Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki.

When the dust had settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty number vary widely. One thing is clear: almost all civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come.

America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that supposedly would have resulted from putting boots on Japanese ground.

Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time.

Here’s a story about America’s development of its bombs, adapted from a documentary produced by Clive Baugh, Ed Reece and myself back in 1986. It takes its name from a prose-poem by the American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

The story features interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. We interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. A memorable conversation.

You’ll also hear Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility. Johns joined the McMaster faculty in 1947, and helped manage its small experimental particle accelerator. He shares the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs (they were indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe).

And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell was a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, and author of the 1985 work No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She won 1986 Right Livelihood Award — the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ — for “raising public awareness about the destruction of the biosphere and human gene pool, especially by low-level radiation.”

Thanks to Brenda Muller for her cello and Michael J. Birthelmer for his guitar. And to the Firesign Theatre, America’s counterculture comics.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Bikini Island, the atoll’s largest island, at sunset (David Kattenburg)

Almost eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay. Alcalay is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York.

Back in the mid-1970s, Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific. The US carried out 67 nuclear tests there, between 1946 and 1958. The biggest was Bravo, its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954.

Alcalay spent those two years on a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, he began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.

Listen to my complete conversation with Glenn Alcalay here:

Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

It’s a sobering truth that few know. Having dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have become the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there.

They didn’t have much choice. America tested its first bomb, Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It dropped its second and third bombs on Japan. A year later — having been handed the Marshall Islands as a Strategic Trust by the UN — the US set out to use it as the testing ground for its now burgeoning nuclear arsenal. In July 1946, the US set off Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls.

Twenty-one more would follow, including the leviathan, 15-megatonne Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954. Forty-four bombs were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls. Read a detailed account of the history of the Marshall Islands here, written back in 2007.

Nothing much has changed since then. Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled. Radiation monitoring continues. Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the new defunct Nuclear Claims Tribunal have yet to be paid. Trust funds administered since 2016 by Bikini leaders have reportedly been squandered.

A third Compact of Free Association between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands is on track to be approved this Fall.

The Marshalls faithfully vote the way Washington tells them to at the UN — most famously, alongside neighboring Pacific island states, in opposition to UN resolutions condemning Israel or calling for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

The US continues to fire missiles at Kwajalein Atoll from California and Alaska, and nearby Ebeye is still packed like a sardine can.

Not surprisingly, the Marshallese people are as friendly as ever. Diabetes and heart disease kill more of them than nuclear-related cancers.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.