casualties that resulted when President Truman displayed U.S. prowess at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the figures to be found in certain sources after diligent search, seem suspiciously low.. What are the true figures?
7 In an article in the August 6 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde, Robert Guillain raised the question. Here are his conclusions.
-Q= ..
concerning this subject:
"Twenty years later, the bomb continues to kill. Two hundred forty-six 'atomized' people were in beds at the Nagasaki Atomic Disease Hospital -- the city of the second bomb -- when I visited there in 1962, Six hundred out-patients checked in every day. And the figures were still higher. at Hiroshima. 'When was your last atomic death?' I asked the head doctor, Professor Yokota, He looked at me in silence for a moment, then said: ‘Just yesterday}! From 1958 to 1961 inclusive he had registered 125 deaths at the hospital due to the bomb, he told me. He cited a typical case, that of a man exposed to the bomb two kilometers from the center, who had fallen ill thirteen years later, ‘He died at the end of 3ix months. When I made the autopsy, all his organs were affected,!
"The American spécialists have themselves recognized, after their studies on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that among the effects of the atomic bomb has been a rise of up to Pifty per. cent in cases of leukemia (cancer of the blood), a clear increase in cancer of the lungs, the stomach, breast, an analogous increase in cataracts, in cases of microcephaly, and of mental retardment” among children exposed to the bomb before they were born.
"Because of all this, atomized people feel that they are living ton borrowed time.! They live in an agony of suddenly coming down with the 'atomic disease.' A silent sotial discrimination ‘operates against them. Employers don't want them. They can't get married,
“How many victims did the bomb cause at Hiroshima? When you try to answer this question, you discover that all kinds of figures are given and that it is difficult to find hard statistics. The official publications, particularly the American publications, generally give a round total of 70,000 dead and an almost equal number of wounded. The Japanese state that these figures are quite erroneous, or deliberately below the reality.
"In any case, they are absurd, they say. Among the 'wounded' on August 6, 1945, there were a high number of deaths eight to ten days later. In addition, it must be taken into account that entire families perished without survivors; that the Japanese army made sure that members of the armed forces were not included since this was a military secret; that the daily population of Hiroshima swelled when workers came in from the suburbs to handle defense work against fires. The garrison in fact amounted to 90,000 men of whom around one-third must have perished,
"By taking into account, finally, the victims that died within a few weeks after the August 6 bomb, the Japanese estimate that the figure for the deaths at Hiroshima must be put at a minimum of 150,000, and that it is probably around 200,000. For the municipal administration and its mayor, Mr, Shinzo Hamai, who has done much
toward reconstructing the town and making it the 'City of Peace,!- 200,000 is the real figure.
"At Nagasaki, in opposition to the official figures of 38,000 dead and 21,000 wounded, the Japanese cite much higher figures, going as high as 120, 000 dead and 80,000 wounded -- which is probably an exaggeration in the opposite direction..."