Hiroshima: The media fallout

Understanding that the countless dead from the nuclear holocaust which was created from
“(a) bomb (that) exploded 580m above the ground. The air temperature at the point of explosion reached several million degrees Celsius. A few millionths of a second after the explosion, the fireball began to spread out, reaching a diameter of about 23m within 1/10,000th of a second with a temperature of 300,000C. Within 0.3 seconds, the fireball grew to more than 200m wide and released heat rays that devastated the city.”

When these sun rays of radiation filled fission eclipsed all life in Hiroshima this was just the beginning. The media fallout can be considered as ruinous. From the moment that images of Japanese citizens were scorched into rock and buildings reformed into there atomic particles the media was censored.

Within the hellish agony of thousands were differing reports. First was the report presented by George Weller and Wilfred Burchett. Both were affiliated with the Chicago Daily News. Burchett, while sitting in an atomic earthen hole wrote, “"In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, 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."

This plague started a war between Macarthur’s censor board and journalists. The truth about the aftermath of the atomic bombs and the need to create an alternative reality in which "the Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. ... Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."

The symptoms to which William L. Laurence called fiction now are clear truths about radiation fallout. Laurence one of the first true soldiers in the filed of embedded reporting was called on by the military to clear the air out the mistruths and lies by Weller and Burchett. For which he was rewarded handsomely with a Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

War in all its trappings must be made public. No matter how cruel or inhuman war is it must be revealed so that people may read, see and listen to the consequences. Why is this necessary? It is necessary for the preservation of future generations. It is important to calibrate the destruction within the confines of human suffering. Thus it is essential that the media in all its forms be made available for posterity.

Many may stray from the point of this review. Some may feel that I am siding with the Japanese during a global conflict against fascism. To the contrary I am highlighting the need to stop fascism in all its forms including the most corrosive: media.