A COLD WAR

* Something that Marshall mentions only briefly in his speech is the effect that would have on the US economy. (around the 7’20" mark)

* Europe’s economy might have been destroyed after the war, but America’s wasn’t looking too bulletproof, partly BECAUSE the European economy had been shattered.

* In 1947, there were serious concerns about the state of the US economy.

* Benn Steil:

* There was a report written in 1946, I think, by the SWNCC, the State, War and Navy department staff, which said “The conclusion is inescapable, that, under present programs and policies, the world will not be able to continue to buy United States exports at the 1946-47 rate beyond another 12-18 months.”

* They anticipated “substantial decline in the United States export surplus would have a depressing effect on business activity and empolyment in the United States.”

* And in 1946, the gross national product of the U.S. was already down 11.6% on the previous year, as the government stopped spending money on the war effort.

* Navy Secretary James Forrestal characterised American priorities in Europe as “economic stability, political stability and military stability… in about that order."

* Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Clayton redefined the problem as one of disposing of America’s “great surplus.”

* He explained in May 1947 : “The capitalistic system, whether internally or internationally, can only work by the continual creation of disequilibrium in comparative costs of production.”

* "Let us admit right off that our objective has as its background the needs and interests of the people of the United States. We need markets -- big markets -- in which to buy and sell."

* Clayton was saying implicitly what Dean Acheson had argued explicitly in 1944: the profitability of America’s corporate system depended upon overseas economic expansion.

* Marshall and other advocates of the program also spoke openly of the parallel between their policy and America’s earlier westward expansion across the continent.

* America needed to expand.

* But wait!? I thought it was the SOVIETS who were trying to take over the world?

* Marshall argued that the nation faced an either-or situation.

* He claimed that Unless the plan was adopted “the cumulative loss of foreign markets and sources of supply would unquestionably have a depressing influence on our domestic economy and would drive us to increased measures of government control.”

* So by defining America’s expansion as the key to prosperity, Marshall defined foreign policy as the key to domestic problems and to the survival of democracy at home.

* (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy - William Appleman Williams)

*

* If the European economy didn’t recover quickly, it would crash the US economy.

* It’s all connected.

* And if the European economy DID recover, but as part of a Soviet trading bloc, it would STILL crash the US economy.

* (Cox, Michael, and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan.”):

*

* And so they came up with a plan.

* A plan to give $13 billion to European countries over 4 years.

* So The Plan, Contrary to popular mythology, it was not just a simple program of aid.

* It had a TON of conditions.

* It wasn’t like the U.S. just dumped pallets of cash on Europe’s doorstep and said “have at it”.

* This was very carefully engineered and managed so that it would benefit the American economy.

* And Truman politically.

* As the influential British economist Sir Alec Cairncross pointed out, US Aid to Europe had been flowing across the Atlantic for the better part of two years even before Marshall's speech.

* What made the June 1947 initiative different, he noted, was its attempt to link aid to the reform of European institutions and practices.

* Moreove

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* One of the greatest pieces of mythology to ever be produced in America is the “Marshall Plan”.

* It’s right up there with the idea of glorifying the “Founding Fathers”, who were actually just tax dodgers who orchestrated a bloody coup.

* It’s also of course one of America’s greatest pieces of foreign policy.

* The Marshall Plan is sold to Americans as the greatest gift mankind has ever received since Jesus died on the cross.

* Even today, 70 years later, it’s almost impossible to find analysis of the MP that doesn’t position it as a ‘gift’ or ‘humanitarian aid’.

* But the truth is, it was really neither of those things.

* The Marshall Plan was completely self serving.

* You will often hear it it was about stopping the Soviets from spreading Communism and stopping another World War, and those things are partially true.

* But that’s also missing the point.

* Both for the U.S. as a whole and, particularly, for Truman.

* And it was a genius move.

* It was, at the time, the biggest transfer of wealth from the public treasury into the hands of the wealthy during peacetime probably in history.

* But nearly nobody understands it.

* I’ve been researching this topic for years and the lack of understanding of it blows my mind.

* But let’s go back a bit and provide some background.

* The European winter of 1946-47 was the worst in a hundred plus years.

* widely believed to be the snowiest winter since 1813-14

* Not the coldest, but it was the snowiest winter in a long time.

* Known as a “hunger winter"

* And of course everyone was still living in the aftermath of war.

* The Germans, Brits and Americans had been terror-bombing civilian populations for years.

* railways, bridges and roads were blown up, factories smashed, farms and fields ravaged by tank battles and firefights

* The war had also forced the old European colonial powers, most notably Britain and France, to begin the painful and, they soon learned, financially costly process of withdrawing from some of their overseas possessions, either as a result of military retreat or simply because they could no longer afford their imperial commitments.

* Or because the Americans insisted on it.

* Open door policy, free trade, and all that.

* Apart from complete destruction of their economies and infrastructure and the deaths of tens of millions of their people, Europe had to contend with something else.

* The realisation that they sucked.

* At the beginning of the 20th century, European countries prided themselves on their superiority.

* But In the space of thirty years the most powerful nations in the history of the world had set upon themselves in two ruinous wars.

* They had killed tens of millions of their citizens, injured tens of millions more, and had stripped from each of themselves of the rank of first-class power.

* Even Great Britain who was victorious in both wars.

* At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a belief in the superiority of European civilization.

* Now that seemed like a cruel joke.

* Superior civilizations don't elevate warmongers to absolute political power in order to destroy themselves in unremitting industrial warfare.

* They don't bombard defenceless civilians, or send conscripted soldiers to certain death in battle after battle, or massacre ethnic minorities, or attempt to commit genocide.

* So The conclusion seemed inescapable: the European way of politics had wrought disaster.

* So across Europe, people wanted dramatic changes.

* And political movements arose to drive those changes.

* And most of them were left leaning.

* Because these superior European countries had all been capitalist.

* Yes, even Nazi Germany.

* Nazi Fascism was extreme capitalism.

* They believed in private property and a ma

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* The X Article.

* George Kennan, the Soviet expert who wrote the Long Telegram, wrote another piece, but this time published publicly and anonymously, in July 1947, just after Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” speech.

* The actual title of the article was "The Sources of Soviet Conduct”.

* It was published in Foreign Affairs magazine.

* He used the pseudonym “Mr X” and so it’s known as the X Article.

* It began as a private report prepared for Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in January 1947.

* It was never intended as a public document.

* But Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, urged Kennan to publish it, so he obtained permission from Forrestal to publish the article under the pseudonym “X”.

* Whereas The Long Telegram was a review of how the Soviet Union saw the world - and The Clifford-Elsey Report took those facts and interpreted how they affected the world and what the United States should do about it - The X Article took the information presented in the two prior reports and constructed a road map for the Cold War.

* The first sections of the article provide a potted history of Leninist and Stalinst ideology and the current political reality of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

* His conclusion is kind of interesting.

* As you might expect, he talks about containing the expansion of the Soviets.

* "confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."

* He says Soviet power "moves inexorably along a prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force."

* Unfortunately he didn’t concentrate at all on how US power and expansion acted as contributing factors to Soviet behavior.

* As Thomas Paterson wrote in Meeting The Communist Threat:

* Too simply, he applied one interpretive model to Russia and another to the United States: Russia's foreign policy derived from a response to internal needs not external threats; America's foreign policy derived from a response to external challenges.

* Mostly he talks about America providing a good example to the world.

* He said that if America has internal fighting, if it struggles economically, if it doesn’t look after its own people, if it embarks on global wars, then it is playing right into the hands of the Communists.

* Because that what they predict the U.S. will do.

* However - if the U.S. keeps its nose clean, looks after its people, and doesn’t take an aggressive global stance, then the Leninist ideology will look stupid and will struggle to keep the faith of the people.

* And here we are, 71 years later, and I hate to tell you - the Russians were right!

* Anyway, back to Walter Lippman, The right-leaning influential journalist and one of the fathers of modern propaganda.

* He took issue with the X article - at the time, he didn’t know who the author was - and wrote a series of articles about it, which ended up as a book called “The Cold War”.

* Which popularised the term.

* It’s usually said that the term was first coined by Herbert Bayard Swope, another Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.

* called the greatest reporter of his time by Lord Northcliffe

* He is known for saying, "I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time."

* He did publicity work for Bernard Baruch in 1947.

* Swope wrote a speech for Baruch, which he delivered to Congress on 16 April 1947.

* The line was: "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war."

* HOWEVER

* On 19 October 1945, George Orwell published an essay "You and the Atomic Bomb” in which he wrote: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many

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* And so on March 12, 1947, before a joint session of Congress, President Truman articulated, for the first time, a comprehensive American foreign policy for the postwar world.

* He did not mention the Soviet Union by name, or refer to the need to contain its power in Europe, though he did place American freedom against "totalitarian regimes."

* Appealing to American universalist ideals, he declared that U.S. foreign policy henceforth must side with any nation facing aggression, anywhere in the world.

* WATCH IT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=-LMXGFhfbCs

* READ IT: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/harrystrumantrumandoctrine.html

* Why not the UN?

* Because the U.S.S.R. would intervene.

* But that’s the POINT of the UN.

* International co-operation.

* Here we are, a year and change after the creation of the UN, and the U.S. is already acting unilaterally in European affairs.

* His key phrases:

* I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

* I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

* I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

* What about the free peoples who are resisting armed MAJORITIES?

* What about the free peoples of Palestine?

* You’ll notice that in his speech, Truman never mentions the Soviets by name.

* But he hints at them.

* He mentions Yalta and “totalitarian regimes”.

* So the Soviets have officially gone from being Allied and friends to the boogieman.

* BTW.

* Please note that Truman in 1947 is referring to the U.S.S.R. as a “totalitarian regime”.

* When people point to the U.S.S.R. and say “look! Socialism doesn’t work!” I always point out that it wasn’t actually socialism or communism - it was totalitarianism.

* People seem to think that socialism has to be totalitarian.

* Which is, of course, nonsense.

* Australia has a form of socialism - "social democracy".

* One of our two major political parties, the ALP, calls itself a democratic socialist party.

* So does Finland.

* So does Sweden.

* None of those countries have totalitarian governments.

* Socialism and democracy can go together.

* Just remember that.

* Back to Truman.

* His speech was really just a rehash of Churchill’s “We Will Fight Them On The Beaches” speech.

* Truman expanded on it.

* “We will fight them on the beaches… of other countries… even if they don’t want us to."

* And how did the Soviets respond to his speech?

* Six days later, Nikolai Novikov, who had returned from Washington to Moscow to take part in a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, discussed Truman’s speech with Molotov.

* He said The speech showed that the United States would support “reactionary regimes” in those countries where they existed, and would try to undermine the progressive regimes of Eastern Europe.

* Novikov writes in his memoirs That Molotov replied with an ironical smile

* Molotov said, “The President is trying to intimidate us,” “to turn us at a stroke into obedient little boys. But we don’t give a damn. At the meeting of the Council [of Foreign Ministers] we will firmly pursue our principled line.”

* Origins of Cold War; an International History, 2e (2005).pdf - page 73

* Now the implications of the Truman Doctrine were enormous.

* Until 1947, the U.S. had openly criticised countries that played power politics.

* Now it has committed itself to playing it on a global scale.

* But as a political tactic, it worked: Truman received the support he wanted from Republicans who wanted the U.S

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* So here we are in 1946.

* The Truman administration has decided on a “containment” policy.

* But who is going to contain the containers?

* According to the Novikov telegram, the Soviets felt like they had to contain the US.

* And the U.S. felt like they had to contain the Soviets.

* So the Americans were trying to figure out how they were going to to it, and how much they were willing to spend on it.

* In terms of atomic weapons control, the United States Atomic Energy Commission developed a classified plan to achieve international control, which came to be known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report, and submitted it to Secretary of State Byrnes in January 1946.

* It was named after Dean Acheson, at the time the Under Secretary of State - we’ve mentioned him briefly before, but he’s going to be a major character during the 1950s - and David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

* But it was written mostly by the committee’s chief scientific consultant, Robert Oppenheimer,

* They recommended that all global fissile material be owned by an international agency to be called the Atomic Development Authority, which would release small amounts to individual nations for the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy.

* But there was a twist.

* The stockpiles and atomic production plants would be strategically distributed geographically.

* Lots of different countries would have some inside their borders.

* So everyone would know what each country had.

* And the UN would have inspections and access.

* If a nation bent on atomic war seized the international plants within its borders, and refused access and inspections, everyone would know immediately what was happening.

* Other nations would have atomic plants within their own borders so that they would not be at a disadvantage.

* If a nation did seize the Authority's installations that were located within its territory, it would still take at least a year or more to produce bombs.

* So the plan would provide a huge measure of security against surprise attacks.

* Not a bad plan.

* The report also said that the United States would have to abandon its monopoly on atomic weapons, revealing what it knew to the Soviet Union, in exchange for a mutual agreement against the development of additional atomic bombs.

* It made no mention of when the United States should destroy its nuclear arsenal, but it did acknowledge that doing so was a necessity.

* The background to this report is the Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow between December 16 and 26, 1945.

* The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed to create a United Nations commission to advise on the destruction of all existing atomic weapons and to work toward using atomic energy for peaceful purposes.

* The resulting body, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission - UNAEC - was created on January 24, 1946, with six permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and Canada) and six rotating members.

* That same month, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes created a special advisory committee headed by Acheson and Lilienthal, to compose a report that the U.S. Government would present to the UNAEC.

* And of course, in that great American White House tradition, a great committee of serious and intelligent men was commission to spend many months of their time researching and writing a serious report about a very serious subject, so that, when it was delivered seriously to the President who commission the report, he could just go “nah fuck that” and throw it in the bin.

* But By the time they delivered their report, Truman had decided “nope, fuck that, we’re keeping the bomb to ourselves"

* But he couldn’t just come out and SAY that, because it would mean reneging on an important pi

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* The last, and certainly most conspicuous, of the four events that transformed the political culture of Washington in 1946 was a speech given in early March by Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Truman's home state of Missouri.

* Like Stalin's speech of four weeks earlier, it was prepared for public consumption.

* Truman had read a draft in advance and approved it, though he would later equivocate on this point.

* He sat behind Churchill as the legendary leader, speaking in the great rolling cadences now so familiar to Americans, declared that an "iron curtain" had fallen on Europe, dividing the free people of the West from a tyrannical, totalitarian regime in the East.

* Sometimes called the opening shot of the Cold War, this passage is one of the most often-quoted in post 1945 world affairs:

* Churchill said near the end: "I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines ... What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will be."

* This is coming from the guy who bitterly opposed to collapse of the British Empire which controlled 25% of the world only a few years earlier.

* Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

* These four developments of February and early March 1946 - Stalin’s speech, Pearson’s revelations, the Long Telegram, and Churchill’s speech - went a long way toward solidifying American attitudes with respect to the Soviet Union.

* The Pearson revelations and the Stalin speech demonstrated to lawmakers of both parties that continued efforts at cooperation with the USSR would be risky to sustain in the hardening atmosphere of American politics.

* General suspicion of the Soviet Union moved to the mainstream-it was now the easier, politically safer stance for a congressional representative or senator to take.

* Add the four together and the picture was clear: Stalin's Soviet Union presented no immediate danger, but neither could it be trusted.

* Because the Soviets could not be trusted, the United States needed to act, rather than stand idly by as it had in the 1930s.

* The questions now was - what to do about it?

* They didn’t want another war.

* And at this stage, the U.S. didn’t have a tradition of carrying a highly military budget during peacetime.

* Many in congress, and perhaps even Truman, believed that the expensive game of military readiness was something the old, defunct European nations did - the U.S. was an exception.

* Plus, Truman wanted to keep the government budget low and balanced and to avoid the inflation that a lot of people were predicting would come after the war ended and the economy returned to a consumer footing, with millions of soldiers returning home.

* As the Soviet threat seemed a long way off, Truman could afford to take his time and do it on the cheap.

* One of the first things he did was to screw Stalin on Iran.

* As we’ve mentioned in the past, Stalin had troops in Iran during WWII to stop the Nazis taking the oil reserves.

* As did the British, who of course had a long history with oil concessions - I think we talked about that on the Bullshit Filter series on Syria.

* Stalin demanded an oil concession from Iran that was equivalent to the one they gave the British.

* American and British diplomats worked with the Iranian leader Ahmad Qavam (and, secretly behind the scenes, with the heir to the Persian throne, Reza Pahlevi) to demand the removal of Soviet troops sent by Stalin to the northern part of the country and to suppress the Iranian communist party, Tudeh.

* Stalin agreed to withdraw his forces in exchange for an oil concession; but once the troops were out, the Iranians-backed by Washington-reneged on the oil agr

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* Stalin’s speech in February 1946 wasn’t a declaration of war.

* It wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been said in the past.

* He issued no direct threats toward the United States, and emphasized above all else the security of the Soviet state and the communist experiment.

* Rather, Stalin showed, if his previous words and actions had been insufficient, that he regarded the postwar world as a continuing realm of competition in which the Soviet system would fight for its survival in the face of capitalist encroachment.

* Close ties with the West were not in the cards.

* The situation, as far as he was concerned, was the same as it had been before the Great Patriotic War: rivalry was inevitable, broad-ranging cooperation all but impossible.

* And that’s when George F. Kennan, counselor at the American embassy in Moscow, when asked to explain Stalin's position, wrote his famous 5,500-word answer (not 8000 words, as it’s often referred to) in the form of a telegram he sent to the State Department.

* It’s known as the “Long Telegram”

* We’ve mentioned Kennan a few times in the past, but I think we should stop for a minute and do a small bio.

* After all, the man did more to shape United States policy during the cold war than any other person.

* George FROST Kennan was born in 1904

* His mother died two months later from a ruptured appendix.

* But for a long time Kennan thought she died giving birth to him.

* Which has to be some kind of burden as a kid.

* Growing up he wasn’t close to his father or stepmother.

* But at the age of 8 he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German.

* It was the first of numerous languages he would eventually master: Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese and Norwegian.

* So this would have been around 1912.

* Just before WWI.

* He eventually got a bachelor's degree in History from Princeton in 1925 and went to work for the United Stated Foreign Service which had only been created the previous year.

* his first job was as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland

* Then he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany where he was selected for a linguist training program that lasted three years.

* In 1929 Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin's Oriental Institute.

* He was following in the footsteps of his grandfather's younger cousin, also called George Kennan,who was a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia.

* And by 1931 he was in Latvia, where he worked on Soviet economic affairs.

* When the U.S. began formal diplomacy with the Soviet government during 1933, Kennan went to Moscow with the U.S.Ambassador, William C. Bullitt.

* Who of course Steve McQueen portrayed in the 1968 film BULLITT.

* Joking.

* Bullitt was actually fired from that job in 1936 when a journalist blew the whistle on him for being involved in the illegal money exchanges in Russia.

* He was briefly engaged to Roosevelt's personal secretary and lifelong companion, Missy LeHand (Job), but she broke off the engagement after a trip to Moscow during which she reportedly discovered him to be having an affair with Olga Lepeshinskaya, who was Stalin’s favourite ballet dancer, and maybe mistress.

* Bullitt’s second wife, BTW, was Louise Bryant, author of Six Red Months in Russia, played by Diane Keaton in the 1981 film REDS.

* He divorced her when he found out she was having a lesbian affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne.

* ANYWAY.

* Back to Kennan.

* Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946.

* Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the Wo

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* In October 1945, Navy Day 1945 in New York City, at the Commissioning of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman gave a speech.

* Here’s a clip.

* https://youtu.be/BjUz4BPWwbc?t=2m21s

* FAKE TRUMAN ACCENT: “We don’t seek any more land - because we already took as much as we could from the Native Americans, and the Mexicans, and the Hawaiians, and the Spanish."

* He went on to say The world "cannot afford any letdown in the united determination of the allies in this war to accomplish a lasting peace."'

* So he’s all about working with the Soviets and finding a lasting peace.

* Or is he?

* Privately it seems like he didn’t believe peace with the U.S.S.R. was possible.

* Like FDR before him, Truman envisioned a world with open international trade - something the U.S. economy desperately needed - which meant global capitalism.

* But the U.S.S.R. had just turned back the Nazis, fighting them for years without much support, and had played a huge role in their final defeat.

* and they had the world’s largest land army.

* They weren’t about to kowtow to the American new world order.

* The only way the USA could force the Soviets to go along with it was war.

* And the Soviets had just proven - again - how difficult their country was to invade.

* And the American people wouldn’t support another war.

* Especially not to overthrow a recent ally, just because they wanted to enforce their own new world order.

* Not yet, anyway.

* Some in Washington believed the U.S. had no real choice but to find a way to work with the USSR

* Other believed the Soviets couldn’t be trusted, and pointed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.

* They conveniently ignored the places where the Soviets had kept to their agreements - Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.

* As of October 1945, Truman and his inner circle seem to have no grand strategy regarding working with the Soviets at this stage.

* But over the next few months, they started concluding that they weren’t going to be able to work with Stalin.

* And by late 1947, the term “Cold War” had already entered the political lexicon.

* and America's containment strategy had been implemented.

* At the end of World War II the United States possessed far and away the world's largest economy.

* Its GDP was five times that of Great Britain, four times that of the Soviet Union.

* As we’ve pointed out many times - this was mostly due to the fact that the U.S. was the only major economy not flattened by the war.

* And now it also had the bomb.

* Initially Truman and Byrnes, his new Sec of State, thought they could dangle the bomb in front of Stalin as a way to induce him to accept their view of the world.

* Not in a “do it or we’ll drop it on you” approach, although that was always an unspoken threat, but in a “do it and we might share our atomic secrets with you” approach.

* Of course, what they didn’t know at the time, was they didn’t HAVE any secrets.

* Stalin knew it all.

* In the first Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) conference, which took place in London from September 11 to October 2, Byrnes tried to use a combination of threats and sweets to get Molotov to budge on a range of issues - the control of Germany and eastern Europe - but Molotov just laughed in his face.

* By December, Byrnes had been told by Truman to stop trying to woo the Russians.

* In fact, Truman got all up in his face for trying to conclude a deal without the White House’s approval.

* He felt Byrnes had over-stepped his authority.

* It’s like Truman has become Stalin and Byrnes is Molotov.

* Truman is beginning to mistrust and sideline Byrnes already and he’s only six months into the job of SoS.

* Now Truman is going to start playing tough again with the Russians.

* In September the departing

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* The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers.

* A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”

* In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of U.S. bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects.

* The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.

* A rare article about what it called this “sensitive” dispute appeared in the New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been “Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years.”

* Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a “hold” on the Japanese using it — even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.

* Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend.

* It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

* The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.

* From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.

* So he got his hands on it and made a short 16 film, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945”.

* He arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press.

* He approached the three TV networks that existed back then and offered them the film, but none expressed interest in airing it.

* Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release.

* When that footage finally emerged, journalist Greg Mitchell spoke with the man at the center of the drama: Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.

* McGovern told him: “I always had the sense, that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war.

* He later said: “The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation.”

* Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

* Four days after Wilfred Burchett's story - remember him from the last episode? Aussie journalist, first into Hiroshima? - splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Lesli

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* TRUMAN ANNOUNCES THE BOMB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN_UJJ9ObDs

* On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow.

* Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others.

* Mr. Akihiro Takahashi was 14 years old, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

* He was standing in line with other students of his junior high school, waiting for the morning meeting 1.4 km away from the center.

* "The heat was tremendous . And I felt like my body was burning all over. For my burning body the cold water of the river was as precious as the treasure. Then I left the river, and I walked along the railroad tracks in the direction of my home. On the way, I ran into an another friend of mine, Tokujiro Hatta. I wondered why the soles of his feet were badly burnt. It was unthinkable to get burned there. But it was undeniable fact the soles were peeling and red muscle was exposed. Even I myself was terribly burnt, I could not go home ignoring him. I made him crawl using his arms and knees. Next, I made him stand on his heels and I supported him. We walked heading toward my home repeating the two methods."

* He was under medical treatment for about year and half.

* Eiko Taoka, then 21, was one of nearly 100 passengers said to have been on board a streetcar that had left Hiroshima Station at a little after 8:00 a.m. and was in a Hatchobori area, 750 m from ground zero, when the bomb fell. Taoka was heading for Funairi with her one year old son to secure wagon in preparation for her move out of the building which was to be evacuated. At 8:15, as the streetcar approached Hatchobori Station, an intense flash and blast engulfed the car, instantly setting it on fire. Taoka’s son died of radiation sickness on August 28.

* When we were near in Hatchobori and since I had been holding my son in my arms, the young woman in front of me said, ‘I will be getting off here. Please take this seat.’ We were just changing places when there was a strange smell and sound. It suddenly became dark and before I knew it, I had jumped outside.... I held [my son] firmly and looked down on him. He had been standing by the window and I think fragments of glass had pierced his head. His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory. He did not comprehend what had happened. And so he looked at me and smiled at my face which was all bloody. I had plenty of milk which he drank all throughout that day. I think my child sucked the poison right out of my body. And soon after that he died. Yes, I think that he died for me.

* Ms. Akiko Takakura was 20 years old when the bomb fell. She was in the Bank of Hiroshima, 300 meters away from the hypocenter. Ms. Takakura miraculously escaped death despite over 100 lacerated wounds on her back. She is one of the few survivors who was within 300 meters of the hypocenter.

* Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn't believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away. For a few years after the A-bomb was dropped, I was terribly afraid of fire. I wasn't even able to get close to fire because all my senses remembered how fearful and horrible the fire was, how hot the blaze was, and how ha

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