Science: Inventory of Holocaust

A devastating study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The event has become both part of history and a haunting vision of what the end of the world may be. On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, shortly after 8 o'clock, a U.S. B-29 flew high over Hiroshima, a small industrial city (pop. 350,000) in southern Japan. Seconds later the entire landscape was lit by a blue white flash that quickly turned into a giant fireball accompanied by powerful shock waves. Death and destruction spread for miles around. Three days later, there was a similar attack on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. For the first and only times, atomic bombs had been unleashed in war.

By today's thermonuclear standards the bombs were puny and primitive, the equivalent of only 12,500 and 22,000 tons of TNT each. But in Hiroshima 140,000 people died on the day of the attack and in the weeks immediately after it. Nagasaki lost 70,000 people. Tens of thousands more were severely injured. Even today, leukemia and other ailments traceable to the radiation exposure continue to take lives.

Last week, as the world marked the 36th anniversary of the bombings, there were renewed appeals for nuclear disarmament, one of them made by the mayor of Hiroshima standing at "ground zero" during memorial services in the city's Peace Park. But the most telling antinuclear message was contained in an extraordinary Japanese scientific study that has just appeared in English.

Titled simply Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Basic Books; $37.50) and prepared under the sponsorship of the two battered cities, it is the work of 34 Japanese doctors, physicists and social scientists. The book uses dry, technical language, with page after page of charts and statistics. Yet it provides the most complete reckoning to date of the damage—physical, medical, social—from atomic attack.

Such a cumulative inventory is long overdue. Though the A-bombings have been the theme of books, memoirs and films, scientific inquiry has been limited. In the immediate postwar years, U.S. occupation authorities openly discouraged filming the devastation or writing about it. When the Japanese regained control, they too resisted appeals for scientific studies, and even today have never passed a basic compensation law for A-bomb victims. Yet through a variety of techniques—autopsies, statistical studies and radiation experiments—Japanese as well as American and European scientists have pieced together the story of the attacks and their grim consequences.

Some of the details are agonizingly familiar: trees and utility poles turned into charred matchsticks by the intense heat (temperatures reached millions of degrees at the centers of the explosions); earthquake-resistant buildings crumpled by the shock waves; human flesh burned 2½ miles from the targets. Less well known, perhaps: the sticky black rain, triggered by hot ash and dust blasted up into the cold air, that showered deadly radioactive fallout on the cities.