Watch Out for “Fallout”!

December 31, 2020 at 4:12 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Tags: nuclear war

(The following is a review that appears in the Winter 2021:125 edition of Kerux, the newsletter of Pax
Christi Metro New York.)

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.  By Lesley M.M Blume.185 pp. Simon and Schuster. 2020. $27.00.

Just before the seventy-fifty anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, I took my copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima down from the bookshelf where it had been for years and read it. As an old friend was given to saying, I mostly don’t read my books; I feel warmly toward them.

But with Hiroshima, I decided it was time. And when I read it, I was blown away, primarily by Hersey’s brilliant interweaving of the personal, devastating stories of five Hiroshima residents who underwent the catastrophe. 

So when I heard Lesley Blume being interviewed on “Fresh Air” about her new book, Fallout, which documents how John Hersey uncovered the details of the effects of the US bombing of Hiroshima and the massive cover-up of that bombing, I had to go out and buy a copy. 

Blume is a journalist and an award-winning non-fiction writer. She begins Fallout by laying out the details of the bombing of Hiroshima and the media’s early coverage of the news, as well as how the government convinced the public that the bomb was a conventional weapon and downplayed the effects of radiation. She then follows Hersey’s journey to Hiroshima in May 1946, almost a year after the bombing. 

Blume also details the significant challenges that faced Hersey and the New Yorker editor, Wallace Shawn, regarding the publication of Hiroshima, navigating, as they had to, the rabbit warrens of federal approval. But when they did master those challenges, it’s hard to overstate the impact of the publication of Hiroshima, first in one entire issue of the New Yorker the following December, and subsequently in the millions of copies sold in English and many other languages.

Hersey played a major role in helping to prevent nuclear war since the end of World War II, and his book has inspired generations of activists. This is so, in large part, because he told the overlapping stories of the effects of the bombing on the lives of five actual human beings, “victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves,” He enabled them “to speak for themselves,” as Nick Turse notes in his detailed “Tom Dispatch” review of the Blume volume. (https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176753/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_one_hundred_second

The story Blume tells of Hersey’s writing and publishing Hiroshima is itself a galvanizing read. Yet her emphasis on the government cover-up of the dire effects of nuclear war is now more important than ever, because we are in a new—or perhaps an ongoing—era of such obfuscation. You are perhaps unaware, for example, because almost everyone is, that the threat of nuclear war, and the massive build-up of nuclear weapons after the previous limited downsizing of our nuclear arsenal, was hardly mentioned in the recent presidential campaigns or their news coverage. 

Yet Donald Trump and his administration were hell-bent on pulling the US out of various nuclear treaties that had modestly lessened the nuclear threat for some years, while the military budget has expanded steadily since well before that administration.  A billion dollars went into research last year on something called “hypersonic weapons systems.” (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/national-pride-stake-russia-china-united-states-race-build-hypersonic-weapons) They are named that because they travel so much faster than the speed of sound that they can “dodge defenses and keep an adversary guessing about the target.” This at a time when the federal government failed to support states, local governments, and struggling families during the pandemic.

Is it any wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts the Doomsday Clock at one hundred seconds to midnight, closer than it has ever been since they started using the clock in 1947?

I imagine that a lot of us are working hard on very important issues like the effects of the pandemic, ending wars, and Black Lives Matter.  But we also need to start organizing and working relentlessly to change the behavior of the US government on nuclear weapons.  The survival of humanity depends on it.

*https://tomdispatch.com/nick-turse-one-hundred-seconds-till-the-apocalypse/

** https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/national-pride-stake-russia-china-united-states-race-build-hypersonic-weapons