Japanese Civilians as ‘Lab Rats’: The Dark Aftermath of the Nuclear Strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

At 08:15 Japan Standard Time on August 6, 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force launched the first ever nuclear attack in history, with the targeting of the Japanese city of Hiroshima causing 135,000 casualties instantly, approximately half of them deaths, and tens of thousands of further deaths over the following months as radiation sickness took its toll on the population. While the controversies surrounding the attack remain well known, including Japan’s longstanding attempts to surrender, and the acknowledgement by the American leadership that the attack was entirely unnecessary to secure a total victory, the highly controversial conduct of American forces towards the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the latter which was similarly targeted three days later, remains much less well known. Although the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was widely referred to, including by President Harry Truman, as “the experiment,” the extent to which the populations of the Japanese cities were seen as test subjects would become apparent over the following months.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were placed under American military rule following the country’s surrender, data was harvested by American scientists from survivors in the two cities was seen as valuable for preparations for a potential nuclear war with the Soviet Union. While those suffering from radiation and contamination expected to receive government support as casualties of war, the American military government ended compensation, stripping millions of wounded of income. More significantly, however, it refused to acknowledge the existence of radiological contamination or of any unusual conditions arising in survivors of the nuclear attacks, with mention of the subject strictly censored.

Studies of the effects of nuclear attacks were conducted under the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission by teams of American specialists, which quickly gained a reputation for harvesting Japanese cemeteries for remains. Specialists including American doctors were strictly forbidden from treating victims, however, or from providing information on their findings that could have aided in their treatment. As a direct result Japanese doctors could not understand the new phenomenon of radiation poisoning.

The way data was sought gave the impression of an experiment being carried out on live subjects, with leading expert on the attacks historian Paul Ham observing:

“The directive did not mention treatment: prolonging life, easing pain, were neither the intentions nor the by-products of the job. Whether the patients – or more accurately the exhibits – lived or died was immaterial to the foreign doctors’ charter. How the victims lived or died, whether their conditions improved or deteriorated; whether they suffered from cancer at some distant date or reproduced it in their children; such were the questions of cold scientific enquiry. In short, irradiated Japanese civilians were to serve as American laboratory rats. Herein lay a benefit – future rationalists would argue – of dropping the bomb on a city: to harvest scientific data about gamma radiation.”

The ability to study the aftermath of a nuclear strike on a civilian population remained a unique opportunity for the United States Armed Forces, and other than the benefits of launching nuclear attacks as a show of force to the Soviet Union, it was a primary benefit of launching the strikes. The means by which this was done, however, significantly exacerbated the suffering of the populations of the two cities.