MB Civic

Mitchell in The Nation …

When the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete … Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once said in an interview that the “nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” But Nagasaki was “forgotten” from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship … The reporter was George Weller .. for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur’s censorship office in Tokyo .. Following his hospital visits, [Weller] would describe “Disease X,” and victims, who have “neither a burn or a broken limb,” wasting away with “blackish” mouths and red spots, and small children who “have lost some hair.”

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