomb has a moment when it affects everybody all within a split second.
01:05:55And I saw reading that a way of approaching Hiroshima by settling on a few people and trying to make their lives real to the reader.
01:06:11Journalism would be enriched by using the methods of fiction,
01:06:16because the reader can identify with the character and almost feel what the character is experiencing.
01:06:22Shortly after getting to Hiroshima, he met Father Kleinsorg, who proved to be a wonderful subject for interview.
01:06:48One of the things reporters do when they do an interview, they say,
01:06:53Who else should I talk to?
01:06:55Father Kleinsorg introduced me to Mr. Tanimoto, the Methodist preacher.
01:07:00And he then introduced me to others.
01:07:05He wanted people whose lives had somehow intersected in those immediate days.
01:07:13He found his six subjects.
01:07:15Without a doubt, they took to Hersey.
01:07:20He doesn't have many of the American prejudices towards East Asians or East Asian societies.
01:07:28He sees them as people.
01:07:30And that's how they appear in the text.
01:07:33They appear as people who are confronted by an enormous horror of war.
01:07:36He was telling each person's story in their voice just strictly what happened.
01:07:40At exactly 15 minutes past 8 in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima,
01:07:54Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
01:08:04He's less interested in how they remember it than in reconstructing the experience of having no idea what was going on.
01:08:18As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.
01:08:26You, the reader, are being told for the first time what it's actually like to experience a nuclear bomb blast.
01:08:36Everything fell and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness.
01:08:41The bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her.
01:08:49There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
01:09:08Her seed comes back and then holds himself away, takes about a month to write this piece.
01:09:13He had originally thought he was writing a standard New Yorker piece of about 7,500 words, which is a decent sized length.
01:09:22But when he started typing, he ended up with 30,000 words.
01:09:27The editor had the idea that we'd publish it all in one piece.
01:09:33So if it was going to be in one issue, it would have to be the entire issue, which had never happened before.
01:09:42Harold Ross, who started The New Yorker, liked the idea of emptying the magazine and putting in this one thing.
01:09:49But it was also like, is that too at odds with the larger identity of The New Yorker?
01:09:54And he went back and looked at the original statement of purpose he'd put out when he started the magazine in 1925.
01:10:00And he said, The New Yorker is an undertaking of serious purpose.
01:10:11Then he thought, that's it. Like, serious is enough for me. I can do this.
01:10:14The illustration had been commissioned weeks before.
01:10:21So Ross and Sean decided that they would put words on the cover.
01:10:27Then they sent it off to the printers.
01:10:32Sean sent someone to Grand Central Station to see if people were buying it. He was a little concerned.
01:10:37It was people walking past the newsstand, and word of mouth, within a day, sold out the entire newsstand run.
01:10:48Everybody at The New Yorker was astonished. Nobody expected this.
01:10:55Einstein tried to buy a thousand copies of the magazine and couldn't get any, because it sold out the day it hit the stands.
01:11:07It was the biggest story of the year.
01:11:10It was written about in all the papers and Time and Newsweek.
01:11:15It got immediately turned into a book.
01:11:17This was the sensation of the season.
01:11:24The entire article was read over national radio.
01:11:28Hiroshima by John Hersey.
01:11:31This chronicle of suffering and destruction is broadcast as a warning that what happened to the people of Hiroshima a year ago could next happen anywhere.
01:11:39It's written in this very dispassionate way.
01:11:43And every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way.
01:11:46On some undressed bodies, the Burns had made patterns of undershirt straps and suspenders.
01:11:52And on the skin of some women, the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.
01:11:59He wanted us to see the Japanese as people, not as monsters.
01:12:05They're just trying to live their lives, and this is the world they happen to live in, and then this horrible thing happens to them.
01:12:15To me, that's a really profound shift in perspective.
01:12:23Various things that have been done to keep a lid on images from Hiroshima, radiation sickness.
01:12:28Now in one fell swoop, John Hersey threatened to disrupt that.
01:12:36That puts the Truman administration to a bit of a panic, and they start to organize a second wave reinterpreting the narrative of what the bomb means in order to counter Hersey's story.
01:12:48This was a key moment because U.S. nuclear bomb tests were really ramping up.
01:13:01We were on the verge of developing the hydrogen bomb, and of course the Soviets were full speed ahead, behind us, but full speed ahead.
01:13:08So this was the kind of turning point.
01:13:11The audience is the American public that you want not to turn against the nuclear deterrent.
01:13:17If you are at home when a surprise attack occurs, call beneath the table if it is very near the window.
01:13:23If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had known what we know about civil defense, thousands of lives would have been saved.
01:13:31You want them to think that nuclear bombs are okay, that we should have them, and that nothing untoward happened when they were used to destroy two Japanese cities.
01:13:44So a number of people associated with the Manhattan Project, James Conant, the president of Harvard, General Groves, Secretary of War Stimson,
01:13:52they collaborate and produce this multiple authored article that's going to come out under Stimson's name, and it's going to be the official why we dropped the atomic bomb.
01:14:05The United States built this weapon because it was afraid of the Nazis.
01:14:13It didn't really want to use this weapon, but Truman had this choice in front of him.
01:14:17Do we invade Japan?
01:14:18There is a very elaborate narrative that such an invasion would have been enormously destructive of American lives, and even more destructive of Japanese lives.
01:14:32And so the atomic bomb was a merciful way to end the war with the fewest casualties possible.
01:14:39And that's a way of trying to erode the moral clarity that Hersey is putting forward.
01:14:46Similar to the Hersey piece, Harper's hyped it heavily, and it gained a very wide audience. Newspapers reprinted parts of it.
01:14:59A lot of people basically said, well, we've had our doubts, but this settles it.
01:15:05Now that we understand why the bomb was used, we don't have to hear about people raising moral issues or something.
01:15:14This becomes the definitive way to attack the criticisms by saying, it's the lesser of two evils. We agree it's really cruel, but they put us in that position and we had no alternative.
01:15:30So what did we learn from Hiroshima? We should have been able to see the horrible effects on humans and long-term effects, after effects and so forth. But instead it was like, okay, well, we got away with that.
01:15:46The constraints on journalism in the mid-40s are overwhelming. So it's very hard for me to fault the journalists because they're up against a secrecy apparatus that is brand new. So they don't even know what they don't know. They don't know where to ask and no one's allowed to talk to them.
01:16:05Censorship mostly worked during World War II and after the dropping of the two atomic bombs because General Groves put together a very effective PR effort.
01:16:21One of the odd things is after the bombs were dropped, the war ended and the effort to control information continued.
01:16:30One of the more creative ways to get even more of this narrative out there is Groves worked with MGM to make a movie about the creation and use of the atomic bombs.
01:16:46General Groves was the key character in the movie.
01:16:50Our country must have an atomic bomb. This must be the best kept secret in all history.
01:16:56Anyone who saw it would have seen pro bomb propaganda.
01:17:01Mr. President, your press secretary, Mr. Ross, is here. And all these advisers tell me the bomb will shorten the war by at least a year.
01:17:09And if the bomb shortens the war, it will save many thousands of American lives.
01:17:13The American public took the narrative hook, line and sinker and said, OK, this is we trust the government that this is what was needed.
01:17:20Thank God we got it. And it wasn't, you know, another country and that we have this and it was the right thing to do.
01:17:26And this is a remarkably resilient narrative to the point where if you tell somebody this narrative, they'll say, right, that's the story. Right.
01:17:33And no, that didn't get really solidified until 1947. So like quite a ways after Hiroshima.
01:17:42And in many ways, it's not true.
01:17:46There was no deep deliberation over whether to use the bomb.
01:17:48There was no deep concern about the Japanese victims.
01:17:52The plan was to bomb and invade, not one or the other.
01:17:55The bombs weren't used to end the war promptly.
01:18:01The bombs were used to scare the Soviet Union into submission.
01:18:07They were not the last salvos of World War Two, but the first salvos of the Cold War.
01:18:12America sees itself as taking on the mantle of leading the world into freedom.
01:18:17And the bomb is just an element of that story.
01:18:34The Longines Futurescope, a television production of Men and Ideas.
01:18:40In this field of science, what would you say was the most exciting event that you have ever reported?
01:18:45One night in the desert of New Mexico, July 16, 1945.
01:18:51Into the early 1950s, Lawrence continues to fashion himself as an expert on all things nuclear.
01:18:57There won't be any wars in the Second Amendment.
01:18:59You think war can be eliminated?
01:19:01I think so. I think science is going to make it unnecessary.
01:19:04Lawrence became known as Atomic Bill.
01:19:06He did other things for the Times. He continued to write other science stories.
01:19:10But his brand was the atomic bomb.
01:19:12In a lot of ways, it is a sad legacy.
01:19:16He was a journalist who was in a singular moment, with singular access.
01:19:21And he squandered it.
01:19:23After Loeb leaves Japan, he returns to Cleveland, where he serves as the managing editor of the Cleveland Call & Post.
01:19:34He is called the Dean of Black Journalism.
01:19:38Without Charles Loeb, you don't get the black journalists that you have today.
01:19:43You don't get the reporting that you have today.
01:19:45It's one giant long struggle for freedom.
01:19:48And Charles Loeb is an essential piece of that.
01:19:50John Hersey wrote one of the most important pieces of reporting from the war and of a defining new event in world history.
01:20:00This was a patriotic American reporting on the horrors that the United States had caused.
01:20:08That's journalism at its most important.
01:20:12If people could imagine what it was like to be one of the survivors, and then, on top of that, realize that a nuclear weapon 2,900 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb has been tested.
01:20:28Then, I think that memory would have moved us much faster toward getting rid of these weapons.
01:20:38In 1952, seven years after the atomic bombings, the U.S. occupation of Japan ends, and censorship is lifted.
01:20:48Americans finally get to see what the attacks look like from the ground, a view they had never seen before.
01:20:55Life magazine publishes Yoshito Matsushige's photographs in a special spread.
01:21:03One of Matsushige's most famous photos is a picture of people on a bridge leading into Hiroshima, and you can still see this dust cloud down the road.
01:21:13And so the symbolic value to me was always, ever since that day, we've all been on that road to Hiroshima in this nuclear threat that we've lived with since 1945.
01:21:25Always Sleptics.
01:21:29Whoops.
01:21:32ucking oh
01:21:45American Experience Bombshell is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
01:22:15American Experience Bombshell is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
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