Atomic bomb decision worksheet

bs_bs_banner sean l. malloy “A Very Pleasant Way to Die”: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan* In the days following the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya noticed strange symptoms among his patients. Some of the survivors who had made their way to the Hiroshima Communications Hospital complained of vomiting, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and general malaise in addition to their more visible wounds. Hachiya, who had himself been injured in the bombing, was at first too overwhelmed to devote much time to exploring these symptoms. Then on August 17, eleven days after the bombing, a new mystery confronted the doctor. Many of his patients developed petechiae—small hemorrhages under the skin that appear as a pattern of dots—and started to lose their hair. Suddenly the death rate in his hospital, which had been declining since the initial wave of casualties, began to increase again. In some cases, patients, who had received only minor injuries in the bombing and appeared to be well on their way to recovery, died shortly after displaying these new symptoms, often with signs of massive internal hemorrhaging. A blood analysis revealed that those suffering from these strange symptoms displayed a markedly low count of white blood cells. On August 26, after interviewing his patients and conferring with fellow physicians, Hachiya posted a “Notice Regarding Radiation Sickness” at the Communications Hospital, one of the first attempts to scientifically assess the effect of nuclear radiation on the Japanese victims of the atomic bombs.1 Even before Dr. Hachiya posted his findings, reports of “the uncanny effects which the atomic bomb produces on the human body” surfaced in the press— *This article grew out of research presented at the June 2008 conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in Columbus, OH, and the March 2009 “Symposium on Nuclear Histories in Japan and Korea” at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I would like to thank my all fellow panelists for their feedback and comments. Alex Wellerstein was particularly helpful in pointing me toward documents at the Nuclear Testing Archive in Nevada that proved to be crucial to illuminating the pre-Hiroshima understanding of radiation effects in the United States. I have also benefited from exchanges on this subject with Barton J. Bernstein, Michael R. Gordin, Gregg Herken, Robert S. Norris, M. Susan Lindee, Masakatsu Yamazaki, Shiho Nakazawa, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, and Campbell Craig, as well as the comments of two anonymous reviewers for Diplomatic History. 1. Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1955), 21, 36–37, 90–91, 96–97, 125. Also see Yukuo Sasamoto, “Investigations of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb,” in A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, Volume I: The Occupation Period, 1945–1952, ed. Shigeru Nakayama (Melbourne, Australia, 2001), 73–107. Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, No. 3 (June 2012). © 2012 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK. 515 diph_1042 515..545 516 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y first in Japan and then in the United States.2 An August 23 article by Associated Press (AP) science editor Howard W. Blakeslee asserted that “[t]he Japanese who were reported today by Tokyo radio to have died mysteriously a few days after the atomic bomb blast probably were victims of a phenomenon which is well known in the great radiation laboratories of America.” In addition to lending credence to Japanese claims that radiation had produced lingering and sometimes fatal injury, Blakeslee suggested that American scientists had known of these effects prior to Hiroshima; he specifically cited prewar studies conducted with the cyclotron at the Radiation Laboratory (or “Rad Lab”) at the University of California.3 Though Blakeslee did not mention it in the article, the man behind the Berkeley cyclotron, physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, had been an important player in the wartime development of the atomic bomb and had served on the major scientific panel that recommended its use against Japan in 1945. General Leslie R. Groves, military head of the wartime atomic bomb project, was privately alarmed by the press attention given to radiation effects. On the morning of August 25, Groves placed a call to Lt. Col. Charles E.