…with images of what The Bomb (as we called it then) can do to human flesh and bone.

Anybody younger than me who remembers images from the Vietnam war? Remember that screaming little girl running naked down a road trying to escape the napalm eating her skin?

Yeah, like that and worse.

I didn’t know about the US military holding a football game, but otherwise, if there was a “coverup” it was a damn inefficient one. There was photojournalism, there were books, there were what-if tv movies — I’m quite sure we were not told everything, but what we did know scared us shitless.

Of course, remember that after years of take-no-prisoners fighting, massive fire bombings by the U.S., the Rape of Nanking and numerous other atrocities by the Japanese (still being officially ignored in Japan), estimated millions of Japanese and 100,000 American deaths if there were an invasion of the Home Islands, the American soldiers played a "careless" and "heartless" football game. In the course of the War and its aftermaths, this incident is not even a blip.

What would have happened had the Japanese won? Or even if a peace treaty was signed with both sides just keeping what they had at the end of 1944?

There was no taboo. In the '50s and '60s we all knew of the horrors of Hiroshima as it was brought up over and over in schools, in having practice drills, in discussions about a new nuclear war, on TV, in movies, everywhere. I remember those days even if some forgot them or were too young or just were more interested in talking about free love than the horrors of nuclear deaths.

Last edited Thu Aug 7, 2025, 01:06 PM - Edit history (4)

Guy was editor of Editor & Publisher and quit the best source on the business when the mag got bought. He chose integrity over cash.

ETA: It wasn’t Murdoch who bought them out, it was the Carlyle Group.

ETA3: It was Carlyle Group, via Duncan-McIntosh, tied to Murdoch and Carlyle Group.

Getting old. One thing never changes: GOOD WRITING IS GOOD EDITING

ETA 4 or 5:

Excerpt...

Nielsen (Company), which is perhaps best known for its television ratings service, is owned by a group of investors that include AlpInvest Partners NV, The Blackstone Group LP, The Carlyle Group, Hellman & Friedman LLC, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. LP, and Thomas H. Lee Partners LP.

Source: https://www.cleveland.com/business/2009/12/editor_publisher_closing_after.html

He may be just the bee’s knees as you say, but if even small children were exposed to photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki via magazines in the average American home — then the info he claims has been covered up is maybe not so much?

And as the child learned to read there were a stack of national bestsellers on every aspect of WWII — I was going to say a not-so-average home, but good lord’n’butter if a book is a national bestseller, it’s in a lot of homes. This he calls a cover-up?

On Edit: He was born the same year as I was.

about radiation and its lingering effects, tumors appearing a decade or two after the fact and that radiation dosage is cumulative, meaning it all adds up and never goes away.

They likely saw little difference between burning a city with a nuke and burning it with carpet bombing and only gradually learned about radiation and increased cancers later on, showing up in vital statistics reports but not predictable on an individual level.

This is the level of knowledge and lack of protocol I'm talking about: