Battleangel

Via Agonist …

A controversial report and photos a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist produced on the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki have been unearthed almost 60 years after U.S. military censors forbade their publication, the Mainichi has learned.

The late George Weller was the first foreign reporter to reach Nagasaki after it was subjected to an atomic attack on Aug. 9, 1945, but Occupation censors refused to allow the publication of his stories and photos that told of conditions in the city and the pain suffered by those with radiation sickness.

The U.S. government at the time wanted to play down the effects radiation had on health and feared that Weller’s story would affect American public opinion and it possibly affected development of a nuclear arms race.

Weller died aged 95 in 2002. His son, Anthony, a writer from Massachusetts, found the stories and pictures last summer in the Rome apartment where his father had lived during the last few years of his life.

The stories had been typed and carbon-copied. The paper on which they had been printed had browned. The stories were typed out on about 75 pages and comprised some 25,000 words. There were also another 25 photos taken of Nagasaki soon after the bombing.

Source: Mainichi News

The complete Nagasaki Report can be found here.