#87 - The Aftermath Part 2

What this episode covers

* The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers. * A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.” * In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of U.S. bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects. * The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail. * A rare article about what it called this “sensitive” dispute appeared in the New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been “Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years.” * Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a “hold” on the Japanese using it — even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier. * Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. * It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. * The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return. * From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look. * So he got his hands on it and made a short 16 film, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945”. * He arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press. * He approached the three TV networks that existed back then and offered them the film, but none expressed interest in airing it. * Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. * When that footage finally emerged, journalist Greg Mitchell spoke with the man at the center of the drama: Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. * McGovern told him: “I always had the sense, that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war. * He later said: “The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation.” * Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated. * Four days after Wilfred Burchett's story - remember him from the last episode? Aussie journalist, first into Hiroshima? - splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Lesli Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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