and Nagasaki, many who survived these, because they were protected or sufficiently distant from the hypocenter, later sickened and died from exposure to radiation. At the end of June 1946 the US Strategic Bombing Survey, chosen by the president on VJ Day to analyse the impact of bombing on Japan, issued a report titled ‘The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. Survey members had studied medical records and talked to medical personnel who had struggled to treat the injured in the weeks and months following the bombings. Contrary to Farrell’s claim, and contrary to the conclusion of Stafford Warren, one of Farrell’s team physicians who had later testified to the Senate Atomic Energy Committee that radiation was the cause of 7-8 percent of deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the survey estimated that at least twice that many—15-20 percent—had died from radiation poisoning. With a longer perspective, the committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, formed at the request of the mayors of both cities, issued in 1979 a lengthy report that included statistically detailed information about the effects of radiation on those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the fateful days or immediately thereafter. The committee found that many who survived blast and fire were exposed to high doses of radiation. For example, an unprotected person 1,200 meters from the hypocenter got 95 rads of gamma rays and 59 rads of neutrons. This was a good deal more than enough to cause leukemia (100 rads in total was considered a dangerous dosage)—and, indeed, between 1965 and 1971 the mortality-by-leukemia rate of those so exposed was seven times greater than that for the rest of Japan. The mortality rate by leukemia for those arriving in Hiroshima within three days of the bombing was three times higher than the national average. Survivors also suffered high rates of thyroid, breast, lung, gastric, and colon cancer, blood disorders, and cataracts. Babies in utero whose mothers were exposed to radiation were in disproportion spontaneously aborted, stillborn, or born with microencephaly or severe retardation.56
The precise number of people who were killed by the atomic bombs will never be known. One is torn between thinking that it is vitally important to estimate as best one can, to try to account for all the people who lost their lives, and an uncomfortable sense that the ongoing dispute over numbers is somehow obscene. Let us, then, be brief. In August 1946, a year after the bombings, the Information Department of the Hiroshima City Office estimated that 118,661 civilians and approximately 20,000 military personnel had died to that point. Among the hurt were 30,524 rated as ‘seriously injured’ and another 48,606 ‘slightly injured’. Many of those in the first category presumably died subsequently from their injuries. In Nagasaki the toll seems to have been around 70,000 killed, virtually all of them non-combatants. It is perhaps worth recalling that some 90,000 were killed in the incendiary raids on Tokyo in the spring of 1945.57
Hiroshimans had counted themselves blessed that their city had for the most part been left alone. In the hours after the atomic bombing, they worried that the Americans had more terrible things in store for them: poison gas or a ‘cold bomb’ that would ‘freeze everything’, even a bomb that would release ‘rotten pigs’ that would destroy what remained of the ravaged ecosystem. Before surrender the Americans no doubt regarded such rumor-mongering as salutary; in its wake, and especially in the light of growing criticism of their having used the bomb, they sought to limit the spread outward from the bombed cities of both wild gossip and genuine pathology reports alike. The occupation authority, headed by the Supreme Commander for the Allies in the Pacific (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, attempted to censor materials that concerned the bomb, though it did so with an inconsistency that will be familiar to students of bureaucracy everywhere. The writer Tamiki Hara,