Censored Reports On Postwar Nagasaki Surface
Weller called the city "a wasteland of war." He found neighborhoods flattened and factories destroyed. Weller described the city, saying, "Look at the pushed-in facade of the American Consulate, three miles from the blastŐs center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way."
The bomb killed more then 70,000 people when dropped on Nagasaki. It was developed and manufactured at Los Alamos National Laboratory, located 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Weller reported on a mysterious sickness that the doctors called Disease X. At one hospital, patients were dying at a rate of 10 per day, some with known radiation related symptoms and others with what seemed like no symptoms at all. Weller reported, "The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed ... that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their eyes." The unseen and mysterious nature of this affliction made the disease difficult for doctors to treat.
Weller's reports detail the devastation of an atomic blast and its effects as they manifest in both the health and spirit of a people. MacArthurŐs censorship kept this report unseen, so that the repercussions of atomic warfare were hidden from the American public. Without adequate information about the negative effects of radiation available to them, the nuclear arms race flourished.
After Weller's death in 2002, his son found carbon copies of the reports from Nagasaki. The reports were released as the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches. A series of community events have already been held in Santa Fe to observe this anniversary.
For example, Hiroshima survivor, Shigeko Sasamori recently visited Santa Fe and spoke of her memories and experiences of living after the bomb. She was thirteen when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and has since undergone over thirty surgeries to repair her body, which was battered by the blast. Sasamori said, "I feel it is important for people to know. So many people do not know what happened at that time. And I feel it is everybody's responsibility to make a good world. So ... therefore, not using nuclear weapons and not making war."
Future local events are being planned by the Los Alamos Peace Project, Pax Christi New Mexico, Los Alamos Study Group and the Upaya Zen Center. For more information, contact CCNS at 986-1973.
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