Scientists, the Bomb, and the Responsibility for Nuclear Disarmament
Shoji Sawada
Dear friends, first I would like to express my deep appreciation for giving me the chance to speak at this important meeting both as a survivor of the A-bombing and as a Japanese physicist.
The Tragedy of the Atomic Bombing
Fifty-nine years ago, on August 6, a uranium bomb was exploded over the city of Hiroshima. In that instant, a huge amount of gamma rays turned the air into a ‘fireball’, a plasma state. At first, a large number of gamma rays and neutrons penetrated human beings. Soon after, the heat rays from the fireball burned people alive, turning many into instant charcoal. The expanding fireball produced a shock wave, which, with the blast, leveled buildings, trapping those inside, who burned alive from fire created by the heat rays. People tried to escape, their burned flesh hanging from their bodies like rags. Away from the hypocenter, ‘black rain,’ ‘black soot,’ and invisible particles fell, causing both internal and external exposure. People who wandered from place to place close to the hypocenter to rescue or search for family members received external and internal exposure from residual radiation. Survivors, including those who did survive the burns and injuries, soon suffered from acute radiation diseases, such as loss of hair, diarrhea, and internal bleeding due to the effects of primary and residual radiation, and they died one after another.[1]
Three days later, on August 9, a plutonium bomb was detonated over the city of Nagasaki, and the same disaster was repeated.
Later, survivors suffered from delayed radiation injuries, leukemia, liver ailments, and various types of cancer. Even now, 59 years later, many of the surviving victim’s lives, minds, and livelihood are still being consumed.
Now I would like to discuss the concerns of scientists for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the cover-up policy of the nuclear powers, who neglect the damage as a result of radiation effects from the use of nuclear weapons and hide it to justify the possession of nuclear weapons.
Cover-up Policy of the US on Nuclear Damage
Shortly after the beginning of Japan’s occupation, on September 6, 1945, Brigadier General T. Farrel, who was a commander of the research commission of the Manhattan Project, gave a press interview in Tokyo and published a statement that “In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at present, the beginning of September, anyone for death has already died, and no one received a dose to make him suffer from atomic radiation.” To an objection raised by a journalist, Farrel made a counter-argument: “The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated at such high altitude that no radiation remained, and that even if some people died later, it was because of injuries sustained at the time of explosion.” This statement is completely against the facts, although not entirely determined by the policy at that time. Scientists in the Manhattan Project, including Farrel, genuinely believed that any person close enough to the explosion to receive radiation damage would immediately have been killed by collapsing bricks first.
On September 19, 1945, the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers (GHQ) issued the press code that controlled and forbade publication of press and literature concerning the atomic bomb. This is because the government of the US was concerned about the international reaction to the use of such a bomb. The restrictions ended in 1952 when the San Francisco Treaty went into effect. This is the beginning of the US policy of the cover-up of radiation damage, especially of the problems of internal exposure by residual radiation.
The GHQ ordered the Japanese Government to cooperate with the Manhattan District Research Team and hand over all results of the Abomb damage research done before the occupation. The results of Japanese scientists just after the bombing were therefore passed to the US. Late in September 1945, the US Army and Naval Surgeon Group organized the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan. They made the Medical Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University to collaborate and investigated the bomb effects for about a year. All collected material and data was brought to the United States, including the data which was evidence for the effects of residual radiation. In 1950, the report The Effects of Atomic Weapons was edited by scientists of the Los Alamos Science Laboratory, the Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission. The distorted description in this report contradicted the real facts as it claimed that there was nothing attributable to fallout of the atomic bomb explosions in the air of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission
In the last years of the 1940s, the US adopted a definite world policy to govern the world in terms of nuclear weapons and by necessity was driven to study the effects on nuclear bombs, especially the effects of primary radiation, on the human body. On November 26, 1946, President Truman directed the National Academy of Sciences to found the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). In 1950, after some preparatory investigations, the ABCC set up permanent institutions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and began with the examination of atomic bomb survivors. Due to the occupation character of the ABCC and frequent changes of the US expert staff as well as bad feelings among the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the activities of the ABCC as a whole became stagnant around 1955. Following the so-called Francis Committee’s recommendation, which was based on a review of ABCC activities, the ABCC started the Adult Health Study on 20,000 survivors in 1958 and the Life Span Study on 100,000 survivors in 1959. In 1975, the ABCC was closed and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) was opened, but RERF took over ABCC’s staff, institutions, and projects as well as the inherent problems of the ABCC.
Research on the Damage of Atomic Bombing
A comprehensive survey by the Special Committee for Investigation and Research, which was established by the Japanese Academic Council, on the damage caused by the atomic bombs, was published in 1953 at the end of the US occupation. Later research concerning survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had mainly been conducted at a local level by individuals or small groups of medical doctors and scientists. Although these studies obtained many valuable results, most of these studies had been abandoned or neglected as statistically insignificant because of their small scale compared with the massive research done by the ABCC. It is from the “International Symposium on the Damage and After-Effects of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, organized by non-governmental organizations and held in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in 1977, in the context of nuclear disarmament campaigns, that the damage caused by atomic bombings received comprehensive attention. Many scientists, among them physicists, experts on radiation biology, human and social sciences, as well as many peace activists from Japan and overseas attended the conferences and discussed the damage and after-effects of nuclear weapons in great detail.
The Bravo Hydrogen Bomb Test and Scientists
The US conducted the hydrogen bomb test ‘Bravo’ on the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954. Fallout from this bomb test caused severe radiation damage to the fishermen of ‘The 5th Lucky Dragon’ boat, which was a large shock to the people of Japan. I was greatly shocked as a physics student that physics, after all, produced a weapon a thousand times more destructive than the Abomb. This moved me to join the movement against nuclear weapons as a physicist. The shock of this Bikini incident created the nation-wide movement against atomic and hydrogen bombs, the first grassroots movement of its kind in Japan. This movement, in turn, gave birth to the first World Conference against A & H Bombs in Hiroshima in August 1955, and the World Conferences have been continued until the present.
Supported by this nation-wide movement, scientists persuaded the Japanese government to send an investigation ship, and they found that the contamination of the ocean caused by fallout from nuclear tests was more widespread and more serious than expected. The US also investigated radiation contamination but did not publish their results and continued to keep them secret. Moreover, the residents of the Marshall Islands were not informed of their exposure conditions and were used as guinea pigs to research radiation effects.
These investigations by Japanese scientists uncovered that the development of hydrogen bombs made this stage of humankind run into one in which the extermination of humankind themselves and of all life on Earth became a real possibility. Dr. Albert Einstein was informed about the results of the research on the radioactive fallout of the H-bomb tests by Japanese scientists. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 states the dangerous situation of radioactive fallout as follows:
“… Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radioactive particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fishermen and their catch of fish. No one knows how widely such lethal radioactive particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with bombs might quite possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many Hbombs are used there will be universal death – sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.”
Dr. Hideki Yukawa signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto to show his support, and Japanese scientists welcomed this with great enthusiasm. Dr. Einstein’s main theme is that “the aim to avoid a world catastrophe must be a top priority over any other aims”, which is considered the “new morality” of the atomic age. Dr. Yukawa called it “Einstein’s Principle.”
Pugwash and Kyoto Conference of Scientists
Cenotaph in Hiroshima
In response to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a meeting of scientists, had been held since 1957.
In 1975, a small Pugwash Symposium was held for the first time in Japan. Dr. Yukawa, suffering from cancer, left the hospital in a wheel chair and made the opening speech of the symposium. In this speech, he appealed to Pugwash to go back to the basics of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Dr. Shinichiro Tomonaga proved with strong logic and argument that the nuclear arms race would go on without end as long as the nuclear deterrence theory was followed, and he led the discussion of the symposium. At Dr. Tomonaga’s suggestion, all participants watched a five-hour film on the “Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki” on two nights. The film, which had been brought from the US, had a big effect on scientists from overseas, and many changed their position after seeing this film. After the symposium, most of participants signed the “Yukawa-Tomonaga Manifesto,” which criticized the nuclear deterrence theory. Among these scientists, Dr. Joseph Rotblat, who was the only scientist to desert from the Manhattan Project after having been informed of its real aim, was involved from the beginning, and he was the Secretary-General of Pugwash at that time. However, it took time for Pugwash to move from the deterrence theory as a whole before Dr. Rotblat took the president post and played his leading role in the 1990s.
Pugwash held its first annual meeting in Japan in Hiroshima, on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The scientists who attended were all invited to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum, and were asked later of their impressions of the photos, materials, etc. They unanimously said: “We thought we had a rather powerful imagination, but the exhibits we saw were beyond imagination. We have always had discussions about what happened in the atmosphere above the mushroom cloud, but the photos and exhibits we saw showed the true picture of what happened under the mushroom cloud.” Pugwash has since then confronted the nuclear deterrence theory in statements of the Pugwash Council. Pugwash and its president, Dr. Joseph Rotblat, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Pugwash has now embraced the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, of which the main aim is the abolition of nuclear weapons and an end to all war.
Studies on the Effects of Radiation and Scientists
Just recently, in spite of their old age, 161 survivors joined the collective lawsuit against the Japanese government in twelve district courts. The complaint is that the Japanese government should no longer refuse to certify radiation disease to survivors who have been worried about their health for the past 59 years, which has upset their lives. This lawsuit is a kind of struggle for the recovery of their human rights. Now, the number of atomic bomb survivors who have a survivor’s notebook is almost 280,000, but the number of those certified is just over 2,000, i.e. less than 0.8% of the survivors. The reason for this is that the criteria of A-bomb disease certification by the government in no way reflect the actual condition of the survivors.
For more than one year, I tackled this problem and realized that at the roots of this problem there lies the nuclear policy of the US government which has denied the effects of residual radiation, especially the effects of internal exposure. Combining this with the nuclear policy and the survivors’ lawsuits, I was forced to consider strongly the responsibility of scientists.
The primary radiation caused acute external irradiation of the survivors, while the residual radiation exposed them to both acute external and continuous internal irradiation. The ‘black rain’ is famous as the fallout which is a special phenomena caused by the high humidity of summer in Japan. It never occurred at the Nevada and Semipalatinsk nuclear test sites where the radioactive materials contained in the fireball became invisible tiny radioactive particles. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the radioactive ‘black soot’ fell in wide regions as survivors told witnessed. This fallout soot and fine particles would be carried away by wind or washed out by rain and after considerable time could no longer be measured physically. The only possible way to estimate the effects of fallout would be to analyze various results of investigation in the incident rate of the acute radiation disease among survivors. All investigations show that in 2-4 km or more distance, primary radiation of the atomic bomb could hardly cause acute diseases such as depilation, which occurred at a significant rate. No other explanation for this fact can be considered but fallout. On the basis of relations between the incident rate of acute radiation disease and exposure dose, I made an estimate of the exposure effects and found that the external exposure to primary radiation was the main effect for acute radiation disease in the region up to about 1.5 km from the hypocenter of Hiroshima, while for areas beyond 1.5 km fro the hypocenter, the major effects came from internal exposure caused by taking tiny fallout particles into the body.
Radiation Effects Research Today
In the examinations conducted by the ABCC and the successor organization RERF, the posture of the survivors and the shielding effect at the instant of bombing were investigated thoroughly, but the survivors’ behavior after the bombing not at all. This shows that initially the examination was mainly focused on the primary radiation effects.
Furthermore, recent epidemiological RERF studies defined the survivors who were exposed to a primary radiation dose of less than 0.005 Sv (on the basis of the “Atomic Bomb Radiation Dosimetry System 1986,” DS86) as control cohort, that is as a non-exposure group, and studied the higher mortality rate among survivors from delayed radiation injuries, such as cancer, compared with that of the control cohort. According to the estimates of DS86, a primary radiation exposure of less than 0.005 Sv corresponds to a distance of 2.7 km from the hypocenter of Hiroshima. In reality, however, people in this area received a continuous internal exposure by taking radioactive fallout into the body, and it is estimated that this cause for acute radiation disease is about 100 times larger than that of the primary radiation. It is a natural result that the criterion of A-bomb disease based on the epidemiological examination of the RERF, which assumes zero effect of the fallout to the distant survivors, are far from the actual conditions of survivors.
From a similar study of the incidence rate of acute radiation disease among the entrant survivors, those who entered into Hiroshima for rescue work or to search for their families after the explosion, it is found that the effects of internal exposure due to the induced residual radioactive materials are much larger than those of external exposure. Leaving aside US policy, the epidemiological studies by the RERF consider only the effects of primary radiation and neglect the effects of residual radiation. The research projects of the ABCC were planned under a policy which does not take account of the effects of residual radiation. There are many scientists who do not recognize the effects of internal exposure of residual radiation of the atomic bombing even now because they are familiar with the results obtained from such biased research.
The Bush administration, going against the “unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the elimination of nuclear weapons,” agreed upon by the nuclear weapons states at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, promotes a “preemptive attack” strategy with the use of nuclear weapons as an option. They engage in the research and development of “usable nuclear weapons,” such as ”mini-nukes” and “earth-penetrating nuclear weapons.” Contrary to the claim of the US government, that the accompanying damage would be reduced by earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, in reality they will produce another “hell on Earth,” different from Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to much stronger and huger amount of residual radioactivity as compared to atmospheric explosions. When it comes to thinking about “usable nuclear weapons,” there exists a grave responsibility of scientists who did not tell the truth to the decision makers by neglecting the severe effects of internal exposure and residual radiation. By clarifying the real damage by radiation among the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as among the nuclear victims worldwide scientifically, it will become clear that the use of nuclear weapons – no matter how small – must never again be allowed, which will lead to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Our scientists have the responsibility to appeal to the public for the abolition of nuclear weapons and an end to all war on the basis of truth and from the viewpoint of all humankind, which necessarily excludes the constraint of research objectives by any government.
Conclusion
Many Japanese scientists have been engaged in research work on the basis of a determination “never to be subject to research for military purposes,” which was adopted by the Science Council of Japan in 1949. This determination is a response of scientists to the Constitution of Japan which renounces armaments from a reflection of Japanese aggression wars and anticipates a war-free world as the future direction of humankind.
In Asia, the framework of peacekeeping, friendship, and cooperative relations is rapidly breaking away from the dangerous framework of world strategy of the US. Then the peace climate in Asia around Japan can rapidly change, and the principles of the Constitution of Japan will play their part more easily. The problem of North Korea as well as the issue of missile defense should be discussed on the basis of this climate change. Instead of leaving room for this development, however, the Japanese government sent the Self-Defense Forces to support the Iraqi occupation by the US, which breaks the Charter of the United Nations. The Japanese ruling circles strengthened their efforts to amend the current Constitution.
In this situation, I think it is important to talk about the future vision of mankind with young scientists, engineers, and students who aim to do research work in the future. Furthermore, it is necessary to appeal to the scientists who are involved in the research and development of nuclear weapons to reconsider their jobs from the viewpoint of all humankind and to notify that their jobs are contrary to the “unequivocal undertaking” to accomplish the elimination of nuclear weapons, agreed in the year 2000.
Let us create a global movement to make the next year, the 60th year of the atomic bombing, a year to achieve a decisive turn toward the nuclear- weapon-free world. Thank you very much.
This paper was written for the conference "The Challenge of Hiroshima. Alternatives to Nuclear Weapons, Missiles, Missile Defenses, and Space Weaponization in a Northeast Asian Context" organized by INESAP and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation on October 8-11, 2004, in Hiroshima, Japan.
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