Monday, Aug. 8, 2005 | 9:06 a.m.
Even 60 years after the August days when the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end World War II, the tension continues over President Harry Truman's decision to bomb and the future of nuclear weapons.
Dr. James Yamazaki, who was the chief physician of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission that visited Nagasaki after World War II, spoke Saturday about his research on radiation's effects on the unborn and others exposed to the atomic blast in Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
Between 500 and 800 babies were born in Nagasaki within six months after the bomb exploded, Yamazaki told more than 100 people during a lecture Saturday at the Atomic Testing Museum at 755 E. Flamingo Road at Swenson Avenue.
He said those within 2,200 yards of the bomb who survived both bomb and birth had smaller than normal body frames and mental retardation. But 43 percent of the pregnancies ended in death when mothers miscarried, bore stillborn fetuses or babies died shortly after birth, he said.
His findings led him to make stopping further harm from nuclear weapons attacks or experiments a life-long mission to .
As a first step in preventing any more nuclear attacks in the world, the public needs to engage in a broad discussion on human impacts, he said.
"That is one reason for this meeting," Yamazaki said.
The pediatrician said he disagreed with the Bush administration and any of its plans for developing larger nuclear weapons.
But not everyone attending the lecture agreed with Yamazaki.
Using the atomic bomb on Japan helped end the war, World War II B-29 pilot Leonard Carpi said to Yamazaki.
"There were millions of people who would have died" in combat if the bombs had not been dropped, Carpi said. "The Japanese warlords were not willing to give up. A lot of young people would not be here today if we had invaded."
Yamazaki paused and looked at the veteran war pilot.
"I do appreciate what you are saying," he said. "The problem for you and me is how we can prevent it.
"Those coming after us, especially the children, are the ones we have to be concerned about."
Dr. Jeffrey Klein, a retired oncologist who directs a hospice in Thousand Oaks, Calif., agreed with Yamazaki.
"It should never happen again," Klein said, noting that peaceful resolution instead of going to war is necessary for avoiding future nuclear conflicts.
Much of what is known about the effects of radiation was learned from the work Yamazaki and others started in Nagasaki.
Before departing for Japan in 1949, Yamazaki had been schooled in some possible radiation effects by Dr. Stafford Warren, chief medical director for the Atomic Energy Commission, precursor to the Energy Department.
The little amount of radiation information that was available to the public at that time fit on a 3-by-5-inch card that Warren gave Yamazaki.
"Some consequences might not be known until we had completed careful observations of the survivors over their entire lifetimes," Warren had told Yamazaki.
He said blood sampled from 500 people is still being studied for genetic defects.
"We just don't know the extent yet," Yamazaki said.
Although he had served as a combat surgeon at the Battle of the Bulge and was captured by the Germans, Yamazaki said he was not prepared for what he witnessed in Nagasaki.
Yamazaki first learned of the human dimensions of the Nagasaki bomb from the city's chief of police, who described how a police patrol ventured over a ridge after seeing a blinding white light and how the industrial area of the city had been engulfed in flames.
Thousands appeared dead. Survivors ran in panic, many with flaming shreds of clothing, flesh hanging from their frames.
The police chief told Yamazaki about how students sitting at a long lab table in a concrete building died instantly, without injury or burn, at the Nagasaki University Medical School, a quarter-mile east of the blast.
Four years later Yamazaki saw a mass of glass made from microscopic slides inside the lab that had fused together from the atomic blast.
There was nothing left of students who had been in wooden classrooms, however. They evaporated without a trace in the blast and firestorm.
Yamazaki also asked his audience to ponder this question: What if the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been nuclear?
The Brooklyn Bridge is one mile away from where the World Trade Center stood, he said. "It would have been demolished.
"In fact, all large cities in the world would be vulnerable to such an attack," he said.
After the lecture, a gray-haired woman waited in line for Yamazaki to sign a copy of his book, "Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima and the Marshall Islands."
She told him she had lived 1.7 miles from the center of the Nagasaki blast and remembers a neighbor's child crying and clinging to her mother's leg.
"We couldn't take her because we didn't know where we were going ourselves," said the woman, who refused to give more than her first name, Nobuko.
She said she never saw the little girl again.
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