Through the Atomic Portal
“I told them that we did not regard [the atomic bomb] as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe and that we wanted to take advantage of this; that the project might even mean the doom of civilization or it might mean the perfection of civilization; that it might be a Frankenstein which would eat us up or it might be a project ‘by which the peace of the world would be helped in becoming secure.’”
—Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s Diary entry on May 31, 1945
For several decades, this image was “misidentified” as a mushroom cloud. The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, referred to it as “the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.” It is also the initial exhibit that greets visitors at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where it's presented as the “Hiroshima Atomic Strike.”
In a 2016 New York Times article, Richard L. Garwin, a prominent bomb designer, and advisor on nuclear arms, unequivocally stated, "This is not a mushroom cloud." Supporting this correction, Kevin Roark, a Los Alamos weapons laboratory representative, clarified that the photograph shows "a smoke plume resulting from the subsequent fires" of the bombing.
Stumbling on anomalies in the atomic historiography of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessitates a reckoning with the idea that official histories are, as a matter of course, constructed rather than purely observed. Fabricating evidence to support a state-sanctioned narrative is technically simple; it seems the greater obstacle is overcoming the 'moral embarrassment' that comes with acknowledging the manipulation of data by scientists or PSYOP battalions. To dismiss such wartime capers as too intricate or ethically repugnant is naive. Even among civilians, scientific fraud is a regularity, often motivated by the simple pursuit of prestige.
The complete absence of a transparent chain of custody on official radiological samples collected from the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in parallel with the documented seizure and destruction of all Japanese samples and instruments, only eases the execution of such deceit.
Unfortunately, soon after the war ended and while Dr. Shimizu’s studies were still underway, the U.S. occupation force confiscated the cyclotron and all apparatus and records that laymen would consider to be related to atomic bomb research. Included in the latter were the radium source [required for calibrating instruments for measuring radiation] and all the notebooks of data. Through the handwritten receipt that had been given Dr. Shimizu, the confiscating officer was identified some 12 years later, and, by the cooperation by the Army records staff, he was located in civilian life. However, soon after receiving the materials from Dr. Shimizu, the officer was ordered back to the United States with little time for an orderly changeover. He turned everything over to a lieutenant colonel or major whose name he could not recall. Further research through Army records has failed to identify this man or to locate any trace of the notebooks or radium source. (Palmer 2020)
Turning to “official sources”, Colonel Ashley Oughterson, MD, a seasoned New England surgeon who led the Joint Commission examining the bombings' aftermath, noted in his official 1956 report, “It is …difficult to explain the complete absence of radiation effects in … people who were theoretically exposed to lethal dosages of radiation.“ (Oughterson 1956)
Tragically, he died in a plane crash the same year his report was published. Three out of his six American counterparts in the committee reportedly passed away "at a young age." Writing in 1965, the pathologist Averill Liebow comments on the series of untimely deaths: