Hiroshima Revisited

Foreword

In this well researched and eminently readable book, Palmer has corralled the available evidence that the war-ending bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were not atom bombs.

What? What’s that you say?

Your family and friends, like mine, may find this notion incredible. If they do, ask them to read the book; it’s free online (see URL on the imprint page). I predict that most of those who take your suggestion will agree that the conventional Manhattan Project history may well be a contender for the Greatest Hoax of all Time. During the reading, readers both old enough to have experienced and young enough to remember those times may experience some Ah ha! moments. Palmer kicks off his study by analyzing physical data that reveal the hoax. In this, he makes good use of the recent book by Akio Nakatani: Death Object: Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax [1], which draws upon reports by those who have examined the scene and assert that the destruction of those two cities was, by all appearances, the result of fire-bombing, like that which had already destroyed most of Japan’s major cities.

Palmer reviews and expands on this convincing physical evidence, and then complements it by analyzing the effects of the bomb on people.

He concludes that the reported ‘radiation effects’ expected from an atom bomb are, instead, effects of sulfur mustard gas and napalm. It is not surprising that government documents regarding medical effects among victims and survivors remain classified for reasons of ‘national security’. Several chapters provide primers on elementary aspects of nuclear physics and human physiology that will be appreciated by those who aim for a critical understanding of Palmer’s thesis.

Thanks to this book, I can now understand a pair of perplexing conversations I had in the 1960s. The first, which took place in the new Institute for Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon, was with its founding director who told me that one of his activities in the Manhattan project was to collect soil samples from the site of the Trinity test a few hours after the explosion. An interesting story, but how come he was alive to tell it? Wasn’t the site lethally radioactive from a ground level explosion of a plutonium bomb?

The other puzzling conversation occurred during a flight to the west coast. A noted geneticist was angry with a world-famous chemist who, he claimed, grossly exaggerated the genetic damage from the Hiroshima atrocity. Why would the chemist, whom I knew and trusted, do such a thing? Palmer’s book provided the Ah ha! moments for both these puzzles.
The young director was not killed by intensely radioactive soil at the site simply because the test bomb had not been an atom bomb.

The chemist, relying on physicists’ estimates of the bomb’s radiation intensity, used experimentally derived relations between radiation dose and mutation rates to predict the genetic damage to Hiroshima survivors and their offspring. The geneticist, on the other hand, had made direct observations on children born to survivors and not found the level of damage that the chemist had estimated—in fact, such studies have found only slight and non-significant increases of genetic disease in the offspring of survivors.
Some readers will acknowledge that Palmer has made a strong scientific case for the fakery but will resist it without answers to “How was it done?” and “Why?”. In the final two chapters, the author takes on those questions with arguments that are, by necessity, speculative.

Please don’t cheat by reading these chapters first. Their conclusions are likely to appear reasonable only after you have acknowledged the possibility of the book’s primary conclusion, that We the People have been taken in by this enormous hoax.
Franklin Stahl

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Yet, only one year after this venturesome experiment, American ingenuity emerged triumphant: the first ever uranium bomb, though never once tested before,3went off without a hitch to obliterate Hiro-shima. Does this really sound true to life, or rather like something out of Hollywood? Should we censure Heisenberg for spontaneously calling it a bluff?

Of course, this question cannot be settled by insinuations, but only by the evidence; and that is what I will attempt in this book. Before going any further, however, I should point out that the book before you is not the first one to argue that the ‘nuclear bomb’ in Hiroshima was a fraud. A recent work entitled Death Object: Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax [1] makes the same case, yet goes beyond it to reject the existence of nuclear weapons altogether. Its author, Akio Nakatani (apparently a pen name), claims to be an expert in applied mathematics, and furthermore to have carried out his own computer simulations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb designs, which show that these bombs could not have worked. He does, however, not describe these calculations in detail:

Though I could nuke the entire orthodoxy with the scientific result . . . unfortunately due to archaic USA national security laws . . . I cannot present that openly, [therefore] I am doing the next best thing, which is to compile . . . the voluminous circumstantial evidence.

Nakatani generalizes his findings to conclude that nuclear bombs are impossible in principle. He indeed presents ample evidence to demonstrate that the systematic fakery goes well beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I highly recommend his book. However, I will here take a somewhat different approach: instead of addressing the subject of atomic weapons in its entirety, which I am not competent to do,4 I will focus on the scientific and medical evidence pertaining to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I will examine at greater depth. The findings will neither supersede nor merely duplicate Nakatani’s work, but rather they will complement it.

Apart from some general works, several of which I hesitate to call ‘nonfiction’, the sources for this book are mostly scientific books and peer-reviewed articles, all of which are publicly available and have been carefully referenced. In this chapter, I will present some selected pieces of evidence; each of the topics thus introduced, and others, will be treated at greater length in later chapters.

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1.4.3 Dispersal of reactor waste to create some fallout.

Finally, Nakatani posits that some radioactivity—probably reactor waste—was dispersed using conventional explosives, relating that such a device— known as a ‘dirty bomb’—had previously been tested in New Mexico.

Chapter 3 will show that scattered reactor waste fits the published scientific findings on ‘Little Boy’s’ radioactive fallout much better than does the official story of a nuclear detonation.

1.4.4 Use of mustard gas to fake ‘radiation sickness’.

Keller [10] reports that many Hiroshima victims suffered from bone marrow suppression and other symptoms that are commonly observed in patients exposed to strong irradiation, be it by accident or for treatment; and these statements are confirmed by many other medical case studies and surveys. The very low amount of dispersed radioactive material apparent from studies such as Shizuma et al. [6] cannot account for these observations.

Nakatani recognizes this incongruity and proposes that clinical reports of radiation sickness are mostly fabricated, although he suggests that a dirty bomb might have produced some real cases. I concur in principle that much of the science that surrounds this event is fraudulent, and I will discuss some specific examples in later chapters.

However, the medical reports are too numerous and come from too many independent sources to be so nonchalantly dismissed, and in fact they can be readily explained by the use of poison gas. Eyewitness testimony from Hiroshima is replete with references to poisonous gas and its deleterious effects. Among 105 witnesses who experienced the Hiroshima bombing as school age children, and whose memories were collected and published by the Japanese teacher Arata Osada [14], 13 explicitly mention poisonous gas or fumes.9 One of them, Hisato Itoh, died shortly after writing his account, which contains this statement:

Both my mother and I had been through a great deal of strain during this time . . . and then we also started to feel listless and began to lose our hair because we had breathed the gases when the atom bomb fell.

The possible use of poison gas was brought up early on by Dr. Masao Tsuzuki, the leading Japanese member on the U.S.-Japanese ‘Joint Commission’ of medical scientists convened to investigate the aftermath of the bombing. The historian Sey Nishimura [15] quotes from a 1945 article by Tsuzuki:

Immediately after the explosion of the atomic bomb, some gas permeated, which appeared like white smoke with stimulating odor. Many reported that when inhaled, it caused acute sore throat or suffocating pain.

According to Nishimura, Tsuzuki’s position concerning the gas attracted the attention of the U.S. military censors, who, for violation of their rule that “news must be factual, devoid of conjecture,” struck out the following passage from his manuscript:

Considering from various points, generation of something like poisonous gas accompanying the explosion operation is conceivable, and it is not hard to conjecture that there were perhaps war victims who died of these poisons. At present we have no clue whether it was devised on purpose so as to radiate something like poisonous gas. If I have a chance, I’d like to put a question to America on this matter.

Again according to Nishimura, Tsuzuki nevertheless reaffirmed his position in another report six years later:9
Several more of these are quoted in Section 13.4.2.

Everyone experienced inhalation of a certain indescribable malodorous gas. This may be considered city stench, which was induced by fierce wind from the explosion; a part of it might have originated from electrolytes generated by application of radioactivity to air. What this so-called “gas” is, is not clear. But it is not unthinkable that it could be invasive to the human body.

Tsuzuki’s conjecture on the radiogenic origin of the gas is sound in principle: ionizing radiation traveling through air can indeed produce pungent, aggressive gases such as ozone and oxides of nitrogen. However, assuming that no nuclear detonation actually happened, we can rule out this possibility, which means that any poisonous gas present must have been dropped in finished form during the air raid. It is interesting to note that the first independent journalist to report from Hiroshima, the Australian Wilfred Burchett [16],10 also brings up poison gas:

My nose detected a peculiar odour unlike anything I have ever smelled before. It is something like sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still smouldering, or at a spot where they were still recovering bodies from the wreckage.

But I could also smell it where everything was still deserted.
The gas plagued the people even four weeks after the event:
And so the people of Hiroshima today are walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their mouths and noses.

The Japanese interviewed by Burchett conflated it with radioactivity:

They believe it [the smell] is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity released by the split uranium atom.

Their conjecture on the origin of the gas must be false, for there is no plausible mechanism by which radiation or fallout from a nuclear bomb could produce this sort of lingering fumes.11 However, this should not mislead us into discounting their perceptions altogether; surely no one toiling in hot summer weather will wear a face mask without reason. What kind of gas would fit this entire scenario?

The most likely candidate is sulfur mustard, which had been used as a chemical weapon in World War I, and which was so used again more recently by Iraq in its war against Iran. Sulfur mustard mimics both the acute and the chronic effects of radiation on the human body. In particular, like radiation, mustard gas damages the bone marrow, the hair follicles, and other rapidly proliferating tissues; and this commonality was already well understood at the time [17].12 An oily fluid, sulfur mustard can evaporate slowly over time; its smell resembles that of ‘garlic, addled eggs, or oil-roasted vegetables’ [19] and is also sometimes described as sulfuric. It can persist in the environment for considerable periods of time [20], which would explain that Burchett still noted its stench and its effects when he visited Hiroshima in early September.

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1.5.4 Experimental evidence of the nuclear detonation.

The case for the nuclear bomb is, of course, supported by an endless stream of government-sponsored scientific studies. For example, there are dozens of reports on the formation of ⁶⁰Co and other radioactive isotopes near the hypocenter, which is ascribed to the capture of neutrons emitted by the nuclear detonation. Similarly, thermoluminescence in samples of ceramic materials is adduced as proof of theγ-irradiation released by the detonation.

Taken at face value, such experimental studies indeed prove that a large amount of bothγ-rays and neutrons was released at Hiroshima, which clearly supports the story of the nuclear detonation and flatly contradicts the negative evidence discussed above. We are thus forced to choose sides. On what basis can we make this choice?
If we assume that no blast occurred, then we must conclude that the evidence of neutron andγ-radiation is fabricated. This is not technically difficult; in fact, the studies in question commonly employ control and calibration samples that were produced by exposing inactive precursor materials to defined doses of laboratory-generated neutron andγ-radiation. The only difficulty is a moral one—we must accuse either the scientists themselves or a third party, such as a government or its secret service, of substituting artificial samples for the real ones. In this context, it is worth noting that none of the studies I have seen documents the chain of custody of its samples; it is not clear who had access to the samples at which times.

If, on the other hand, we assume that a nuclear blast did occur, and furthermore that only this blast occurred, then we have to conclude that some people inexplicably survived deadly doses of radiation, whereas others succumbed to acute radiation sickness without significant exposure. A third miracle is needed to explain that all people who looked at the flash of the detonation escaped with their retinas unhurt.17 Between moral embarrassment and scientific impossibility, the only sound choice is the former. We all expect the fortitude to make such choices correctly in the members of a jury; here, we should expect the same of ourselves.

1.6 A brief guide to the remaining chapters of this book

Most chapters in this book focus on various aspects of the relevant physical and medical evidence. These chapters are necessarily quite technical in nature. Some background that may help readers to better understand the physical arguments is given in Chapter 2. The most important physical findings are presented in Chapter 3; this evidence alone suffices to reject the story of the nuclear detonations.The remaining physical chapters mostly deal with data which are offered as proof of the nuclear detonation, and which seem to be largely fabricated.
As to the medical evidence, Chapter 7 provides background on mustard gas and napalm, the two key weapons used in the bombings.

The evidence presented in Chapters 8 and 9 is sufficient to prove the case for mustard gas and napalm and against nuclear detonations. I believe that they can be understood without much medical background, while Chapters 12 and particularly 10 are more demanding in this regard. Chapter 11 combines physical and medical aspects; its most significant contribution is to illuminate the scientific malfeasance that is used to maintain the deception.

The book concludes with two chapters on the methods and the mo-tives, respectively, of the staged bombings. The arguments presented there are of a more general, less scientific nature than those in the preceding parts. The case presented in the final chapter, in particular, is based largely on inference and plausibility; readers who disagree with its conclusions are asked to judge its merit separately from that of the other, more evidence-based chapters.

Michael Palmer