Inventory of Holocaust

By Frederic Golden

A devastating study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The event has become both part of history and a haunting vision of what the end of the world may be. On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, shortly after 8 o'clock, a U.S. B-29 flew high over Hiroshima, a small industrial city (pop. 350,000) in southern Japan. Seconds later the entire landscape was lit by a blue white flash that quickly turned into a giant fireball accompanied by powerful shock waves. Death and destruction spread for miles around. Three days later, there was a similar attack on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. For the first and only times, atomic bombs had been unleashed in war.

By today's thermonuclear standards the bombs were puny and primitive, the equivalent of only 12,500 and 22,000 tons of TNT each. But in Hiroshima 140,000 people died on the day of the attack and in the weeks immediately after it. Nagasaki lost 70,000 people. Tens of thousands more were severely injured. Even today, leukemia and other ailments traceable to the radiation exposure continue to take lives.

Last week, as the world marked the 36th anniversary of the bombings, there were renewed appeals for nuclear disarmament, one of them made by the mayor of Hiroshima standing at "ground zero" during memorial services in the city's Peace Park. But the most telling antinuclear message was contained in an extraordinary Japanese scientific study that has just appeared in English.

Titled simply Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Basic Books; $37.50) and prepared under the sponsorship of the two battered cities, it is the work of 34 Japanese doctors, physicists and social scientists. The book uses dry, technical language, with page after page of charts and statistics. Yet it provides the most complete reckoning to date of the damage--physical, medical, social--from atomic attack.

Such a cumulative inventory is long overdue. Though the A-bombings have been the theme of books, memoirs and films, scientific inquiry has been limited. In the immediate postwar years, U.S. occupation authorities openly discouraged filming the devastation or writing about it. When the Japanese regained control, they too resisted appeals for scientific studies, and even today have never passed a basic compensation law for A-bomb victims. Yet through a variety of techniques--autopsies, statistical studies and radiation experiments--Japanese as well as American and European scientists have pieced together the story of the attacks and their grim consequences.

Some of the details are agonizingly familiar: trees and utility poles turned into charred matchsticks by the intense heat (temperatures reached millions of degrees at the centers of the explosions); earthquake-resistant buildings crumpled by the shock waves; human flesh burned 2 1/2 miles from the targets. Less well known, perhaps: the sticky black rain, triggered by hot ash and dust blasted up into the cold air, that showered deadly radioactive fallout on the cities.

There are also reminders of the first encounters with that grisly ailment of the atomic age, so puzzling to its initial victims, known as radiation sickness. Among the early signs: nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, thirst, fever and diarrhea. By the second week, hair began to fall out, the gums became painfully swollen, the white-blood-cell count fell sharply. Severe exposure usually meant death. Lethal rays did not always come directly from the blasts. The explosions produced some 200 different isotopes, most of them radioactive, with varying half-lives. Days after the bombs fell, survivors were exposed to this "hot" debris as they sifted the rubble for missing wives, husbands, children.

Even those who seemed to have safely passed these initial trials soon realized that the threat and damage from such attacks were different from previous bombings. Healing of cuts and burns was slow because of radiation damage to the body's immune system. Unusually thick scars, called keloids, formed over wounds. Survivors experienced a high rate of blood disorder, leukemia and other cancers. There were also signs of premature aging, including so-called atomic-bomb cataracts. Many children born in the days and weeks after the blasts were retarded, microcephalic (with small heads) and stunted in growth.

The damage was not always purely physical. For years after the war, the Japanese conscience was troubled by "Abomb orphans." Some languished in foster homes. Others drifted aimlessly across the countryside and became delinquent.

Survivors faced not only the fear of sudden illness and possible genetic damage, but social prejudices as well, limiting their opportunities for jobs, marriage and normal lives. Some even refused to apply for government medical care lest they become publicly known as A-bomb victims.

The study's authors refuse to accept the U.S. explanation that the bombs were dropped to hasten the war's end and avoid a bloody invasion. Instead, they cling to the questionable theory that the attacks were mainly intended to awe Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In other respects, the study is remarkably free of polemics, though not of ironies. The writers note that many of the victims were Japanese of American birth who had returned to Japan for study and were trapped there by the war. Those of other nationalities who died in the attacks: thousands of Koreans brought to Japan as forced laborers, hundreds of Chinese, some Russians, Germans and Mongolians, even a handful of American P.O.W.s. Most of these were airmen shot down only nine days earlier. When informed by captors that they would be taken to Hiroshima, two are reported to have warned that the city would soon be destroyed by a devastating bomb.

--By Frederic Golden

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.