The director of the documentary, Mick Jackson, later went on to direct and produce the superb ‘Threads’, also made by the BBC (and which featured some of the FX shots from the QED film). As an aside, I always felt that ‘Threads’ made the better-known, and roughly contemporaneous, US film ‘The Day After’ look like a vicarage tea-party…

Brett, I’m not sure how widely speculated about the effects of radioactivity were, though there is good reason to say ‘not much’ for the first few years after Hiroshima/Nagasaki. There is a fascinating book called ‘Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age’ by Catherine Caufield which discusses the whole shebang. The US observers who entered Hiroshima after Burchett claimed there was no radioactivity (the ‘New York Times’ account was headed ‘No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Rain’), and in general, such talk was pooh-poohed by the authorities. As Caufield writes:

‘Concern about radiation played no part in the public feeling about the atomic bomb. In the weeks after Hiroshima, radiation was not mentioned in a single one of more than 200 letters about the atomic bomb published in American newspapers. In this respect, the world underestimated the power of atomic bombs. Almost everyone thought that atom bombs, for all their awe-inspiring destructive force, were simply super-powerful versions of conventional bombs…’

I would think that talk of enhanced radiation weapons (a very perceptive forecast by Arthur C, foreshadowing as it did the so-called ‘neutron bomb’) and radioactive mutants was very much in the realm of science fiction. It’s not really until the 1950s that you see the effects of radiation entering the public consciousness (one thinks of the welter of, usually cheap, sci-fi films with post-atomic war mutants and the like).

Thanks for that, interesting about Burchett’s piece. I gather from de Groot’s book that this was a bit of an anomaly though? Was anyone talking about atomic mutants and enhanced radiation weapons at this time? Or was this sort of speculation still in the purview of science fiction writers?

CK:

Thanks, that doco looks great. Might be a post in it …

You can barely go past an intro like “I write this as a warning to the world,” after all.

US journalist George Weller showed similar independence of thought and courage, undertaking a similar perilous journey to Nagasaki as Burchett did to Hiroshima, but his conclusions were quite different.

I should point out that his stories were never published. The silly bugger, having bucked the system by travelling to Nagasaki in the first place, then submitted his stories to Macarthur’s office in Tokyo for clearance, with a fairly predictable result.

From a NY Times report of 2005 after the yarns were found: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E6DE123BF933A15755C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

From NYT:

‘When Mr. Weller arrived in Nagasaki on Sept. 6, 1945, the atomic bomb, he wrote, seemed ”a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon,”

”Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader flash and a more powerful knockout,” his account said. (The first American use of a nuclear weapon occurred three days earlier, against Hiroshima.)

By telling those he encountered that he was an American colonel, Mr. Weller acquired an official guide, driver and place to stay. He also began to witness the bomb’s different character and long-lasting effects.

”Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out,” a dispatch of his said, ”are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures with them. About one in five is heavily bandaged,” but none, he said, were ‘’showing signs of pain.”

”Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats,” Mr. Weller wrote. ”They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband, shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.”

Mainichi Shimbun bought the articles from Mr. Weller’s son, who hopes to publish the rest of them, about 25,000 words in all, in a book.

George Weller was already a well-known, sometimes swashbuckling, reporter before going to Nagasaki. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for an article about an emergency appendectomy performed on a submarine. He was detained for two months by the Gestapo in Europe and had many other narrow escapes during the war. ‘

You might want to have a squizz at this BBC doco from teh ’80’s (Oh! The graphics!) testing official Home Office advice on how one can quickly and easily survive a nuclear attack, and compare it to The Blitz.

At least back in the ’40’s the government provided bomb-shelters.

I’m guessing it was made following the introduction of Trident and use of US air-launched cruise missiles operating from bases on the stationery British aircraft carrier:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vdzyqQIEAI

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing the year before, Wilfred Burchett, the first unescorted westerner to enter the stricken city, had written a headline-grabbing article for his paper, ‘The Daily Express’: I WRITE THIS AS A WARNING TO THE WORLD

‘In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb,’ he wrote, ‘people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm - from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.’

His story was published around the world, but even before Burchett, a former Manhattan Project scientist, Prof Harold Jacobson of Columbia University, had written an article carried by several US newspapers on 8 August 1945, warning of the effects of radiation. He claimed (wrongly) that Hiroshima would remain uninhabitable for 70 years. However, he also wrote that, ‘Rain falling on the area will pick up the lethal rays and will carry them down to the rivers and the sea. And animal life in these waters will die… Investigators in a contaminated area will become infected with secondary radiation which breaks up the red corpuscles in the blood. People will die much the same way that leukemia victims do.’

Some of Jacobson’s predictions were exaggerated, partly because the bomb was detonated in an airburst, which somewhat mitigated the generation of fallout. Jacobson was rubbished by the military and Oppenheimer, all of whom had come to realise the dangers of fallout, but were desperate to play it down. This essentially grew out of the secrecy surrounding the bomb project. In the months before the Trinity shot of July 1945, the Manhattan Project scientists had come to realise the possible effects of fallout on civilians in New Mexico. However, militray secrecy precluded an evacuation of the area, and so they basically trusted to luck that no-one would be adversely affected. Of course later, once the bomb had become known to the world, there was an equal relectance to admit to any radiation effects on the Japanese bomb victims for fear of accusations of using an inhumane weapon.

There were, therefore, conflicting noises concerning nuclear weapon radiation with the authorities, on the one hand, downplaying it, and journalists and scientists, on the other, discussing it in public from very early on.

In fact, if you go back further, Frisch and Peierls had suggested in 1940 that an atomic explosion might produce dangerous radioactive byproducts. And, of course, there had long been precedents of workers using radioactive substances suffering disproportionately from leukemia and specific cancers (not only early scientific researchers using x-rays, radium, etc., but also watch-dial painters, who used radium-based luminous paints, and who used to wet the tips of their brushes with their mouths and consequently suffered high rates of jaw cancers and the like).