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17 June 2005
Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:03:00 GMT Report on Nagasaki just after the atom bomb hitvia Kjell Olsen2531 days agoAs one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation. 1
Men, woman and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. 4
Disease X, as it was called, baffled most Japanese Doctors, because in certain cases it resembled radiation poisoning, but in others light burns just kept spreading over the skin and eventually killed the patient.
At first the a-bomb didn’t appear so impressive…
The U.S. government at the time wanted to play down the effects radiation had on health and feared that Weller’s story would affect American public opinion and it possibly affected development of a nuclear arms race. >
On the same day, Weller visited two Nagasaki hospitals and realized the symptoms peculiar to radiation poisoning. He wrote of seeing a woman who had initially suffered only a minor burn, yet was now unable to speak and her legs and arms were speckled with tiny red spots. >
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