Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [138]
The surrender announcement, the end of the Emperor’s public silence, brought no immediate relief to those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yoshio Nishina had arrived in Hiroshima on the 8th, his trip delayed for a day by a faulty transport plane and the government’s evident lack of eagerness to learn what had happened. Nishina strongly suspected that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb, and felt that, if he was right, he and the Riken scientists should take their own lives out of shame for having failed. His investigation, begun the next morning, quickly confirmed his suspicions. He located the hypocenter and picked through the ruins of the city, gathering soil and water sample for analysis back in Tokyo and discovering packets of exposed X-ray film at the former sites of hospitals and photo shops. He met military officials to discuss radiation illness; he could offer no other help. He left for Nagasaki on the 10th, then returned to the Riken just after the Emperor had made his radio announcement. He told his colleagues that, if the Americans could build an atomic bomb, so could they, and they should set to work with his cyclotron. Gone was any talk of suicide. But four months after he had visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nishina’s skin broke out in blotches, the result, he thought, of the probing he had done in radioactive areas. He would die of cancer in 1951.53
It took the Americans a month to send a team to see Hiroshima for themselves. Leslie Groves was interested in knowing more about what the bomb had wrought, and he was concerned about a swelling chorus of criticism of the bombings at home and abroad. He dispatched to Japan his deputy, General Thomas Farrell, along with nearly thirty officers and enlisted men, including a number of physicians. Separate groups were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima team included Los Alamos scientists Philip Morrison and Robert Serber, and it looked altogether serious, equipped with Geiger counters and more sensitive electroscopes and moving briskly through the streets of the shattered city. Members of the team took photographs of the destruction. Morrison calculated, on the basis of shadows burned into concrete walls, that the bomb had exploded at its intended height. No one found lingering radioactivity, and a Japanese guide helpfully pointed out that lotuses in the moat surrounding army headquarters were growing once more. The teams rendezvoused in Tokyo, where Farrell called a news conference. The dying in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was largely over, he said. There was no radioactivity left on the ground; the height of the explosion had ensured that death would come only by blast or fire, as the Los Alamos scientists had predicted. When he was challenged by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who had just returned from Hiroshima and had seen people dying quickly as their skin turned blue and blood streamed from their ears, Farrell waved dismissively. The patients were ‘victims of blast and burn, normal after any big explosion’. Burchett had succumbed to ‘Japanese propaganda’. (Groves himself would admit that some had perished from radiation poisoning, but remarked, scandalously, that this was ‘a very pleasant way to die’.)54
Emiko Nishii, a 16-year-old girl, came to the Communications Hospital and Dr Hachiya’s care on 28 August. She complained of‘general malaise, petechiae [bluish skin blotches], and inability to sleep’. Like many others, she had seemed healthy enough after surviving the bomb, apart from some dizziness and nausea, and after a week or so had returned to work, despite overall weakness and persistent diarrhea. On the 23rd, her hair began to fall out; four days later she developed more petechiae, severe abdominal pain, and ‘restlessness’. Her pulse weakened, her temperature rose to 1040, her breath grew labored. She died, ‘an agonized appearance on her face’, on the 29th.55
Wilfully or not, Farrell had been wrong about radioactivity. While it was true that blast and fire caused most of the casualties in Hiroshima