Above: Mohamed ElBaradei, left, is interviewed at the United Nations studio by Walter Cronkite.

Archival Tape President Franklin Roosevelt; President Harry Truman; Dr. Ralph Lapp, Manhattan Project nuclear physicist;

Retired teacher Masahito Hirose, was 10 years old when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He was only 2 miles from the epicenter and lost many friends and family members. The school where he later taught, was directly below where the bomb exploded. “There were about 1,500 children who had just come out of the air raid shelters and were playing. They were all killed; not a single one survived.  And the heat was so intense that their bodies just burned within that second or two. They say when you look at this ground here now, if you came within several days, several weeks, the whole ground was covered with bodies; you couldn't see anything but bodies of children.”

Shimohira says the bodies continued to glow because the radiation affected the bone calcium. “Even seven or eight months after, the phosphate, phosphorous light was giving out from the ashes. It was called corpse candle.”

Akio Sakita, an atomic bomb survivor from Nagasaki, was 16 years old in 1945. “I saw orange colored fire ball rise in the sky.  It looked almost as big as the size of the sun. It did not emit a blinding flash right away.  But, within a second, beams in many colors—red, blue, and yellow—suddenly started to spread in every direction from the orange colored fire ball.  It hit my face so I felt great pain. I just touched my face. And then I felt my skin come off my face and hang down.”

“But to tell the truth, almost 99% of Hiroshima people, even though they lost their family, do no hate Americans – ordinary people. But I think they hate the American policy of militarism.”

Fumiko Matsuda, atomic bomb survivor from Nagasaki, considers herself a peace activist. But it takes a very unusual form. “I always try to talk to the kids in my neighborhood. When I get out of my car, then the kids in the neighborhood run up to me. And I really love them and I care about them, I cherish them and I always talk to them. This is how I try to disseminate my feeling about peace. Maybe it is too much to call that peace activity. Mine is very, very basic and very simple. It is part of my daily life. But I think peace is there, or the very first step of peace is there.”

Other Voices

international civil servant and scholar, Dr. ElBaradei has become closely familiar with the work and processes of international organizations, particularly in the fields of international peace and security and international law making. He has lectured widely in the fields of international law, international organizations, arms control and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and is the author of various articles and books on these subjects. He belongs to a number of professional associations, including the International Law Association and the American Society of International Law.

Grahlfs has devoted a good portion of his life to examining the impact of atomic radiation on Americans. “One of the things I discovered in my research is that almost everyone I interviewed who had been Marines in the occupation of Nagasaki, ended up with leukemia, sometimes as much as 20 years later. This is a weapon that is deadly not only to the people you’re using it against, but to the people who are using it.”

Yoshio Suzuki was drafted in 1941 and served in the Japanese army as an infantryman, mostly in China. War veteran Yoshio Suzuki now lives in retirement north of Tokyo. His personal experiences as a draftee during World War II have profoundly affected his life. While some Japanese remember the horror of being bombed, he has nightmares about the horrors he was forced to perpetrate against civilians in China.

William Perry served as Secretary of Defense from 1994-1997. Perry was an army officer who participated in the US invasion of Okinawa in 1945. He later became Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration and today is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is a forceful proponent of a strong US military. He says, however, that the US and other nuclear powers have not lived up to their commitments under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.

Mr. Tashiro theorizes “if they televised the whole consequence of the atomic bombing, right after the bombing, for a few days or so, probably there wouldn’t be the nuclear arms race between the United States and former Soviet Union. Actually the majority of the people of the world really don’t know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Dower reflects on the censorship of the years after the bomb, “As part of a more general censorship policy, writings about the effects of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were basically censored by American occupation authorities. Photographs taken by the Japanese were ordered to be turned in to the Americans. And the film footage the Americans took of the immediate aftermath of the bombs was held secret until the 1960s.”

Aaron Tovish, campaign manager of the Mayors for Peace in Hiroshima, a program to promote solidarity of cities towards the total abolition of nuclear weapons. As of  May 2005, membership stood at 1,036 cities in 112 countries and regions.

President Franklin Roosevelt; Thirty-second president of the United States; the only one to serve 4 terms. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II. With Stalin and Churchill, Roosevelt laid the groundwork for the post-war world, and the creation of the United Nations.

Harry S. Truman, Thirty-third president of the United States, During his few weeks as Vice President, Harry S. Truman scarcely saw President Roosevelt, and received no briefing on the development of the atomic bomb or the unfolding difficulties with Soviet Russia. Suddenly these and a host of other wartime problems became Truman's to solve when, on April 12, 1945, he  became President.  He told reporters, "I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

Dr. Ralph E. Lapp (1917–2004), nuclear physicist and prolific author on radiation fallout, was involved in atomic weapons from the earliest days of the Manhattan Project. He was a prominent figure in the cold-war debate about civil defense and continued to speak out about the health effects of radiation into the 1990's.