George Weller, correspondent, Chicago Daily News: I entered Nagasaki on September 6, 1945, as the first free westerner to do so after the end of the war. When I walked out of Nagasaki’s roofless railroad station, I saw a city frizzled like a baked apple, crusted black. I saw the long, crumpled skeleton of the Mitsubishi electrical motor and ship fitting plant, a framework blasted clean of its flesh by the lazy-falling missile floating under a parachute. Along the blistered boulevards the shadows of fallen telegraph poles were branded upright on buildings, the signature of the ray stamped in huge ideograms.
In the battered corridors of these hospitals, already eroded by man’s normal suffering, there was no sorrowful horde. The wards were filled. There was no private place left to die. Consequently the dying were sitting up crosslegged against the walls, holding sad little court with their families, answering their tender questions with the mild, consenting indifference of those whose future is cancelled. The atomic bomb’s peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away under their eyes.
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While Weller’s report from Nagasaki never made it past the US censor—and was ultimately lost for decades—Burchett’s story created a stir, and a few days later, in an effort to combat the worrisome reporting, US military and Manhattan Project leaders spoke with William Laurence, now back at his post at The New York Times, to downplay the fears of radiation.