08/06/09 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And introducing Greg Mitchell.
He's the editor of Editor & Publisher.
He's the co-author with Robert J. Lifton of Hiroshima in America.
He's also the author of last year's Why Obama Won, The Making of the President 2008.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Always happy to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and this is a very interesting article.
In a sense, it's a small part of the story, but a very interesting angle on it.
The story of the censored footage of those who were first to document on film the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I guess if you could start us off by telling us a little bit about the two men who are basically the subject of most of the article on Editor & Publisher today.
Lt. Dan McGovern and Lt. Herbert Susson.
Who are these men, and what's their story here?
Well, it's kind of a long story.
I'll try to make it as brief as possible.
I first met Herbert Susson about 25 years ago, and at that time he was trying to go public with the word about this censored suppression and suppression of this footage that he shot along with his commander, Dan McGovern, as the official U.S. military film crew that went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks after the bombing.
They were sent to document the effects of the bomb, both physical and medical.
For many months they traveled around the two cities shooting this incredible color footage, the only color footage taken at the time of both the physical destruction and the quite graphic injuries of the victims, the effects of fallout, which of course was very little known at the time.
I think a lot of us, when we were growing up and much later, especially if you're more on the older side, did see some footage of the victims of the bombing and the landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost always black and white, and usually not very graphic.
And usually it's very short little clips, right?
Usually somebody's talking over it, and they show you a couple seconds of footage.
Yeah, and actually most of that footage was taken by Japanese crews that went into the two cities immediately after the bombing, before the Americans arrived.
When the Americans arrived, we seized all of that black and white footage and also kept it mainly under wraps.
Again, some of it did get out, but we seized the Japanese footage.
We sent our own teams in there, and then when that footage came back, and it was quite shocking, it was then suppressed for many decades, and only much later did it start to come out when people like me started writing about it, and documentary filmmakers started putting it in movies.
So over the last 20 years, you see a little bit here and a little bit there.
It's no longer officially censored.
But during the key time, the real turning point when perhaps the nuclear arms race and also coming to grips with what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have happened, the late 1940s and the 1950s, the real key point when the arms race really got out of control, those type of images, along with photographs, were kept from the American people.
The American people did not really get a real look at what these weapons could do, the terrible effects of fallout, and so forth.
Well, I can really relate to that, because I think in my mind, basically what I picture if you say Hiroshima is the mushroom cloud, which of course is a thousandth the size of the kind of bombs we have nowadays.
Anyway, I picture the mushroom cloud from the picture, and then pictures I've seen of the city basically leveled, but of course it's like a clean sweep or whatever.
There's bodies not everywhere.
And then of course there's a couple pictures here and there of a guy's shadow where the concrete has literally been burned away, except where the guy who's been burned away was.
You know, that kind of thing.
But certainly nothing like hours' worth of absolute horror show or whatever.
I don't have that in my memory, because I've never really been exposed to it my whole life.
So I guess it's safe to say that goes for everybody else, too.
Yeah, well, like I said, it started to come out in the 1980s and later, little bits of it.
And again, when you see it, you know you've seen it, because it is the only color footage.
That color footage was quite rare at the time, particularly after the war.
There was a shortage of color film.
So what was particularly striking about this was that it's color footage.
So if you're watching a documentary or seeing something on TV and suddenly you see something in color from the two cities back then, that most likely comes from that source, and that's what was suppressed.
And these two men, particularly Mr. Hussain, who went into CB, became one of the top producer-directors at CBS TV after the war.
He was in a position to try to get the networks and people like Edward R. Murrow and all the top people then, David Brinkley, he approached all sorts of people and said, I know it's out there somewhere.
Could you please get it freed up and make a documentary or let me make a documentary to show the people and show the world what nuclear weapons can really do?
And partly the media was not interested in doing that, and partly they just couldn't get at the footage because it was still classified and could not be shown.
Well, in your article you really document exactly why it was that the footage was not shown, and it was because of just how horrible it is.
The song would play for the intro music there.
He talks about a new disease, radiation sickness.
That was why it was censored, because it was like watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something.
Well, you mentioned the book I did with Robert J. Lifton, and really that whole book is sort of different than anyone else's because it starts with the use of the bomb.
Most books are about the making of the bomb or the use of the bomb.
Our book really starts with the post-war period coming down to the present day, and it really looks at how America dealt with having used the bomb, which is a whole different approach.
And so this cover-up of the film footage is just part of it.
They talk about even some Hollywood films whose scripts were censored right up to the White House.
And we talk a lot about magazine articles, newspapers, all sorts of things that we call the official narrative and how that was shaped.
And, of course, the official narrative was that the use of the bomb was required, was necessary, was the only option.
And that's pretty much endured down to this present day and with at least 50% of the American people, if not more.
And so it's been an effective narrative.
And so the cover-up of the film footage, along with other things that we talk about, and articles and photographs and so forth, was twofold, both to keep that official narrative going about the use of the atomic bomb and then to keep the hold on the public with the supposed need to build thousands and thousands more, because the message was, see, you can use them.
They have use.
They protect us.
They supposedly won a war.
And so we have to embrace nuclear weapons and not push them away.
And that's why the footage and other things were so dangerous.
Well, it's interesting.
It's like a major moral precedent being set there, like Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War settled the question of whether secession is illegal or not kind of thing.
Well, this settles the question of whether or not, I mean, we're talking again about nuking a city full of civilians with an atomic bomb here.
If that's okay, then, Greg, anything is justified.
There are always ends that can justify any means if nuking Hiroshima is all right.
Well, we've had, as you well know, we have had in place since then what we call a first-use policy, meaning that we can say we don't want to use nuclear weapons, and we can say nuclear weapons are horrible, or even the statement, they must never be used again.
But yet we have a first-use policy, which means that under certain circumstances, we will use nuclear weapons first, not just in retaliation, not just someone attacks us, then we will attack, that we will use them first.
In order to sustain that, you kind of have to say, hey, yeah, we used them before.
Yeah, we made an exception.
We don't think they should be used.
They must never be used.
But we made one exception.
In fact, we made two exceptions, and we judged that fair and judged that useful, and so we could make that exception again.
The message that's come down is that nuclear weapons are useful, they're good to have, and they can even be used not just in defense, but as an aggressive action.
Well, and you know, it's kind of maybe ridiculous to say so, but it seems to me that the fact that most of the footage that we have is black and white kind of isolates it back in this olden days period when everything was in black and white or something, where the use of atomic weapons is so kind of imaginary and metaphysical at this point.
It's not something people have any kind of very real connection to.
So what it's led to, it seems like, is you talk about the first-strike policy.
They used to have the excuse, Greg, that, hey, listen, if the Soviet tanks all start rolling through the Folda Gap, we will have no choice but to use atomic weapons, something like that.
But, you know, in late 2007, I'm sure you remember, a reporter asked Barack Obama whether he would use nuclear weapons in the mountains of Pakistan against Al-Qaeda, and he said, no, of course not.
And Hillary Clinton, his now Secretary of State, attacked him and said, see, this is an example of the naivete of this guy.
He's not qualified.
He's not qualified.
You never tell people you won't nuke them.
Right, right.
Well, that's why we have a first-use policy.
And in the past, presidents and candidates have always just said, well, you know, we have a policy in effect, and then, like I said, they offer all the clichés.
They must never be used again.
We should never use them again.
Abolition, you know, everybody now wants to get rid of nuclear weapons, but they don't do a hell of a lot to go in that direction.
I just wonder what's going on in the mind's eye of these people in the imperial court.
When they think hydrogen bomb, haven't they seen footage of what thermonuclear weapons are, that you could take out a Houston with one of those things?
I think we may be back in the period, and actually I think maybe for a few years we've been there, but, you know, I recall going back to the gold days of the nuclear freeze movement and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s.
You know, basically what had happened was by, you know, 1980 or something like that, most Americans had sort of lost that ability to visualize why nuclear weapons were so different, why the immense destruction they caused and the immense danger of fallout and so forth.
And basically that was the function of Jonathan Schell's book, and his series in The New Yorker, which just very calmly and graphically depicted, you know, what if a hydrogen bomb was set off over New York City, and then it sort of sketched how far the destruction would reach, how far the fallout would reach.
And it just used a very simple, you know, you may live outside Dallas or something, and you think, well, maybe Dallas will get nuked and, you know, I won't be so bad off.
Who's going to care about me living out here in the suburbs or out on the farm or something like that?
But thanks to Jonathan Schell, they then had a picture of, geez, these bombs are going to, you know, destroy life for many, many, many miles around and, you know, kill all the crops and kill all the people with fallout.
Well, you know, Dale points out in his piece today that the H-bomb, or, yeah, yeah, pardon me, that the A-bomb, like they dropped on Hiroshima, is right now, a bomb like that is the blasting cap for the thermonuclear hydrogen bombs.
Yeah, it might be like a bunker buster today.
But what I was saying was that I think we're back where we were 25 years ago, where Americans, again, don't have a firm idea of why these are different.
Or they might even say, well, we should bomb Iran.
Why don't we nuke Iran or something like that?
And they just say, yeah, you know, you drop these and they destroy a city or part of a city, and they're just bigger versions of the bombs we know about.
And they've, again, lost the ability to really imagine or understand how different they are.
So you get into this kind of reckless sort of, yeah, hey, nuke them or nuke North Korea or whatever.
And so maybe we need another kind of Jonathan Schell type of articles and books that just sort of say, hey, this is what you're advocating.
This is what we're dealing with here.
Another generation or two has grown up since then that may not fully realize why nuclear weapons are different and the massive danger to all society of any use of them.
And that's why the Hiroshima is still a battleground in a way, because the message of Hiroshima is still it's okay to use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances.
And we can all imagine other circumstances that would arise where someone might try to justify the use of a nuclear weapon.
Well, you know, I have a compromise.
How about this?
How about we just start with getting rid of all the hydrogen bombs and we stick with Hiroshima-sized little bitty nukes?
And we can feel safe and comfortable, and the Russians will know we can still destroy Moscow, no problem if it comes down to it or whatever.
But these H-bombs are, I mean, this is crazy.
This is the genocide bomb, they call it.
Right.
Well, then the argument would be, well, if we get rid of all of them and North Korea or Iran has some, then we're at a disadvantage again.
So we can never be happy again.
Right.
Except the Iranians wouldn't be able to make an H-bomb in 150 years.
No.
Well, anyway.
But that's always been the argument.
You know, we have to have more.
I could live with us having more if we have down to 30, you know, and someone else has two and so forth.
Well, that's better than, you know, 30,000 and 15,000 and 10,000.
So let's work towards that at least.
Yeah.
Well, I have here the poll results.
This is from news.antiwar.com.
Today a poll by Quinnipiac University found that 61% of Americans felt the attack was the right thing, while only 22% believe it was wrong.
Somewhat encouraging, however, was the willingness to question the attack was significantly larger among younger people, with people between the ages of 18 and 34 split roughly down the middle about whether the killings were acceptable.
Well, that's historically been the poll results, and I think there has been some movement towards the no part of that, more people questioning.
But every time that happens, then there's a big outcry of people who say, how could they be so not understanding of history?
And it's always the same arguments, which I respect.
I disagree with them, but I respect the opinion that it was the only thing that could have ended the war, saved American lives, so on and so forth.
I recall in 1995, when there was tremendous coverage for a rare moment, tremendous coverage of this debate, Peter Jennings on ABC did a, it might have been a two-hour documentary.
In fact, I was interviewed for it myself.
On this great debate.
And Peter Jennings, to give him credit, basically slanted it or in the end came down with the view that the use of the bomb was really not necessary and should continue to be questioned.
I also took part in 1995, sort of at the center of, if you remember, the great debate at the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian over there, a Nola Gay exhibit.
This was the plane that dropped the bomb.
And it was basically going to show all the debate over the bombings and pro and con and the context and everything else.
And when word emerged that it was going to kind of honestly look at the debate and look at both sides, it was basically shut down, censored, and completely changed because of protests by conservatives and veterans and so forth.
And I was right in the middle of that and part of a committee that was trying to save the exhibit.
So it's like every time a real effort is made to really open up the debate, certainly at least 50% of all historians, American historians, believe that the bombing either was not necessary or should be very, very closely questioned.
There certainly is not a historic history consensus over the view that the bombing was justified.
And yet if you try to show a 50-50 or a split kind of view of it, you're usually attacked for being a revisionist.
Yeah, well, it happens every August.
We go around and around.
But I think you hit on an important point there about anything like a 50-50 or 60-40 split.
The issue, like a lot of others, I think, is kind of dependent on a perceived unanimity where everybody kind of learned the same thing in fourth grade that Truman did what he had to do.
Yeah, there was this guy named Truman and he nuked these people, but you had to end the war.
And everybody knows that and everybody kind of agrees with that.
But in fact, just recently I said, well, you know, MacArthur and Eisenhower both opposed it.
And the answer I got back was, really?
And now all of a sudden, hey, permission to question Truman's decision.
If MacArthur, of all people, was against it, then maybe there's an argument against it that hasn't been made available to me yet.
Because that guy surely didn't care about nuking a bunch of people.
Why would he oppose it?
Well, that's why the insistence on an open debate, as I said, I respect people who have a different view or people who look at the facts, look at the history, and come to a different conclusion.
That's fine.
But the problem is that, as with so much else in America today, people make up their mind about things based on second-hand information or what they've been told or what some commentator on TV has told them or some emotional response they've had or something that's been passed on to them or whatever.
So if people read the real history and come to a different conclusion, that's fine.
But most people have absolutely no idea really what they're talking about in terms of what was really happening in the war, what the situation really was, what the options were, how things might have been different.
So you kind of have to read all the history on all sides and get a true sense of it.
They might find out why someone like Eisenhower and MacArthur and many, many others, you know, John Foster Dulles, the Great Hawk, so many others who said the bombing was wrong.
Wow, John Foster Dulles was against it?
Oh, absolutely.
Well, that guy was for everything.
I know.
Well, he took, as Lifton and I show in our book, there was in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the reason going back to the censorship of these films was so vital was because in the weeks after the bombing, there was a real searching response in America, often led by churches and people like that.
John Foster Dulles, when he came out against the bombing a month after the bombing, he was one of the heads of the Council of Churches, and there were a great number of church leaders who came out against it because there was an immediate perception, and this is one of the values of going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I have done, and you kind of stand there and you envision these weapons going off over the centers of the city, being deliberately set off over the center of the cities for maximum impact.
So it's not just like, well, we used this bomb and we thought we were bombing a military base and sort of 100,000 people died accidentally.
You kind of see that we're very much in wars that we've been in and are currently in.
There's always a lot of talk about civilian casualties and collateral damage, and are we doing enough to protect that happening and so forth.
So we have a real sense of at least feeling guilty about civilian casualties, trying to minimize them and so forth.
But to actually see how people could target an entire civilian city, which also had some military aspects, but you were basically killing 99% of the people who were civilian and deliberately setting off a bomb to kill as many as possible.
And that's what the people like John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower and a lot of others immediately after the war were reacting to, because they knew full well that this was kind of a new concept.
Now we're used to this bombing from the air and people dying.
But back then, even though there was firebombing in Europe and in Japan towards the end of the war, and terrible, hundreds of thousands of people died in raids, that's what people were recoiling from.
It's like, oh yeah, well, people die.
People die, civilians die in war, war is terrible and so forth.
But back then, it was just something people were just trying to get used to.
And so there was a very immediate reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki when people very accurately pictured this deliberate extermination of hundreds of thousands of people.
What an unfortunately realistic description of the mindset there, getting used to slaughtering people from the air so that now it's no big deal.
All right, well, let me ask you a couple of things here to wrap up, Greg.
Again, it's Greg Mitchell from Editor and Publisher.
He's the editor of Editor and Publisher.
I'm not sure if he's also the publisher of it.
How can people see this footage?
I know there's the Weller footage, the George Weller footage, the Japanese footage, the American Technicolor footage.
How can people get a hold of it?
Can you just address a little bit, because you mention it in your article, that in your book you really go in depth.
Again, the book is called Hiroshima in America.
You really go into depth about the censorship of the decision-making process, how it was that Stimson and our little haberdasher decided that they were going to go ahead and do this thing.
Right.
Well, you know, it was, like I said, the book concentrates more on the after the war.
Robert Lifton is one of the great thinkers of our time, and he has a long chapter on Truman's psychology and deciding to use the bomb and his feelings afterwards.
Perhaps he felt a little more guilty than is usually pictured, but it's a brilliant, lengthy psychological profile of Truman.
We get into a great deal on Stimson's, again, turning point 1947 article in Harper's, in which he was the first full-length really official defense of the use of the bomb, and quite controversial, and so we show how that came about.
That did kind of settle the debate that had gone on for two years about the use of the bomb.
So that's really the focus of the book, and it gets into all the controversy since then in terms of this domestic debate over the use of the bomb.
I really need to get my hands on that thing.
In terms of the footage, it's all up there as it has been.
It's at the National Archives if people want to see it or use it in film.
It's been in many documentaries.
A documentary I was involved in as chief advisor was the original Child Bomb, which came out a couple of years ago.
I presume it's on DVD.
I can't say for sure.
They certainly have a website where I'm sure you can purchase it called Original Child Bomb.
It's an excellent documentary that makes the most use of the footage.
But it's been in many documentaries since then.
Again, it's not that this cover-up is ongoing.
It's just that it was complete at the most crucial time, 1940s, 1950s, through the 1980s.
Right.
It's not that it's not available.
It's just that nobody knows where to find it.
Everybody can just walk down to the National Archives.
I found some stuff on YouTube.
This one is called, the one that I played as the introduction here, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Original 1945 Documentary.
Clearly the narration is not from 1945.
Well, you can see the documentary.
I believe the full title was Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945, that Eric Barnau put together and was first screened around 1971.
That's this one.
It drew great controversy.
PBS put it on the air and was smashed for it and so on and so forth.
But that became available.
A lot of people started showing it in schools in the 1970s and so forth.
But that was the kind of very arty, almost sketchy black-and-white footage, which was not nearly as graphic and had as much impact as what the color footage would have had.
How brave was it for Jon Stewart to say that Harry Truman was a war criminal?
And then how shameful was it for him to take it back with no explanation the next day?
I was shocked.
I happened to be watching when it happened.
That's a good example of what happens.
He sort of had a truthful moment there.
He expressed something, and I'm sure the Comedy Central switchboards, if they have them, lit up overnight with protests from veterans and so forth.
He felt the need to backtrack.
I can't remember the original wording exactly what he said, and I don't know exactly what he said in his backtracking.
I'd have to see exactly what he said.
Well, what happened was he was arguing with the warmonger, and the warmonger said, Oh yeah, well then was Harry Truman a war criminal?
And he said, Well, yeah.
He could have said it off out in the ocean as a demonstration or something like that.
And then the next day he said, Oh, I don't know what I was thinking.
It just slipped out, and I'm sorry.
But he didn't say what was wrong about his conclusion or anything like that.
Well, again, when people who do know something about the real history, it's a very honest debate.
Again, I respect people who defend the use of the bomb, who know the facts and just come to a different conclusion, and I think that's very understandable.
But it does come down to how much value you put on a human life where you sort of say, yes, it's possible the bomb did shorten the war.
It's possible that it did save American lives.
But is it also possible that the war would have ended anyway in the same time period without the use of the bomb, that we wouldn't have had to kill up to 200,000 people who were all civilians without the use of the bomb?
So it's sort of like the known fact is that we killed 200,000 people.
The unknown fact is how many lives it may have saved.
Well, if we really want to get into that, it's obvious that if you demand unconditional surrender and we accept as the premise that what would it take to get our unconditional surrender, then sure, I guess you've got to nuke everybody until they unconditionally surrender.
Well, of course.
Again, one of the stubborn facts that most people don't know is that we demanded unconditional surrender, and then once we used the bomb we accepted the main condition that the Japanese wanted, which was to keep their emperor.
So think about that for a minute.
Well, and as Ralph Reiko says, if we had gone ahead and said, you know what, keep Formosa and keep your troops in Manchuria, it may have prevented Mao Zedong rising to power and killing 40 million people.
Well, again, there's a lot of history that is fascinating, and it makes for a very complicated, not black-and-white issue, and I certainly encourage everyone to read all that and come to different conclusions.
But it's a fascinating, terrible history to read.
I really appreciate the fact that you focus on this, at least on the anniversaries every year, and of course all the extra work that you've done on it in the past, just to let people know that it's not only a black-and-white issue, but it's not just a white issue.
It's not just a one-sided issue.
There actually is another side of the argument, maybe even some gray area, and that consensus that people thought existed around this is not real.
That alone, to me, is significant.
Well, there's plenty of articles and books you can buy, not just my own, but there's plenty of places to go for a full accounting of this.
The new stuff comes out regularly from the archives and it's kicked around by the experts.
It's all very interesting to look at.
Another fact that very few people know is that the Russians came into the war two days after the bombing.
If you ask most Americans, the few people who know that will say, oh yeah, they were waiting for us to bomb and then they came in and so forth.
Well, that's not the history at all.
Before we knew that the bomb would work, before it was tested, we were insisting on the Russians to enter.
The Russians weren't particularly happy to get into the war quicker than they wanted to.
They had just sort of finished finishing up in Europe.
It was us who were insisting that the Russians get into the war around August 9th.
As it happened, of course, we were able to test the bomb successfully and then we used the bomb, but the Russians were coming in anyway.
There are vast numbers of historians around the world who argue that the Japanese feared the Russians much more than they feared the Americans.
They had no way they could fight a two-front war and that the Russian declaration of war and moving in against the Japanese starting August 8th would have been enough to provoke a quick Japanese surrender, not much later than the use of the atomic bomb.
Now, of course, we'll never know that.
The point is that very, very few Americans know that fact.
The people who know the fact don't know the true facts or have a twisted idea of what happened.
They picture the Russians coming in to take advantage of what we did.
That's kind of complicated.
You tell that to people and they say, �Hmm, gee, I didn't know that.
Well, maybe I have to look at this again.
� Now, I'm not in the school of thought.
There's a wide school of thought that says the only reason we used the bomb was basically to scare the Russians or to end the war so the Russians wouldn't come in.
As the first shot of the Cold War, that's the only reason we used the weapon was basically against the Russians, not the Japanese.
Now, I don't happen to believe it's that simple, but I think it's part of the picture.
I think if you ignore that as part of the picture, as part of the picture, not the whole picture, but as part of the picture, then, again, you're not really comprehending the full history.
Put these various things into the mix and shake it up and take a different look at the whole subject.
You really are a Jeffersonian, this whole free market of ideas and truth and reason went out in the end and all that.
You're a newspaper man through and through.
I've also been studying this for 30 years almost.
It is a difficult subject because you don't want to say that you clearly know what would have happened if X, Y, and Z had occurred.
You just have to be honest and say, I don't know.
I don't know for sure what would have happened.
For most Americans, they feel, well, we know what did happen.
The war ended and our boys came home.
The veterans will say, well, I was out in the Pacific and I know I felt at the time it saved my life.
For them, that's the truth and that's the only truth.
You have to respect their emotion about it.
But they were in the foxholes.
They weren't back in the Pentagon or back in the War Department or the White House.
They didn't know what information was coming in on the state of Japan's attempts to surrender, conditions for negotiations, the Russians coming in, options for other use of the atomic bomb where it could have been tested.
They knew nothing.
They had their emotional feeling.
You have to say the emotional feeling was completely valid, but it was not privy to the vast other information and debates and so on and so forth that was going on back in the U.S.
It's an important part of the picture, but it's actually a small part of the picture when you're talking about the real history of the whole thing.
One piece of that is in Hiroshima in America.
It's by our guest Greg Mitchell with Robert J. Lifton.
He's also the author of Why Obama Won, the Making of the President 2008.
You can find his essay today at www.editorandpublisher.com.
It's called Atomic Anniversary, the Great Hiroshima Cover-Up and Fallout for us today.
Thanks very much for your time.