The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  On August 22, President Tsuno’o died, surrounded by his wife and members of the hospital staff. His injuries had not been severe, but he had never recovered from the strange malady that had afflicted him and so many other people since the bombing. By this time, the people of Nagasaki realized that they were falling prey to a new and evil disease. They called it atomic bomb sickness. Right after the bombing, many survivors were nauseous, threw up, and had diarrhea. The fast-growing cells of their digestive tracts had been killed by the radiation, and their intestines no longer functioned. They became incredibly thirsty and lethargic, sometimes experiencing convulsions and delirium, and began to die. By the week of August 22, when President Tsuno’o died, people exposed to the bomb’s radiation began to die from more widely distributed effects. Their mouths, noses, and rectums bled, and their skin was covered with blotches and spots where blood vessels had burst. They developed fevers and infections. There was little Shirabe and the other doctors who had survived the explosion could do for them.

  On August 28, Shirabe, his wife, and his three daughters went to the hospital to find out what had happened to Koji, the second oldest son in the family. Shirabe guessed that he had been in the anatomy auditorium at the medical school, just north of the hospital. As they approached the burned-out school, they saw hundreds of crows flying in the sky. “Their voices were angry, as if they were cursing the souls of the dead,” Shirabe remembered. Nothing was left of the auditorium except its concrete foundation. They saw mounds of human ashes in the foundation—students who had been listening to the lecture and were cremated in the bomb’s fires.

  Suddenly his daughter called out, “There’s something here.” She had found a remnant from a piece of clothing. They looked and saw the word “Yamamoto” written in black ink on the cloth. That was the son of Shirabe’s eldest sister. He had been drafted to serve in the navy after completing medical school, and he had given his student uniform to Koji before he left. Finding the tag in the ashes meant that all hope was lost. Both of Shirabe’s sons were gone.

  By this time, Shirabe himself had fallen ill. He continued to trudge from house to house to treat patients in the neighborhood, but he had no energy and staggered when he walked. Finally even walking was impossible. Lying in bed, he found small purple spots on his upper arms and thighs. They were subcutaneous hemorrhagic spots from the radiation, he knew. He covered his arms and legs so that his wife would not see them. But when Sumiko glimpsed them anyway, she said, “It must be flea bites. I also have small ones.” He wondered if he should make a will, but he was too weak to speak or even to turn over in bed. He thought that the end was near.

  Then, after about a week, the spots began to change color—from purple to blue to yellow. By the second week in September, he was beginning to think that he might survive. Not long after that, a third-year medical student came to visit. He found a bottle of alcohol in a closet and asked, “Doctor, can I have a drink?”

  Shirabe thought that it might be methyl rather than ethyl alcohol. “If you die as a result, don’t hold me responsible,” he said.

  But the student drank some and did not become ill. “How about a drink, doctor?” he asked.

  Shirabe was worried about damaging his radiation-ravaged liver, but he accepted a cup of alcohol from the student. It was delicious. He felt his body warm and his strength revive. Over the next few days, he drank a small amount of alcohol at breakfast and at dinner every day. That bottle of alcohol was “a savior,” he later wrote. Sumiko noticed that he was looking better. By about September 20, he noticed that the spots on his arms and legs were gone.

  Chapter 18

  NAGASAKI

  WHEN SHIRABE WAS A SCHOOLBOY GROWING UP IN A SMALL TOWN IN western Japan, he loved to learn. He used to stand outside the classrooms of older students so that he could hear their teachers lecture, sometimes calling out answers to the teachers’ questions from the hallway. He never lost that curiosity. It carried him through medical school in Tokyo, through his first jobs as a professor and surgeon in Beijing and Seoul—where the higher salaries helped him support his growing family—and then into his appointment as first professor of surgery at Nagasaki Medical College Hospital.

  After he recovered from atomic bomb disease, Shirabe realized that he now could learn from the people of Nagasaki. That fall he organized a team of other physicians and medical students, and together they developed a survey that they could use to determine the medical effects of the bomb on the residents of the Urakami Valley. Over the next few months, Shirabe and his colleagues interviewed more than 5,000 survivors, gathering information on their burns, injuries, and radiation sicknesses. Their results were among the earliest Japanese-generated data on the effects of atomic bombs on humans.

  They found that within one kilometer of the hypocenter (nearly two-thirds of a mile), almost everyone died, even the few people without obvious injuries. The death rate was lower at the hospital because of its concrete walls, but at the nearby medical college, which consisted largely of wooden buildings, the mortality rate was almost 100 percent. After the deaths caused by the initial blast, the death rate rose to a peak on August 17 and then declined. These deaths “may represent death from secondary shock,” Shirabe and his colleagues wrote in their initial report on the survey, before the effects of radiation on the human body were more fully understood. “This may be an interesting subject for study.”

  Those who were farther away from the hypocenter tended to live a week or two longer than those nearer the blast, but then their mortality rates rose as well. The time to death was greater in those younger than 16 and slightly greater in females than males. Some people as far as two-and-a-half miles from the hypocenter experienced symptoms of what would eventually be recognized as radiation sickness, with the rates declining in the few people surveyed who were farther away.

  Among the survivors who were surveyed, external wounds were more common than burns, with burns somewhat more common in older people who survived than younger people. Almost all the burns among survivors were second-degree burns that left grotesque scars when they healed. The most common injuries among survivors were cuts from broken glass, followed by contusions where they were hit by objects or were propelled into objects.

  The data Shirabe and his colleagues compiled were invaluable in understanding the effects of an atomic bomb on humans, but they did not become publicly available for years. When the US Army took control of Japan in September, it imposed strict censorship on the dissemination of all information from the country, and especially news regarding the atomic bombs. US scientists had largely failed to anticipate the effects of radiation sickness on the survivors of the initial blast, and the military did not want that information to become known. Groves dismissed the few stories that did emerge as propaganda designed to increase sympathy for the Japanese. “The atomic bomb is not an inhumane weapon,” he told the New York Times. “I think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war, and if they don’t like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.”

  Censorship applied to everyone, not just to Japanese scientists. In early September, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune named George Weller managed to extricate himself from a press junket in southern Japan and make his way by train to Nagasaki. There he pretended that he was a US colonel and demanded food, lodging, and transportation. Every night he typed his stories by lamplight and sent them in a package labeled “Chief Censor, American Headquarters” to Tokyo, where he hoped MacArthur’s censors would allow the stories to get out. “Today the writer spent nearly an hour in 15 deserted buildings of the Nagasaki Medical Institute hospital which sit on a hill on the eastern side of the valley,” he wrote on September 8. “Nothing but rats live in the debris-choked halls.” His hopes for publication were in vain. The censors suppressed all his stories and appear to have destroyed the copies they received. Weller kept carbon copies, but they were lost for 60 years until his son found them in a moldy box a few mon
ths after his father’s death.

  In the fall of 1945, the survivors of the Nagasaki bombing began trying to create new lives for themselves. Almost all had lost family members, and many were injured or sick. Many men working in munitions factories in the Urakami Valley were killed, leaving their wives and children destitute. Children who had lost both parents lived on the streets, begging, stealing, and going through garbage bins for food. Without income or any other means of support, many people treated their injured family members at home. Funeral pyres burned for months as bulldozers began to scrape the valley clean.

  The postwar years were a time of great misery for Nagasaki. As writer Susan Southard recounts in her book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War:

  Fourteen or fifteen people often lived in a single room with no furnishings. Running water was still not available, so survivors hauled springwater from the mountains and collected rainwater to boil and drink. Without toilets, people dug holes in the ground outside their shanties and covered them with wooden boards. Without bathtubs, they heated water in large oil drums and bathed standing up. To battle the winter winds, families wore as many layers of donated clothing and blankets as they could, huddling beneath umbrellas around wood-burning hibachi to protect themselves against the rain, sleet, and snow that fell through their makeshift roofs.

  The psychological damage was as grave as the physical damage. Many survivors remembered watching those around them die and being unable to help. Many had disfiguring scars on their faces or bodies. Those who survived without visible injuries or scars were terrified that they had been damaged by the bomb’s radiation and would die of the diseases that had killed so many people they knew. They thought that any children they might have would be deformed, and many refused to marry or were rejected as mates. Those who survived the atomic bombings came to be known as hibakusha, which means explosion-affected people. They were shunned by other people in Japan, and many moved to other parts of the country and tried to hide what had happened to them.

  In 1949 the Japanese legislature passed the Nagasaki International Culture City Construction Law, which provided funding to help rebuild parts of the city that had been damaged. Censorship began to ease. Also in 1949, three years after it was written, Takashi Nagai’s memoir The Bells of Nagasaki was published and became an international bestseller. In the book, Nagai recounts the bombing and how it killed his wife and many of his colleagues, students, and patients. He details his own injuries and radiation sickness and the efforts he made to help other survivors. He describes several young men digging up the bells of the ruined cathedral and ringing them as a message of peace and understanding. “Men and women of the world, never again plan war,” Nagai wrote at the end of his book. “With this atomic bomb, war can only mean suicide for the human race. From this atomic waste the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war!”

  Every year since the bombing the city has held commemorative events on August 9. In 1949, for the first time since the war, thousands of Catholics from Nagasaki and elsewhere marked the anniversary in the ruins of Urakami Cathedral. In the 1950s, the first new buildings opened on the grounds of what was now the hospital of the Nagasaki University School of Medicine. Since then, the remains of the old hospital have been replaced by much larger and more modern buildings.

  SHIRABE SPENT THE REST of his long and productive career at the Nagasaki University School of Medicine. In the 1950s, after becoming director of the Nagasaki University Hospital, he established a relationship with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which later became the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. The commission was established in 1946, at President Truman’s request, by the National Academy of Sciences and its operating arm, the National Research Council, to study the effects of the atomic bombs on Japanese survivors. Though it was widely criticized in Japan and elsewhere for not treating the injuries and illnesses of the hibakusha, the commission provided a way for Shirabe’s early studies and other medical investigations to become public. Today a small museum in the medical college still proudly displays the results of the work that Shirabe and other college physicians and students did after the war.

  Shirabe, like other people in Nagasaki, also committed himself to remembering what happened on August 9, 1945. He became the head of an association of families of students killed by the bomb, and he edited a collection of writings on the experiences of hibakusha that eventually ran to seven volumes. He served for eight years as visiting director of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation while continuing to study the long-term health effects of the bomb’s radiation. He died in 1989, a month before his ninetieth birthday, and soon thereafter was named an honorary citizen of Nagasaki.

  Today, the Urakami Valley has been completely rebuilt, and the city at large contains relatively few reminders of the devastation caused by the atomic bomb. A gray stone monolith in a small park surrounded by trees marks the point beneath where the bomb exploded. A larger park on an adjacent hill, on the site of a prison that was destroyed by the bomb, contains sculptures and monuments sent by governments around the world to celebrate and preserve peace. The Atomic Bomb Museum halfway between the Peace Park and the rebuilt medical college displays artifacts recovered from the wreckage and explains what the atomic bomb did to the city. To the north of the medical college, next to the rebuilt Urakami Cathedral, one of the original cathedral’s bell towers is still lodged into the earth on the banks of the concrete canal that was choked with bodies on August 9, 1945. The rest of the city hums with homes, businesses, traffic, and tourists.

  Yet even today, in quiet corners of the city, vivid reminders of that long-ago event remain. In the tatami room of a house just a mile or so north of the medical school, where Shirabe’s now elderly daughter Choko still graciously greets inquisitive visitors, two oil paintings of young men in uniform hang on the wall. They are her brothers, Seiichi and Koji, killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

  PART 4

  CONFRONTING ARMAGEDDON

  “The total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only absolute guarantee for all of us to be safe from the threat of nuclear annihilation.”

  —Jim Stoffels, peace activist

  Chapter 19

  THE COLD WAR

  AS IN THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES, THE IMMEDIATE REACTION IN Richland to the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan was largely elation. “It’s Atomic Bombs,” proclaimed a special edition of The Richland Villager on August 6, 1945. “It is the greatest force ever harnessed—and may change the course of civilization.”

  For people across the country, the moment they heard about the atomic bomb was seared into their memories, just as later historic events would be. President Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima in a radio address at 11:00 a.m. Washington, DC, time, or 8:00 a.m. in Richland. By then, most of the men had already left for the site, so their wives were the first to hear. They called each other “in a flurry of phone calls which kept the switch boards humming,” The Villager reported. A few were able to reach their husbands at work, and word began to spread through the fuel fabrication facilities, the reactor control rooms, the separation plants. That morning, before leaving for work, Matthias had told his wife to listen to the radio. She was grinding ham for dinner when she heard the news. She burst into tears. “I couldn’t help but believe that God, wearying of this long and tortuous war, had finally, reluctantly, given us this terrible weapon with which to end it.”

  The reporting was murky at first—even Matthias was initially unclear about whether the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had used uranium from Oak Ridge or plutonium from Hanford. But the story quickly came into focus. An entire Japanese city of a quarter million people had been destroyed. Tens of thousands, possibly more than 100,000, were dead.

  People were shocked, excited, hopeful that the war would soon be over—and frightened. An atomic bomb had destroyed a Japanese city, which meant that atomic bombs could destroy other cities, including American citie
s. Even Truman’s initial statement hinted at that possibility: “Under present circumstances it is not intended to divulge the technical processes of production or all the military applications, pending further examination of possible methods of protecting us and the rest of the world from the danger of sudden destruction.” On the evening of the Hiroshima bombing, NBC news commentator H. V. Kaltenborn said in his radio broadcast, “For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.” Two days after the Hiroshima bombing, the Milwaukee Journal published a map showing how much of Milwaukee would be destroyed by an atomic bomb. Radio newscaster Don Goddard observed that the bombing of Hiroshima was like “Denver, Colorado, with a population of 350,000 persons, being there one moment, and wiped out the next.”

  The bombing of Nagasaki just three days after the destruction of Hiroshima created another surge of excitement and fear. The United States seemed to have a ready supply of atomic bombs. Certainly the Japanese could not hold out for long under such an onslaught. In fact, the plutonium and high explosives for a third bomb were still in Los Alamos, though Groves was getting ready to send them to Tinian. But the day after the Urakami Valley was destroyed, President Truman ordered a halt to any more atomic bombings. As Henry Wallace, Truman’s Secretary of Commerce, wrote in his diary, “Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”