The Atom & Us: Greg Mitchell
I was the rare writer who interviewed dozens of atomic bomb survivors in Japan AND both of the pilots of the planes that dropped the bombs
Thanks for reading ‘The Atom & Us’, a series of interviews in which I’m spotlighting the work and insights of some of the incredibly interesting individuals I've been privileged to get to know through making & distributing my own nuclear history film, 'The Atom: A Love Affair' - from scholars and artists, to industry professionals, campaigners and more.
Together, I hope their shared ideas & experiences of the atomic age will help us all deepen our understanding of one of the most vital & urgent - yet in my view also one of the least well-discussed & understood - topics of our 21st century world.
Hello again friends,
I’m so pleased you’re joining me once more for this third and final post in the little mini-series of sorts that I've put out this week, commemorating the anniversary of the USA's atomic bomb strikes on Japan, 80 years ago this month. Here are the previous two posts in case you missed them:
Today, on 9th August, we remember the victims at Nagasaki, the second (and, thank God, so far the last) ever city to be hit by an atom bomb.
I don't think it's controversial to say that the story of the attack on Nagasaki is less well known that that of Hiroshima. Yet in so many ways it was a far greater moral outrage: rushed1, chaotic2 and, in the eyes of many, actually more about demonstrating to the world (or more particularly to the Soviets) a second, even more powerful bomb3 than it was about trying to end the war in Japan.
And my interviewee for this installment of ‘The Atom & Us’ is an author and journalist who knows this all too well.
.
When I signed up to Substack in October 2023 (I lurked as a reader for a couple of months before eventually hitting publish on my first post, in December 2023), one of the very first things I did was seek out writers on atomic issues.
I quickly found Greg's Substack dedicated to the then-recently-released Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer biopic and when I read this piece - which expertly encapsulates much of my own response to the film4 - I knew I'd found someone whose work I needed to read more of.
Greg has been working to bring attention to the atomic bombings and their aftermath, through books and films, for a long time. And this year, he has a brand new film out on PBS continuing in that dedicated tradition.
The Atomic Bowl tells the story of an extraordinary game of American Football, played in the devastated grounds of a school in Nagasaki, close to Ground Zero of the 'forgotten bomb', only a few months later on New Years Day 1946. It’s an eye-opening piece of work that throws a much-needed spotlight on what happened at Nagasaki and why it was later so much more obscured than Hiroshima. It also makes crystal clear the ongoing urgency and relevance of those events in the increasingly unstable and perilous world we inhabit today.
And so it seems fitting to be introducing his work to you, on this day of all days.
I’m very pleased to say that Greg has kindly sent over answers to a selection of my usual questions, which you can read below. Then I'll dip back in with some more of his writing about Nagasaki and links to his new film. Here's Greg.
1. Who are you and what's your connection to 'the atom'?
I am Greg Mitchell, author of more than a dozen books, and now writing and directing films for PBS (public television) in the U.S. I’ve been writing about nuclear issues, usually surrounding the atomic bombings of Japan and their aftermath, for over four decades, in hundreds of articles and four books. Now two of my films have won awards and distributed nationally by PBS: the recent “Atomic Cover-up” and this summer “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Danger Today.”
2. Can you remember when & how you first encountered anything atomic – something you read or saw on the news maybe, or encountered some other way? Tell me about you early memories, thoughts & feelings about nuclear.
I was the classic post-war baby who was in grade school in the mid- and late-1950s and experienced all of the nuclear fears of that era, from talk about fallout shelters in the basement to “duck and cover” drills at school.
Then came the Cuban missile crisis and Berlin Wall and other U.S.-Soviet showdowns. But in 1964, I saw “Dr. Strangelove” in the theater and it instantly became my all-time favorite movie—which I guess hinted at my future focus--and remained so for many, many years.
Around the same time I was exposed to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain.” So “The Bomb” was always there.
3. When did you first become actively engaged in working in/thinking about nuclear and what did that look like for you?
When I was in college and most of decade after, civil rights and the Vietnam War were the key protest issues, not The Bomb, and I certainly took part. Then in the late 1970s, I first protested nuclear—the energy issue, after Three Mile Island, even took a bus for a large demo in Washington.
It wasn’t until 1982 and the emergence of the grassroots nuclear “freeze” movement that I started attending anti-Bomb rallies. Late that year, I became the editor of the leading magazine for the movement in the USA, Nuclear Times, and did that for four years.
4. Is there an event or experience from your personal involvement with nuclear that particularly stands out in your memory and why?
In 1984, I got a journalism grant to spend a full month in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a very, very rare experience for an American journalist. From that my decades of engagement with the atomic bombings has flowed.
I wrote articles for everyone from The New York Times to Mother Jones and soon started work on my classic book with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America,” even making two long trips to the Truman Library in Missouri. I was the rare writer who interviewed dozens of atomic bomb survivors in Japan AND both of the pilots of the planes that dropped the bombs.
Later I wrote an award-winning book, “The Beginning or the End,” on how the Pentagon and the Truman White House intervened to turn Hollywood’s first drama about the making and use of The Bomb into pro-bomb propaganda.
5. Why do you personally find it a compelling topic?
Of course, any nuclear war has the chance of ending human life on earth, and even a limited exchange of single use on a city could kill millions. I have been motivated all these years by the fact that the “first-strike” U.S. policy initiated in 1945 still exists today, despite years of efforts to enact a “no-first-use” policy. So the leader of the U.S. still has ability to respond with nuclear weapons to any conventional attack or a threat in a crisis.
Also, many if not most Americans (the public, media and officials) continue to support use of the bomb against Hiroshima and even Nagasaki, so there is that motivation for me as well.
I feel both grateful and somewhat overawed at Greg’s commitment to telling and re-telling the story of the bomb (both THE big overarching story and so many other smaller, offshoot stories) for so many years. It’s such important work. If you want to go deeper, I highly recommend subscribing to his Substack where there’s a wealth of material in the back catalogue already.
On Nagasaki specifically, I would draw your attention to his Aug 2023 article in American magazine Mother Jones, The US Nuked Nagasaki 78 Years Ago Today. “Oppenheimer” Barely Mentions It. It’s packed with revealing detail but especially striking are the expressions of regret or condemnation for America’s choice to drop that second bomb:
Some of the other scientists at Los Alamos who celebrated the Hiroshima bomb would later claim they felt physically sick upon learning of the second attack. “Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was a mistake,” Samuel I. Allison, a leading Manhattan Project scientist at the Met Lab in Chicago, declared years later. “Dropping the bomb on Nagasaki was an atrocity.” While historians remain divided on the justification for bombing Hiroshima, even some supporters of the first attack declared the Nagasaki annihilation avoidable. Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trials, asserted that while the “rights and wrong of Hiroshima are debatable” he had “never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.”
and
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who survived the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, would later say, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” He described it as “purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.”
You might also want to take a look at this Substack post, published the same day as the Mother Jones piece from which it quotes, in which he writes about visiting Nagasaki in 1984. The ceremony he describes witnessing - memorialising some of the more than a thousand children killed at a single elementary school in the city - is profoundly moving.
You can watch the “The Atomic Bowl” via the PBS website HERE (if you’re outside the US, like me, just choose a station on the drop down menu at the top). And you can find a lot more background, praise for the film and information about the companion e-book published to accompany the film HERE. Here’s the trailer:
His previous film for PBS, Atomic Cover Up is also available to watch HERE. Do let me know if you watch one or both of the films and I’m sure Greg would love to hear any comments too.
So there we have it. Thanks so much for reading (and listening if you had the opportunity to do so with the survivors' testimonies I recorded) my pieces this week and giving your attention to these difficult and heavy legacies that I know are all too easy to turn away from.
I’ve not been able to be as fully present to sit with it all myself as I’d have liked, because of, well… life. My partner has been away working all week so I’ve been on solo parenting duties, which has included a trip to see the fairies at Brighton Theatre Royal and ‘executive producing’ (ok, mainly just stepping in to prevent fights😄) a film the kids have been making together, as well as emptying out both of our bedrooms in readiness for the builders arriving next week and battling a protracted migraine. But I’ve so appreciated hearing from those who’ve commented and replied.
In particular, thanks to
who sent over links to a couple of pieces I’m sure you might like to check out, one on an exhibit of on-the-ground pictures of Hiroshima at the Tokyo Museum of Photography and one written specifically for the 80th anniversary of the bomb.
And to Paul Charlton who sent over a link to his son Oscar’s band Heathen Kings who have released a new song about Oppenheimer and the bomb to coincide with the anniversary (this news really lifted my spirits as it’s always just so encouraging to know that new generations of artists are grappling with and bringing attention to these issues). Here’s the video:
Finally, in between sneezing in dusty wardrobes and tripping over bits of Lego, I managed to squeeze in one other spirit-lifting conversation, with the novelist and memoirist
, whose work I only lately found here on Substack.It feels like the universe brought us into one another’s orbits just at the right time as it was instantly clear we have many shared interests and threads we may tug on in the future and you’ll certainly hear more on all of that as it comes. But right now, I must shout about the very exciting news that Eleanor’s novel Fallout, written against the backdrop of Greenham Common and previously serialised on Substack after being rejected by mainstream publishers, is coming to the world! Rush on over to http://empresseditions.io/ and check it out.
And there I will leave you. No monthly / round-up meanders this month because of the school holidays but I’ll be back to reveal the next film in The Film Thread and your 10 Things to Know About… post will be arriving soon thereafter. We had a fantastic discussion at the first online meet-up so if you’ve been thinking of joining we’d love to see you there (it’s only £8 for each monthly event if you want to just dip your toe in for one film and see if you like it.)
And as ever please do hit reply if you’re reading in email or leave any thoughts or comments below.
Thanks for being here.
Vicki x
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It’s believed Japan had been on the brink of surrendering as soon as the Soviets entered the war, which they did the day before the bomb at Nagasaki and in any case, leaving only 3 days between the first and second atomic bombs gave Japanese military leaders very little time to assess the damage at Hiroshima and draw any conclusions about surrendering as a result.
Nagasaki was only chosen as the location for the second bomb at the very last minute and bad weather meant it was dropped almost a mile away from the planned city centre target.
Nagaski’s 'Fat Man’ plutonium bomb had a destructive yield almost twice as large as Hiroshima’s uranium-powered ‘Little Boy’.
In essence, a profound frustration that for all the unquestionably impressive acting and visual effects, the movie was basically one long psycho-drama digging into a famous white man's personal guilt whilst minimising, if not completely eliding, the experience of the not-famous and not-white victims of the Manhattan Project, both in Japan and on the native land on which the Trinity Test was carried out.
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