How the Bombing of Hiroshima Was Covered Up

A new documentary from the PBS American Experience series steps into this void, offering a provocative history that brings to life the dangers that arise when government secrecy and control overwhelm press freedom.

Bombshell examines how U.S. newspapers covered the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documentary traces the career of New York Times science writer William L. Laurence, who in the spring of 1945 was selected by Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves to serve as the press writer and official historian of the Manhattan Project. Groves brought Laurence to the top-secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, granting him extensive access to the project’s operations. Working under military supervision, Laurence squandered both his opportunity and his credibility, becoming a mouthpiece for government propaganda rather than a voice committed to telling the truth.

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Reporters were not the only people who compromised their principles. A scientist, Stafford L. Warren, a pioneer on radiation whom Groves brought in to be chief medical officer, wrote Groves a strong memo about the dangers of radiation. Groves ignored him. Warren changed his messaging in another memo, minimizing the danger of radiation and said that U.S. soldiers would be perfectly safe going into cities that had been bombed. “Somehow Warren was able to persuade himself, justify, forget, deny, repress, his own fears about the atomic bomb,” says Janet Farrell Brodie, a historian at Claremont Graduate University.

Laurence’s omissions were a harbinger of things to come. He interviewed pilots involved in dropping the bombs and even flew on one of the aircraft involved in bombing Nagasaki. And just as Groves and the Truman administration preferred, Laurence emphasized infrastructure damage and military success, even though he saw the horrors of the aftermath firsthand. He helped the government in their effort to scare the Soviet Union with descriptions of the bomb while not undermining the moral authority of the United States.

Through this lens, Bombshell gives new meaning to the iconic image of the mushroom cloud, seared into the memories of generations of schoolchildren. In retrospect, its most striking feature is the absence of human bodies: The cloud became a way for the United States to showcase the ferocity of its weaponry in abstract terms without revealing what had happened on the ground.

The heroes of the film are journalists working outside U.S. institutions. A Japanese photographer a Hiroshima newspaper, Yoshito Matsushige, took the only surviving photographs right after the bomb dropped; he only stopped when he was overcome by what he saw. The U.S. military later seized the pictures.

Black intellectuals including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. Du Bois were among the first to criticize how the United States deployed science and were acutely attuned to the racialized, anti-Asian bias shaping those decisions. Hurston called Truman the “butcher of Asia.” Du Bois called him “one of the greatest killers of our time.” As Ohio State University historian Felecia Ross notes, “The Japanese were people of color, just like they are, so there is an understandable skepticism.” The film also highlights Charles Loeb, a Black journalist for the Cleveland Call and Post, whose reporting focused on the long-term effects of the radiation on the populus.

Leslie Nakashima, a reporter born in Hawaii, was living in Japan when the bombs fell. Traveling by train to Hiroshima, he immediately encountered the carnage—the “sea of destruction” as one of the film’s commentators put it. Nakashima recorded what he saw and published a syndicated article, “Hiroshima as I Saw It,” offering one of the most unflinching contemporary accounts of the devastation. Images in the film show how some articles at the time raised questions about Nakashima’s credibility, labeling him in headlines as a “Jap newsman.” When Nakashima’s column appeared in the Times, the paper included Groves’ opinion: “Japanese reports of deaths from radioactive effects of atomic bombing are pure propaganda.”

In response to such reporting, military officials and government scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, whom the film depicts as complicit in the cover-up, moved to minimize how bad the effects of radiation would be. When Groves acknowledged before Congress in November 1945 that radiation was killing people, he dismissed the danger by calling it a “pleasant way to die.” George Weller, a Chicago Daily News journalist, defied military restrictions and went to Nagasaki. But when he shared the graphic pieces he wrote out of patriotism with Gen. Douglas McCarthur’s headquarters, they didn’t see the light of day for decades. Meanwhile, Laurence was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his role in shaping the official narrative.

The cone of silence finally collapsed in 1946, when the New Yorker, a magazine better known at the time for lighter fare and humor, published John Hersey’s 31,000-word masterpiece, “Hiroshima.” Filling an entire issue, the article traced the devastating impact of the bombs on six survivors. (Hersey’s background—his father had been a missionary in China—helped him avoid the anti-Asian bias that shaped much mainstream coverage.) His essay was an immediate sensation, and the issue sold out in a single day. Albert Einstein reportedly attempted to order 1,000 extra copies. Time covered the article; it was read out loud on the radio; and it was quickly republished as a book.

Yet even after Hersey shattered the official narrative, the government moved quickly to impose a new one. President Truman promoted civil defense programs that, as the film shows, reassured Americans they could survive the bomb by ducking under dining room tables or retreating to suburban underground bomb shelters. More consequentially, Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt’s former secretary of war, published an article in Harper’s Monthly, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” Receiving coverage comparable to “Hiroshima,” the piece argued that the bomb saved over a million American and Japanese lives by averting a U.S. invasion of the mainland and bringing the war to an end. Groves worked with MGM on a film characterized by the experts in the film as pro-bomb propaganda that simply repeated the story for a mass audience. This “lesser evil” narrative—one that the film’s experts largely agree is a myth—has endured to the present day.

Journalists of the era underestimated the power of the government’s secrecy apparatus, and as a result the United States has never fully reckoned with the horrors unleashed in the summer of 1945.

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The film goes somewhat too far in its closing moments by emphasizing the triumph of the government’s narrative in ensuing years. In reality, a massive international nuclear freeze movement took shape after the war, one driven by the conviction that the development and use of the bomb were tragic, unnecessary, and immoral. As historian Lawrence Wittner documents in his classic trilogy on the subject, millions of people around the world mobilized around this belief.

At the same time, the film does not engage with the work of historians and journalists in recent decades whose research lends some support to claims first advanced in Harper’s. In Road to Surrender, Evan Thomas argues that hawkish military leaders and factions within the Japanese government were determined to continue the war even after the bombs fell, suggesting that there is some validity to the claim that the bombings saved lives. His nuanced account avoids the stark moral binaries of earlier justifications while underscoring that the story is more complicated than government propaganda alone.

Regardless, Bombshell is an important and worthwhile production. The filmmakers illuminate the fraught relationship between government and the press at a moment when Washington is once again tightening its grip on fundamental freedoms with an intensity not seen in decades. This film makes clear how much can go wrong when press freedom erodes.