The Black Reporter Who Exposed a Lie About the Atom Bomb

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/science/charles-loeb-atomic-bomb.html

Charles H. Loeb was a Black war correspondent whose articles in World War II were distributed to papers across the United States by the National Negro Publishers Association. In the article, Mr. Loeb told how bursts of deadly radiation had sickened and killed the city’s residents. His perspective, while coolly analytic, cast light on a major wartime cover up.

The Page 1 article contradicted the War Department, the Manhattan Project, and The New York Times and its star reporter, William L. Laurence, on what had become a bitter dispute between the victor and the vanquished. Japan insisted that the bomb’s invisible rays at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had led to waves of sudden death and lingering illness. Emphatically, the United States denied that charge.

But science and history would prove Mr. Loeb right. His reporting not only challenged the official government line but also echoed the skepticism of many Black Americans, who, scholars say, worried that race had played a role in the United States’ decision to drop the experimental weapons on Japan. Black clergy and activists at times sympathized openly with the bomb’s victims.

(snip)

A search of databases suggests that few if any journalists of Mr. Loeb’s day approached his level of detail and tight focus in telling of the radiation poisoning.

[brush]

1. Makes one wonder if the A-bomb had been ready in time...

would it have been used against Germany, a European nation?

[zipplewrath]

13. Yes

Probably on Berlin, or where ever Hitler was if he was still alive.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

18. Probably, and the U.S. would have lied about its effects there, too.

[Poiuyt]

25. The primary goal of developing the bomb was to use it against Germany

The Americans were terrified that Germany, with its great physicists, would develop the atomic bomb first. As it turns out, they had made very little progress towards its development. When the European campaign ended, the American scientists at Los Alamos thought they wouldn't have to use the bomb. Truman and the generals thought differently.

[Klaralven]

28. The fire bombing of Dresden killed 25,000 and the fire bombing of Tokyo killed 100,000

I think it reflects the bomb load of the British Lancasters versus the American B-29s as well as the size of the cities, rather than any differential solicitude towards the German race versus the Japanese race.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

[Hoyt]

2. Have never believed nukes were necessary to end WWII.

With all our efforts to prevent Iran, North Korea, etc., from developing nukes, we are the only country to have dropped them.

[JohnSJ]

4. Probably not, but after Iwo Jima and Okinawa it saved the lives of Americans preparing for a land

invasion of Japan

[Hoyt]

5. Sorry, invading/occupying wasn't necessary either. We had them surrounded

and starving.

[JohnSJ]

6. We disagree Hoyt. Operation Downfall was canceled because Japan surrendered as a result of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki



https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/376238/

[bsiebs]

9. Didn't need to drop them on cities...

[Hoyt]

24. Exactly. An uninhabited island would have done the trick.

[regnaD kciN]

8. Indeed, it wasn't...

...but we needed to "send a message" to the U.S.S.R., and killing a couple of hundred thousand Japanese civilians barely even qualified as "collateral damage." After all, they didn't count -- they weren't even white!

[ansible]

14. There was a coup attempt against the Emperor AFTER Nagasaki

They were very, very willing to fight to the death even after nuclear weapons were used

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident

[hunter]

26. That wasn't in the cards after the success of the Trinity test.

The plutonium production lines at Hanford were built huge, mostly in fear of Germany doing the same thing.

After Germany surrendered, May 7-8, 1945, and even before the first plutonium bomb was assembled and tested the July following, the plan was to drop atom bombs on Japan, two or three every month, until they surrendered or there was nothing left of their industrial capacity. The remnants of the Japanese Empire were contained.

The plutonium bomb was the bomb of the future because the uranium-235 bombs which everyone knew would work (and did so for the first time tested over Hiroshima) were just too damned expensive and too damned scary, the sort of weapon that could go off in a plane crash or other accident.

The U.S.A. had a hundred and twenty "fat boy" plutonium bombs by 1950, and these were being retired in favor of more sophisticated bomb designs. Once we started building bombs we never stopped.

Japan would have lost the war with or without the atom bomb, and with or without a massive invasion.

I think the bombing of Nagasaki was a highly cynical act. Certain factions in the U.S.A. wanted to see what these plutonium bombs would do to a living city, and they wanted Stalin to see it as well.

The biggest secret of the atom bomb was that it worked.

Knowing that it was possible it was just a matter of having the scientific, technical, and industrial resources to build them.

The Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949. Soviet spies accelerated Soviet bomb building by a couple of years, but not much more than that.

Every nation that has the scientific, technical, industrial resources, and most horribly the political will or power to build atomic bombs has built them.

Hell, the white apartheid government of South Africa built a few atomic bombs, which were quietly dismantled as that bizarre government was collapsing for fear any subsequent anti-apartheid not-white governments would have them.

There's a lot of mythology about the end of World War II in U.S.A. high school textbooks. We don't have to repeat it.

[hardluck]

17. Absolutely necessary? No.

Least bad option? Probably.

The Navy and Army Air Force did not want to invade. Instead, they wanted to blockade Japan from sea and continue fire bombing the cities leading to mass starvation and death. This would have led to more Japanese lives lost then from the atomic bombs.

The army favored Operation Downfall which would also have led to more Japanese dead as well as more allied deaths.

At any point Japan could have surrendered in line with the Potsdam Declaration. It chose not to. It put its faith into the USSR brokering a conditional surrender allowing it to keep at least part of its empire. Stalin played them for time until he was ready to invade China and roll back the IJA. Even after the USSRs declaration of war, Japan would not accept an unconditional surrender. Instead, they were looking for any “win” to allow them to come to the settlement table with some leverage. That didn’t happen but the atomic bombs gave emperor Hirohito a face saving reason to surrender allowing him to finally overcome the stalemate in his cabinet. Even then, after Hirohito’s surrender speech, it was a close run thing.

[zipplewrath]

20. Those of the day disagree

This comes up every year at this time. But the thing to understand is that by the time we dropped the bomb, if Truman hadn't, and it had been discovered, he almost assuredly would have been impeached or otherwise attacked, and probably physically.

The thing to understand is that early on in the war, a tremendous number of men were drafted. The social dislocation is hard to understand these days. But when the war started, it wasn't long before every block, every street, was littered with "blue star" flags indicating a household with someone in uniform. Those blue stars started turning red (injured or captured) very quickly, and by the time we dropped the bomb, every street, every block had a gold star. Everyone knew someone that had died in the war. At it's peak there were something like 19 million men in uniform (in a country of something like 150 million people). And that's just the men. Women were working in the factories, had moved hundreds of miles away to work for the war department. The social dislocation is hard to imagine today. (and one wonders what they'd make of a population that now makes a fuss over wearing a mask). And people were "tired". They were ready for the war to be over. And "ready" really doesn't describe how they felt. Everyone "knew" that the invasion of Japan was coming. "Everyone" knew that it was going to be a blood bath. It was going to D-day, it was going to Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Tarawa all over again. These were amazingly bloody battles and on the mainland it was going to be at least as bad. There was going to be no "French resistance" to help. They wouldn't be "liberating", they would be invading.

Could something else had been done? Possibly. It is important to understand that we "know" more now than they did then. There are three kinds of information in the fog of war. There is the information that's true. There is the information that's false. And there is the information that is true, but believed to be false (and it's converse). There is also a wide variety of motivations behind every decision that is made. There are hundreds of people involved in every decision, each with their own biases, intentions, and motivations. But we had long ago moved into the "total war" concept and by the time of the bomb, the decision that everyone was expecting was that we would use it to end the war just as quickly, and the least deadly for the US, as possible.

It is also important to understand that they knew little of the long term effects of radiation and that the "levels" of exposure considered "safe" were astronomically higher than we understand today. Much of the work that was done on lethality of uranium and plutonium were surrouding things like ingesting and inhaling them. It was focused mostly on the workers that would product the material. In the 50's, we would march soldiers through blast zones within hours of above ground detonation of these weapons. They did this because they knew little of what the long term problems would be.

It's easy to second guess, or arm chair quarterback the decisions made at the time. It is also true that our government and military came to understand the immense risk these weapons posed. But at the time, the vast majority of people involved in war planning and decision making just knew they had a "really big bomb" on their hands.

[Hoyt]

21. Oh, lots of ways to rationalize killing innocent Asians. Did it in VNam too.

Although conventional weapons were deadly enough.

[zipplewrath]

22. "innocent" is a tad strong

They were complicit in so many ways. But they were "civilians" by any reasonable description, as were many of the Germans we bombed.

[Hoyt]

23. Women and children and old folks.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[niyad]

7. KNR

[rickford66]

10. My Dad was getting ready to participate in the invasion of Japan when the bomb dropped.

He was in the Army Air Corp a week after Pearl Harbor and thankfully made it through to the end.

[RobertDevereaux]

11. Mine as well. Stationed in the Philippines.

[SharonAnn]

12. Mine as well, stationed in Hawaii

[FakeNoose]

19. My dad was training as a Navy pilot in 1945

If the war hadn't ended when it did, he would have been flying over Tokyo, maybe even dropping bombs. (The non-nuclear kind.) The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with so many dead - it's sad to think about - but that'd what saved the rest of the Japanese people from dying. They would have fought hand-to-hand combat to the last man. They would not have surrendered had it not been for the atomic bombs. Many Americans would have died it's true, but 10x more Japanese would have died and the result would have been the same. Japan lost the war decisively. Truman made the right decision.

[IowaGuy]

31. My Dad was in the Army Air Corp also....signed up a month before Pearl Harbor

He did not even finish basic training before he was on a troop ship to Australia. He spent the war island hopping north of there up through New guinea and the Philippines, setting up radio stations for Aussie Coast watchers. Often they were setting them up surreptitiously on Japanese held islands. Thankfully, he didn't get into many fire fights, if he did, it meant they screwed up because nobody was supposed to know they were there. He got in enough though, it was clear it affected him profoundly and he struggled w/ depression and what we would call PTSD nowadays. At one point during the war him and another guy were stranded on an island in New Guinea because his rear base had been bombed by the Japanese and his guys did not have the resources to pick him up. They were there for about 30 days, and survived because a local indigenous tribe took them in and hid them from the Japanese and fed them. This tribe were fairly recent converts to Christianity and still led a very primitive existence. Less than 50 year prior they still had customs of cannibalism and head-hunting. Oddly enough, it was one of my fathers best memories of his time over there. They were so kind, caring and treated them so well. War is strange....the horrors are self evident and yet the decency of humanity still breaks through. A white guy from the Ozarks, far removed from the culture of that tribe survived to raise a family because of their basic human decency.

He was sent home a few weeks before the end of the war, because he caught malaria. My Mom and him tried to get married immediately, but he had to wait a couple of weeks, was stuck in California...the military would not release him because he had never completed his certification on rifle training in basic, he had to complete that first to get his papers in order. to be released so he could travel back to Missouri..you can't make crazy shit like that up.

[ansible]

15. They were still using US soldiers as guinea pigs for testing radiation in the 1950s

This is one infamous, horrific example where they sent soldiers straight into the field right after a bomb was detonated.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

16. Shoulda listened to the Black guy I guess

[hunter]

27. My father-in-law did that. He was a guinea pig, experienced an atomic bomb test up close...

... from a hole in the ground and marched towards ground zero as the mushroom cloud was rising above and stuff was burning all around.

These guys were sworn to secrecy and he didn't speak of it, even for a few years past Bill Clinton said he could.

He didn't even tell his mother or his wife.

[ansible]

29. Why did he keep it secret? By the 70s it was obvious soldiers were dying from cancer already

[hunter]

30. The penalties for revealing "atomic secrets" were severe.

In 1996, the U.S. Congress repealed the Nuclear Radiation Secrecy Agreement Act, which rescinded the Atomic Veteran "oath-of-secrecy", thus allowing Atomic-Veterans the opportunity to recount stories of their participation in Nuclear weapon testing and post test event activities, without legal penalty. By this time, however, many thousands of Atomic Veterans, the majority of whom were afflicted with a host of radiation induced health issues, such as cancer, had taken that "secret" with them, to their graves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_veteran

My father-in-law doesn't seem to have suffered any serious health issues related to his participation in atomic testing, but many soldiers were not so lucky.