Four official US investigating teams sent to Japan in the months immediately after the surrender wrote reports about the biomedical effects of the two atomic bombs. Military officials encouraged editors to continue some kind of wartime censorship especially about the bombs’ radiation. In the US, too, newspapers omitted or obscured anything about radiation or ongoing radioactivity. One month after the war ended, Occupation authorities restricted public criticism of the US actions in Japan and denied any radiation aftereffects from exposure to the nuclear bombs.Ī Navy photographer takes a picture of a Japanese soldier walking amid the ruins of Hiroshima. Historians note the irony of American Occupation officials claiming to bring a new freedom of the press to Japan, but censoring what the Japanese said in print about the atomic bombs. American officials confiscated Japanese reports, medical case notes, biopsy slides, medical photographs, and films and sent them to the US where much remained classified for years (some for decades). As soon as Japanese physicians and scientists reached Hiroshima after the bombing, they collected evidence and studied the mysterious symptoms in the ill and dying. The censorship of the Japanese began quickly.
In my research, I found US officials controlled information about radiation from the atomic bombs dropped over Japan by censoring newspapers, by silencing outspoken individuals, by limiting circulation of the earliest official medical reports, by fomenting deliberately reassuring publicity campaigns, and by outright lies and denial.
To this day we have no fully accepted accounting of the atomic bomb deaths in both cities it has remained highly contested because of the politics surrounding the bombing, because of problems with the wartime Japanese census, and, importantly, because of the complexity of defining what constituted radiation-caused deaths over decades.
A formerly classified correspondence provides guidelines on disclosure and censorship.
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