"The liberated atom spares nothing"

Tuesday, August 9 — about seven weeks from now — will mark the 60th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Nagasaki. And only now, after six decades, can we read dispatches by George Weller, the first Western war correspondent to view Nagasaki after the bombing. Weller wrote dozens of stories from the area in late 1945, but all of them were spiked by General Douglas MacArthur’s censorship office in Tokyo and thought lost until Weller’s son Anthony found smudged, mildewed, and crumbling carbon copies in a crate two years ago.

Anthony Weller says he offered to sell his late father’s articles to U.S. magazines but was turned down. The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Daily News finally published excerpts last week. Here are a few selections:

“In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in façade of the American consulate, 3 miles from the blast’s center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, 1 mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way.”

“Several children, some burned, and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband shows eyes dim with tears. Vink (a Dutch medical officer) points out a woman on a yellow mat in hospital. She lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words. Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red spots in patches. According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late developing symptoms are dying now a month after the bombs fell, at a rate of about 10 daily.”

“The atomic bomb’s peculiar ‘disease,’ uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed the answer to the malady is beyond them.”

Of the 286,000 people living in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing, 74,000 were killed and another 75,000 sustained severe injuries. The Japanese estimated that 44% of the city was destroyed.

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