Bombshell (American Experience Films, PBS Western Reserve, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 6) I watched a fascinating special on PBS, an American Experience episode called “Bombshell” about how the U.S. government not only kept the existence of the Manhattan Engineering District (the official name of the World War II atomic bomb program, though it’s become colloquially known to history as the “Manhattan Project” even though none of the work took place in Manhattan or anywhere near New York City) a secret during the war but worked furiously to shape the public’s view of the bomb project after the war. The show was produced under rather odd auspices because, while its credits have the familiar American Experience logo, it’s not listed under either imdb.com or PBS’s own Web site. It turned out it was produced under the rubric “PBS Western Reserve,” apparently a sub-network of which I’d never heard before. The first half-hour is a capsule history of the origins of the Manhattan Project, including the discovery of atomic fission in Germany in the 1930’s that, at least according to director and co-writer Ben Lofterman, gave the Nazis an automatic head start in building a nuclear weapon. Actually the Nazis frittered away that advantage because of Adolf Hitler’s racism: he denounced nuclear science as “Jewish physics” and drove out a lot of Germany’s top nuclear researchers because they were Jewish. The show hits all the high points of this familiar story: the letter Leo Szilard wrote to Albert Einstein in 1938 expressing the fear that the Nazis would build an atomic weapon and imploring him to use his prestige to get President Franklin Roosevelt to authorize a crash program to build an A-bomb before the Germans did; the formation of the Manhattan Project in 1942 and the appointment of General Leslie Groves, who had just finished construction of the Pentagon and had brought the project in ahead of schedule and under budget, to administer it; Groves’s choice of J. Robert Oppenheimer to run the project’s scientific end; and the successful detonation of Trinity, the first working atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945. Along the way Groves hired a New York Times reporter named William L. Laurence to handle public relations for the project, even though the public wasn’t supposed to know about it until the bomb was successfully deployed. Laurence was a fascinating character: he’d studied philosophy and law at Harvard and Boston University, but he never received a degree at Harvard because he kept defaulting on his student loans. (Lofterman says he was expelled for cheating; he took an exam in elementary German for a student he was tutoring.)

Laurence got a job on the New York World in 1926 and effectively invented the job of science journalist. Ultimately the New York Times hired him away from the World, and in 1940 he wrote a Times article, which the paper put on its front page, about the potential use of atomic energy in creating a super-weapon. Laurence was apparently hoping that his article would spark the creation of a U.S. atom-bomb program, but it didn’t. A copy did find its way to the Soviet Union, which took the hint and launched their own atom bomb program in 1942. (So much for the still widely believed myth that the Soviets couldn’t have made their own A-bomb and had to “steal” the secret from us!) In 1942 Groves hired Laurence and gave him carte blanche to stay at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was being developed. The price for Laurence’s access was total secrecy; he had to promise not to write anything about the bomb until it was actually used, and he kept his promise. Another condition of Laurence’s access was that he had to allow Groves’s censors to review any dispatches he did publish, and in particular to toe the official line that the death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first two (and so far the only) cities in the world ever attacked with atomic weapons, came mostly or totally from the blast effects and not from the radioactivity released by the bombs, which as we now know turned into a “silent killer” that continued to strike down the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades afterwards due to increasing their risks of cancer and other long-term toxicities of nuclear radiation. This remained the U.S. government’s official line for decades afterwards, including those insane A-bomb drills in Nevada in the 1950’s in which U.S. soldiers were marched into A-bomb test sites right after the bombs had been detonated to show that nuclear weapons could be used tactically without any significant harm to the people marching in after they were used. (In fact the death rates among those soldiers from cancer and other radiation-related chronic diseases were well above the average for people of their ages, backgrounds, and overall health conditions.)

The crusading journalist who broke the myth was a young war correspondent named John Hersey, who was born in China to American missionary parents. He referred to himself and his fellow children of missionaries as “mish kids” and said they either excelled in whatever fields they entered or became hard-core alcoholics (nothing in between). In 1945 Hersey was already known as a World War II correspondent and author of the novel A Bell for Adano (1944), about an Italian-American major in Sicily who wins the admiration and affection of the townspeople of Adano. In 1945 he was approached by New Yorker publisher Wallace Shawn and editor Harold Ross to do a profile story on the Hiroshima bombing for the magazine. Hersey was skeptical at first, especially after the world’s fourth atomic weapon was successfully tested by the U.S. at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, but Ross and Shawn told him to go ahead with it and scheduled the publication for the first anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Hersey decided to focus on six Japanese survivors of the attack: Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, who ran a private hospital; Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, German-born Jesuit pastor of Hiroshima’s largest Roman Catholic church; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki of the local Red Cross hospital; and Rev. Kiyoshi Tanamoto, pastor of Hiroshima’s largest Methodist church. When Hersey started writing it, he thought it would be the average 7,500-word length of a typical New Yorker profile. Instead he kept on working until it was 30,000 words, long enough for a book, and to their credit Shawn and Ross not only decided to print it in full but to make it the sole content of the August 31, 1946 issue. It created a sensation when it first came out, largely because American readers had heretofore known about the atomic bomb and its results only from the sanitized version they’d got from William Laurence and other journalists approved by the government. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club premium selection when it was published in book form, and reportedly Albert Einstein tried to buy 1,000 copies from the publisher to use as warnings of the dangers of atomic warfare – only The New Yorker couldn’t sell him any copies because the issue had completely sold out. Hersey’s Hiroshima bothered the U.S. government enough that they directly commissioned a counter-narrative, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, credited to then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson but co-written with Harvard University president James Conant and others, including physicists who’d actually worked on the Manhattan Project.

Ben Lofterman’s Bombshell also profiled various other people who tried to get the truth out to the American people about how destructive the A-bomb really was, including Japanese-American photographer and reporter Yoshito Matsushige, who when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred on December 7, 1941 had been in Japan visiting his parents. Matsushige had continued working as a journalist in Japan and just happened to be in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 when the first A-bomb was used. He said he was so horrified at what he was seeing that he could take only a few photos of the devastation, and his pictures were confiscated after the war by the U.S. occupation forces and not released until the U.S. ended its formal occupation of Japan in 1952. Then he got his photos back and sold them to Life magazine, which published them as a major spread. Another one of Lofterman’s heroes was Charles Loeb, an African-American who worked for a Black newspaper in Cleveland and got unfiltered accounts of the destruction of Hiroshima from Black servicemembers who’d been ordered into the city to clean it up. Lofterman explains that one of the reasons General Groves and others in the U.S. military were so determined to downplay the radiation effects of the bomb was that they were worried it would be considered a chemical weapon, similar to the poison gas attacks that had been used to devastating effect by both sides in World War I and had thereafter been banned by the Geneva Conventions. (It’s ironic that Adolf Hitler, who had been wounded by a gas attack as a corporal in World War I, had no problem using gas against helpless civilians in the Holocaust, but firmly forbade the German military from using it in wartime.)

KPBS followed this up with an intriguing half-hour documentary called The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero – and Nuclear Peril Today, narrated by Peter Coyote (who’s familiar as the narrator of virtually all the Ken Burns documentaries since David McCullough gave up the gig) and telling the bizarre story of an all-star two-handed touch football game played in Nagasaki, Japan on January 1, 1946. This was a morale-builder for the Second Division of the U.S. Marine Corps, who were stationed in Nagasaki as occupation troops, and was held on the site of an old middle school which had been near Ground Zero whose athletic field could be adapted for the purpose. The Marines cleared the field and erected goalposts and bleachers out of scrap wood. They decided to make the game two-hand touch instead of tackle because the field was full of glass shards that couldn’t be removed to make a tackle game safe. That wasn’t the only tweak in the usual rules; they also specified that a team would have to gain 15 yards for a first down instead of the usual 10. The two teams were the “Isahaya Tigers” and the “Nagasaki Bears,” and both had former football stars as their captains: Angelo Bertelli, 1943 Heisman Trophy winner for Notre Dame, for the Bears, and professional star “Bullet” Bill Osmanski of the Chicago Bears for the Tigers. At the time Japanese athletes had already taken up baseball, but American football was terra incognita, and one of the motives behind the game appears to have been to introduce the locals to America’s other pastime. Young Japanese women were recruited to be cheerleaders, and a U.S. Marine band played during halftime. American servicemembers sat in the bleachers or stood alongside the field, while the Japanese watched from afar on hilltops.

The movie got into the “why” of the Nagasaki bombing, and gave me a piece of information I hadn’t known before: it’s the only time in U.S. history the use of an atomic weapon has been authorized at a lower level of command than the President of the United States. There was a lot of criticism, even at the time, that the use of one atomic bomb could be justified as a means of getting the Japanese to surrender but two bombs were beyond the pale. After that, President Harry S. Truman decreed that the U.S. would never again use nuclear weapons without the President’s specific authorization. For the rest of his life Truman would defend his use of the bomb against Hiroshima and would frequently get testy or even angry when it was questioned. He maintained that by using the bomb America had spared itself the need for a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland, which would have meant many times the death toll of the atomic raids. Ben Lofterman in Bombshell and the director of The Atom Bowl both questioned that and said the U.S. government had originally planned to keep dropping as many A-bombs on Japan as American factories could make, not to induce the Japanese to surrender but to soften them up and undermine their ability to resist a U.S. invasion. Also a number of Lofterman’s interviewees argued that the bombs weren’t the last weapons of World War II, but the first of the Cold War: they were used to show the Soviet Union that we were the new world hegemon and they shouldn’t even try to resist as the U.S. took suzerainty over the entire world. That didn’t happen only because the Russians developed their own bomb in 1949 – and I’ve long savored the irony that both J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, who headed the bomb programs for their respective countries, ran afoul of their nations’ political police forces and were officially disgraced.