LINK:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/08/hiroshima-cover/
You know your government has done something unethical, immoral or just criminal when they cover it up, the horror of the A-bomb...
You know now our leaders knew they had done something unethical... a cover up...
A story that the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day has finally been published—60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller’s first-hand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.
Snip...
General Douglas MacArthur promptly declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of the cities, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story.
snip...
A month after the bombings, two reporters defied MacArthur and struck out on their own. Weller, of the
Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.
snip...
His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”
“Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has 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.”
Snip...
Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945 in the
London Daily Express
The official U.S. narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed as “Japanese propaganda” reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.
Snip... other reporter...
So when Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller’s 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, Gen. MacArthur personally ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors,
“They won.”
Snip... hope!
Last month, Weller’s son Anthony discovered a carbon copy of the suppressed dispatches among his late father’s papers (George Weller died in 2002). Unable to find an interested American publisher, Anthony Weller sold the account to Mainichi Shimbun, a large Japanese newspaper. Now, on the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombings, Weller’s account can finally be read.