Bomb's Aftereffects

What awful aftereffects does radioactivity have on the people not instantly killed by an atomic bomb? This week there were some fairly straight answers. The University of California's Colonel Hymer Friedell, a member of the Army commission appointed to make a survey, previewed its report. This will be Washington's official view:

> Radiation accounted for not more than 5% of Hiroshima's fatalities (100,000 out of a 400,000 population). The proportion in Nagasaki was about the same. Japs who died from radioactive waves were within one to two kilometers of the blast. All physical damage was instantaneous with the explosion; no rays "persisted," as Jap doctors once claimed, in the soil.

> Bleeding, caused by a depletion of white blood cells (and depression of tiny blood-clotting elements called throm-bocytes), was the largest single specific cause of death among Jap victims of radioactivity.

> Some Japs were made sterile--a condition not necessarily permanent. Sterilization, which sometimes occurs temporarily among hospital patients treated by radiation, is one big bugaboo* of atomic energy. Tokyo stories that atomic energy was a "cure" for sterility (two older women were reported to be "like girls again" and eggless hens were said to be "rejuvenated" by radiation) were baseless.

> The ruined streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now filled with Japs who have small tufts of hair beginning to grow back on their slick pates. Temporary baldness is one symptom of radiation injury. A variation of the injury was discovered among a herd of red cattle grazing some 50 miles from last summer's test bombing in New Mexico. Radioactive dust settled on their backs, turned the red hair white in small splotches.

*Two London doctors last month warned industrial scientists that they were playing with fire; OSRD's Vannevar Bush also warned a House committee that amateur attic experiments with radioactive energy might "sterilize, perhaps, all the passers-by."

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