Fallout
The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
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New York Times bestselling author Lesley M.M. Blume reveals how one courageous American reporter uncovered one of the deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century—the true effects of the atom bomb—potentially saving millions of lives.
Just days after the United States decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But even before the surrender, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the devastating effects of these then-experimental weapons. For nearly a year the cover-up worked—until New Yorker journalist John Hersey got into Hiroshima and managed to report the truth to the world. When the magazine published “Hiroshima” in August 1946, it became an instant global sensation, and inspired pervasive horror about the hellish new threat that America had unleashed.
Since 1945, no nuclear weapons have ever been deployed in war partly because Hersey alerted the world to their true, devastating impact. This knowledge has remained among the greatest deterrents to using them since the end of World War II.
Released on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Fallout is an engrossing detective story, as well as an important piece of hidden history that shows how one heroic scoop saved—and can still save—the world.
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Powerful History. This is a history not of the actual nuclear detonation at Hiroshima, but of one man's efforts to uncover the coverup of just how horrific that nuclear detonation was. On August 31, 1946 - just over a year after said detonation - John Hersey published a four part expose in The New Yorker about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and its immediate aftermath. It dominated that month's print issue, supplanting both regular (and popular) cartoons and columns, and it would go on to become its generation's Pentagon Papers or Edward Snowden. This book tells that history, the history of how Hersey was able to write the expose and its effects, including a discussion of Hersey's followup piece 40 years later called Hiroshima: The Aftermath. And it does the entire history a great deal of justice in its easy to read narrative and comprehensive approach - this is the singular most well documented book I've ever read, with nearly 40% of the text of the book being its bibliography. That it is publishing the week of the 75 anniversary of the bombing is spot-perfect timing as well. Very much recommended.
Footnote: In 2015, The New Yorker published Hersey's original Hiroshima essay on its website, where it remains at least to the time of the writing of this review. If you've never actually read that essay, or indeed are like me and had never even heard of that essay before reading this book, I also very much going to that site and reading this 30K word essay on the horrors of nuclear weapons, as told by some of the only people to have been able to tell the tale.
