By Michael Palmer and Teruichi Harada

Osamu Sugihara, editor-in-chief at Gogatsu Shobo Shinsha Co., Ltd., has attempted a rebuttal of Palmer’s book “Hiroshima Revisited.”1 The book makes the case that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not atomic, but were instead staged with the use of conventional explosives, napalm, and mustard gas. It has also been published in Japanese under the title “The Staged Atomic Bombings” (translated by Harada). Sugihara’s article is dressed up like a “scientific paper”, but the similarity is only skin-deep—it does not pertain to the substance of his arguments. These can be summed up as follows:

  • Sugihara never touches on the most crucial evidence that disproves the atomic bombings.
  • Likewise, he fails to mention any of the evidence for the use of mustard gas and napalm.
  • None – literally not a single one – of the scientific or medical arguments presented in our book is correctly stated. Those of our arguments that he does address he first distorts almost beyond recognition before attacking and “defeating” them.
  • Sugihara denies and obfuscates the insurmountable evidentiary difficulties of the “atomic” standard narrative using threadbare and irrelevant arguments.
  • He uses plot elements of the standard narrative as if they were evidence.
  • He accords highest priority to the results of laboratory experiments that are demonstrably fake.
  • He equates denying the atomic bomb narrative with defamation of the victims.
  • He claims that the sheer scale of the cover-up proves that the cover-up was not a cover-up.

It would take many pages to examine and rebut every single one of Sugihara’s absurd claims. We will therefore merely illustrate each of our above statements by example. As our reply to his statements we think these examples are enough.

Crucial evidence against the atomic bombings that Sugihara fails to mention

This evidence includes:

  • The survival of numerous people near the hypocenter, out in the open or shielded by no more than wooden houses. “Hiroshima Revisited” (HR for short) cites several statistical reports pertaining to such survivors. First-hand witness accounts by such survivors can be found in Chikatsu Hayashi’s recent book “Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth of those tragedies” (in Japanese), too. Sugihara talks only briefly about the survivors, and he falsely suggests that they had all been shielded and protected within concrete buildings or cellars.
  • The absence of retinal burns in survivors who looked directly at the “nuclear” flash. The medical literature contains no reported cases of such retinal burns from either city.
  • The absence of physical destruction of buildings and trees near the hypocenter commensurate with a “proper” nuclear detonation. The blast wave should have reached an air speed of 1300 kilometers per hour—five times that of a category 5 hurricane. Notice that the drag scales with the square of the air speed; therefore, “Little Boy’s” blast wave would have developed a force 25 times greater than a category 5 hurricane. Not even regular steel frame buildings should stand up to such a force. However, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of such structures remained intact, as did many trees, flagpoles, and window frames.

Positive evidence of the use of mustard gas and napalm that Sugihara fails to mention

With mustard gas, we can cite:

  • respiratory distress and capillary leak syndrome in early victims, with lung pathology to match,
  • blisters of the skin and sloughing-off of airway mucous membranes,
  • “radiation sickness” in persons who were not in the cities for the attacks but entered them shortly afterwards, which is explained by the prolonged persistence of mustard gas in the environment.

The use of napalm is supported by typical skin burns, often leading to keloids later. These lesions were indistinguishable from those reported in acknowledged napalm burn victims.

Distortions of HR’s evidence and arguments

It is in the misrepresentation and obfuscation department that Mr. Sugihara exhibits the greatest virtuosity. Examples:

  • “TNT, napalm, … sulfur mustard, … do not produce a neutron flux …” That is of course true, but neither we nor anyone else ever dreamed of saying that chemical reactions release neutrons. Instead, HR suggests explicitly that sample materials were irradiated with neutron sources in the lab.
  • Regarding those same neutron-irradiated samples, Sugihara summarizes HR’s argument as follows: “Since there are discrepancies between early measurements and later dose calculations, neutrons did not exist.” However, HR’s real arguments against neutron radiation from the bomb are those against the atomic bomb itself, such as the survivors near the “detonation” and the limited extent of physical destruction. These findings reflect the immediate and directly observable effects of the bombing. Such immediately manifest real-world evidence must take precedence over measurements on samples in the laboratory conducted years afterwards. Accordingly, the purpose of HR’s critical analysis of the neutron data is not to prove that those data were faked. Instead, the analysis starts from the premise that they are fraudulent and merely serves to show that they were faked poorly and inconsistently.
  • “In conspiracy theories, while materials from official agencies are generally viewed with suspicion, images of unknown origin, anonymous testimonies, …” This may be so, but it does not apply to HR, which cites all of its sources—more than 300 overall. Most of these sources are scientific books and papers. Eyewitnesses who are quoted are also named. Most eyewitness accounts come from books originally published in Japanese and later translated into English.

Denial of the obvious difficulties with the standard narrative

We already mentioned above the violent strength of the detonations that the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs should have produced. Sugihara admits that the blast wave should have caused the enormous pressure of 11 tons per square meter, yet he suggests that this is somehow compatible with the limited extent of destruction on the ground, which does not exceed that observed in conventionally bombed cities. Trees, he reassures us, may survive such a blast wave. He is untroubled even by the finding that in Hiroshima most trees were bent toward the hypocenter, i.e. against the fury of the blast wave. This is of course nothing but nonsense and baffle gab.

Using the standard narrative as “evidence” in its own support

Striving to refute the idea of Hiroshima’s destruction by conventional bombs, Sugihara invents the following spurious difficulty: “While a single explosion could cause significant localized damage, a simple mass comparison—equivalent to 15,000 metric tons of TNT—would require several thousand such bombs.” Thus, he treats the official legend of the multi-kiloton nuclear blast as a proven fact, even though the evidence on the ground flatly disproves the idea of such a large detonation. In fact, based on a comparison with the area destroyed in the Tokyo Air Raid on March 10, 1945, it can be estimated that the payload of 30 to 50 B-29 bombers might have sufficed to burn down Hiroshima.

Treating fabricated data as privileged evidence

Sugihara maintains that laboratory measurements of neutron-induced radioactivity should be given the highest priority, ahead of all medical evidence and eyewitness testimony. But demanding that direct observation be overruled by the interpretation of lab results is patently absurd. As we had already stated, the neutron radiation data must be considered fraudulent, since they cannot be reconciled with undeniable, directly observable facts such as the unshielded survival of people near the hypocenter.

Does denial of the atomic bombings disparage the survivors?

Sugihara, perhaps aware of the weakness of his factual arguments, also stoops to blaming “denialists” like us four our alleged abuse of the survivors. Disbelief in the atomic bombings, so his argument, “undermines the very credibility of the survivors as witnesses.”

But Sugihara’s accusation is scurrilous. Nobody denies that the survivors suffered grievously. However, several chapters of HR show how the testimony of the survivors contradicts the story of the “atomic” bombings and supports the alternate scenario of the atrocity. A straightforward example are the many eyewitnesses who reported the presence of poison gas during the attack.

The difficulties with the survivor testimony were also noted by researchers at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). When these workers, in the 1950s and 60s, questioned all survivors as to their whereabouts during the “atomic” bombings, they also met with those who had at the time been out in the open and near the hypocenter. How did the researchers react to such testimony? Seymour Jablon, an American statistician with the ABCC, recounts:2

Although some persons report being in the open at close distances, the stories must be considered as mistaken, since the intensity of blast and heat effects at near distances were such as to make survival impossible. … Survivors who stoutly aver such experiences may be sincere in their statements; however, there is a possibility of post concussion amnesia with a resulting erroneous story. … The fact that so few survivors do not remember the details of the event may be taken to imply that those survivors who are amnesic for the explosion have substituted for their actual experiences a satisfactory surrogate.

In other words, survivors who gave inconvenient testimony were simply given a made-up diagnosis of “amnesia” and then dismissed as unreliable witnesses. It thus turns out that it is not the “denialists” who impugn the credibility of the survivors, but rather those who, like Sugihara, stop at nothing in their attempt to keep the “atomic” fairy tale alive.

Does the scale of the cover-up prove that it is not a cover-up?

Sugihara argues that “if a massive cover-up were to continue for an extended period, it would be highly likely to result in defections among those involved, contradictions in documents, inconsistencies in physical evidence, and counterevidence from third countries.” This is a standard argument likely to be raised in the discussion of any inconvenient “conspiracy” theory. But does it hold?

Defections of conspirators seem to be generally quite rare, also in cases of proven conspiracies. As to contradictions in documents and in the physical evidence, HR documents numerous examples. The more important question may be this: can we truly comprehend the idea that the entire story of the atomic bombings was a fraud? What would be the sense and the meaning of such an enormous deception? We posit that, large as it may seem, the atomic bomb fraud forms only one part of an even larger and longer-running historical deception, and that it can be understood properly only in this context.

In Japan—as in any other nation—modern and contemporary historiography are designed to conceal the truth from the general public. The synthetic narrative is deeply embedded in the culture. For generations, politicians, journalists, educators and scientists have been steered in a specific direction and have contributed in turn to the selective curation of information. This ensures that the reality of past events is transmitted to subsequent generations in a completely distorted form. Thus, when individuals attempt to reveal the truth, they meet with enormous resistance. However numerous they may be, they remain effectively powerless. The famous American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, who courageously and honestly documented the truth about events such as World War I and Pearl Harbor, referred to the systematic suppression of such truths as the “historical blackout.”

For instance, the Meiji Restoration was an armed revolution backed by international financial speculators. The trajectory that began with this event led to the Russo-Japanese War and, subsequently, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Furthermore, the post-war consolidation of a global order defined by nuclear hegemony was facilitated by the calculated promotion of a “nuclear fear.” Japan was also coerced into silence regarding the Soviet-American joint invasion of the Northern Territories, and was later compelled to provide economic support for various subsequent conflicts that had been initiated by the US. The same pattern holds true in the entire West: whenever events are orchestrated to generate massive profits—one need only look at 9/11 or the pandemic—the voices of those who speak the truth are invariably drowned out.

Back to the situation of 1945: By the time negotiations to end the war got underway, Japan had already fallen under the influence of the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). In the post-war period, the country was subjected to rigorous censorship, particularly concerning the issue of the atomic bombs. Under intense social pressure—exerted by both the Japanese right and the left—to conform to the official narrative regarding the atomic bombings, those who dared to speak the truth were systematically erased from history. “Hiroshima Revisited” and Mr. Hayashi’s recent book, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The True Nature of the Tragedy”, serve to unearth these long-buried truths—the voices and the scientific data that have lain dormant in old records, much like fossils—and bring them to light for the modern era.

Osamu Sugihara, in trying to discredit the work contained in “Hiroshima Revisited” and in Mr. Hayashi’s book on the same events, has joined the effort to keep those fossils buried and to perpetuate the “historical blackout.” His intent to deceive rather than to enlighten is evident from the sheer number of his distortions and misrepresentations of our work. Instead of trying to resolve his questions and objections by approaching us directly, he aims his defective work at potential readers in Japan who are not yet informed on the matter.

In this struggle over historical truth, the choice of which side to take rests with each individual reader. We invite you to examine for yourselves the arguments presented in our book. Furthermore, we would welcome your assistance in unearthing evidence that remains buried and in subjecting it to critical scrutiny. Just as a physician cannot heal his patient without first establishing the true nature of his patient’s disease, so mankind cannot hope to heal and make peace with itself without first recognizing the true causes of the traumatic events that have shaped so much of recent history. Everyone who shines a light on some part of this unhappy past helps build a better future for us all.

  1. See: https://note.com/boueitech/n/n119b12d2132b. An English PDF version is available. (go back)
  2. Jablon, S. (1971) Atomic bomb radiation estimation at ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission) https://www.rerf.or.jp/library/scidata/tr_all/TR1971-23.pdf (go back)