“Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World” by Lesley M.M. Blume
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10 : 1982128518 | ISBN-13 : 978-1982128517
Date Finished: Sept 7, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Every journalism student knows about the most read magazine article of all time, John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” The New Yorker published the piece in it’s 30,000-word entirety in their August 31, 1946, issue. Albert Einstein ordered 1,000 copies of it to share with fellow scientists. “Fallout,” by Lesley M.M. Blume, looks at the media landscape at the time, and how they were complicit in whitewashing the true devastation levied by “Little Boy.” Without being cowed by the US government’s PR spin, Hersey and the New Yorker tell an intertwining story of six survivors of the bombing, to ghastly effect. This is the story of how they pulled it off.
My Notes:
The New Yorker magazine devoted its entire August 31, 1946, issue to Hersey's "Hiroshima," in which he reported to Americans and the world the full, ghastly realities of atomic warfare in that city, featuring testimonies from six of the only humans in history to survive nuclear attack.
The U.S. Government had dropped a nearly 10,000-pound uranium bomb—which had been dubbed "Little Boy" and scribbled with profane messages to the Japanese emperor—on Hiroshima a year earlier, at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. None of the bomb's creators even knew for certain if the then experimental weapon would work:
The city of Hiroshima initially estimated that more than 42,000 civilians had died from the bombing. Within a year, that estimate would rise to 100,000. It has since been calculated that as many as 280,000 people may have died by the end of 1945 from the effects of the bomb, although the exact number will never be known.
However, until Hersey's story appeared in the New Yorker, the U.S. government had astonishingly managed to hide the magnitude of what happened in Hiroshima immediately after the bombing, and successfully covered up the bomb's long-term deadly radiological effects.
Little Boy had packed an explosive payload equivalent to more than 20,000 tons of TNT, the president revealed, and was by far the largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare.
After millennia of contriving increasingly horrible and efficient killing machines, humans had finally invented the means with which to extinguish their entire civilization. Humankind was "stealing God's stuff," as E.B. White wrote in the New Yorker.
Even though the New York Times was the only publication that had a reporter accompany the Nagasaki atomic bombing run and had maintained a bureau in Tokyo since the Japanese surrender, Times reporter (and later managing editor) Arthur Gelb stated that "most of us were unaware, at first, of the extent of the devastation caused by the bombs. John Hersey's excruciatingly detailed account... finally brought home to Americans the magnitude of the event."
The United States—which had just won a painfully earned moral and military victory over the Axis powers—was not eager to "get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities," as the country's secretary of war put it.
When it was eventually conceded that bomb-induced radiation poisoning was real, its horrors were downplayed.
The published images of Hiroshima's demolished landscape gravely undersold the reality of atomic aftermath. Usually a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case it would take Hersey's 30,000 words to reveal and drive home the truth about America's new mega-weapon. The Japanese, of course, didn't need Hersey to educate them about the effects of Little Boy and Fat Man, but American readers were shocked when they were, at last, properly introduced to the nuclear bombs that had been detonated in their name.
Fallout is the backstory of how John Hersey got the full story about atomic aftermath when no other journalist could, and how "Hiroshima" became—and remains—one of the most important works of journalism ever created.
We know what atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us. Since the release of "Hiroshima," no leader or party could threaten nuclear action without an absolute knowledge of the horrific results of such an attack.
The National WWII Museum estimates that, worldwide, 15 million combatants died, along with some 45 million civilian casualties among the Chinese alone. Russia put its losses at 26.6 million dead; the United States lost more than 407,000 military servicemen and women.
"You swallowed statistics, gasped in awe," Gannet wrote, "and, turning away to discuss the prices of lamb chops, forgot. But if you read what Mr. Hersey writes, you won't forget."
Approximately 117,000 people of Japanese descent had been detained in internment camps in the United States during the war.
Hersey had seen firsthand in Asia and the Pacific evidence of Japanese barbarity and tenacity in battle. Still, he was determined to make sure Americans could see themselves in the citizens of Hiroshima.
Yet, before he had personally gotten into Japan—ten months after the bombings—the American media had already essentially given up trying to break the story of Hiroshima in a significant way, essentially giving Hersey an unlikely monopoly on the story.
Hersey had made it impossible for Americans to avert their eyes and, as physicist Albert Einstein put it, "escape into easy comforts" again.
(To that end, the Soviets deeply resented "Hiroshima" and its author; their hostility became increasingly vehement over time. Actions were taken in Russia to debunk Hersey's revelations, smear Hersey himself, and downplay the might of America's new bombs.)
It is estimated that the world's current combined inventory of nuclear arms includes more than 13,500 warheads. Should war break out today, the prognosis for civilization's survival is grim; as Einstein said after the Japan bombings: "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks."
In 1946, Hersey wrote that his protagonists did not yet understand why they had survived the Hiroshima bombing while tens of thousands of others around them had perished.
Once the Pulitzer was bestowed upon him, Hersey's literary star rose even higher. Critics compared him to Hemingway. He and his wife, Frances Ann—a wealthy, educated Southern-born-and-raised beauty who had been presented at the Court of St. Jame's in London—were leading a glamorous life. The film version of A Bell for Adano was released just weeks after V-E Day, in June.
While not religious himself, his reserve and pronounced moral compass were likely rooted in that upbringing, along with his staunch aversion to self-promotion. Amidst the acclaim of his early career, Hersey would find personal attention "hollow," one of his sons would recall later, and developed an early antipathy to "flogging his wares." As Hersey's career developed, he always preferred instead to "let his works speak for themselves," added one of his daughters. He lived in the spotlight and yet he seemed—to the public, anyway—something of a cipher. This suited him just fine.
Even during the V-E Day celebrations there, the shadow of still-undefeated Japan soured the festivities. Some revelers had tried to put a good face on the specter, carrying signs proclaiming:
"On to Tokyo!"
"On to Japan!"
"Two down, One to Go!"
On August 6, 1945, Hersey was in Cold Springs Harbor, New York, when he heard President Truman announce on the radio that the United States had used an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This new weapon, the president declared, drew its terrible power from the basic powers of the universe. "The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East," he said. If the Japanese did not submit unconditionally to the surrender terms already issued by Allied leaders the previous month at the Potsdam Conference, they could expect obliteration.
American pilots had trained in Utah and the Pacific for a bombing missions whose details and goal were unknown to them: they had not "the slightest inkling of the nature of their job," recalled one observer at Tinian, the Pacific island base from which the Hiroshima bombardment team had taken off.
The Japanese radio announcer added that "by employing a new weapon destined to massacre innocent civilians, the Americans have opened the eyes of the world to their sadistic nature."
Few seemed to share Hersey's qualms and distress about the means by which the Americans had brought the war to an end at last. A poll conducted the day after V-J Day revealed that the vast majority of those surveyed approved of the nuclear attacks on Japan.
Sailors and Army men fanned out in the streets, grabbing and kissing girls. More than a dozen effigies of Emperor Hirohito were strung up on light poles around the city and later cut down and burned; small boys toted handwritten placards proclaiming, "HAND THE EMPEROR." The next day the delirium began all over again.
Also, immediately below this story, the Times ran an item headlined "Japanese Reports Doubted," in which the head of the Manhattan Project, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, was descried as contending that "Japanese reports of death from radioactive effects of atomic bombing are pure propaganda."
He confirmed Burchett's account that blast survivors were indeed suffering from an awful affliction; the bomb had mysterious, terrifying, lingering effects after all.
But then the Times and Lawrence appeared to quickly backtrack. Less than a week after his "Worst Damaged City" story was published, Lawrence had a new article out, with the section header "FOE SEEKS TO WIN SYMPATHY." ... the Japanese are exaggerating its effects...
As they walked through rubble and ashes of the city, the McCrary reporters actually ran into Australian correspondent Wilfred Burchett of the Daily Express, who had then been typing his "Atomic Plague" article furiously on his portable Hermes typewriter in the middle of the smoldering ruins. Burchett was contemptuous of this group of "housetrained reporters" who were simply "being rewarded for [their] faithful rewrites of the Washington headquarters comminuques" with the promise of the greatest scoop in history: a first look at the results of America's new war-winning weapon. What they had actually been selected for, Burchett later wrote, was participation in a cover-up of outsized proportions.
Nor was the magazine meant to be read by just anyone: the New Yorker's founder and editor, Harold Ross, would panic when his readership exceeded 300,000. ("Too many people," he once said. "We must be doing something wrong.") From the beginning he had pledged that his magazine—would cater solely to urban sophisticates. The provincial sensibilities of the "old lady in Dubuque," as Ross had put it when launching the New Yorker in 1925, would be diligently ignored.
"He had a wide countryman's mouth, his complexion was as coarse as the face of the moon, and he wore his hair on his biggish head cropped to about two inches in length, so it stood up in all directions," Hersey recalled later. It seemed wonderfully ironic to Hersey that "the editor of a sophisticated city-slicker magazine—a man who, late at night, was always given the most elite table in the back room at the Stork Club, then the smartest night spot in town—should look like a hayseed, an absolute rube."
He often defaced his writers' drafts with dozens of queries and edits written on the margins. (The Ross editing experience could be like "being stung to death by an army of gnats," one New Yorker writer recalled.) When Hersey submitted the Kennedy story to the editors at the New Yorker, his draft was returned to him covered with more than fifty Ross edits in the margins. ... Ross was an extravagant personality with a talent for profanity.
[William Shawn} Ross.. describing his deputy to a White House official as "thirty-seven, flat-footed, stoop-shouldered, a pill eater, hopeless for any service more deadly than behind a typewriter."
Despite their differences in temperament, Ross and Shawn were a perfect editorial team, incisive and shrewd. Both were unabashed, relentless perfectionists; both had a near mania for accuracy.
He could try to maintain the original hijinks tenor of his magazine, now suddenly totally out of step with the times ("Nobody feels funny now," he complained to his exwife and New Yorker cofounder, Jane Grant), or he could take advantage of ""the greatest journalistic opportunity in history," as Shawn later put it. They chose to chase the historic opportunity.
"How simple it is to scoop the world, even if a flock of other journalists have the same facts and the same opportunities," he told Flanner.
In Hiroshima, the team was able to calculate the height at which the bomb had detonated. "The bomb had burst at precisely the spot we wanted it to, high over Hiroshima," recalled one Manhattan Project physicist. "They therefore concluded that "there had been a minimum of radioactivity in the city," as most of it had been absorbed back into the atmosphere. ... "You could live there forever," he said. [General Groves said]
Hersey and Shawn decided that Hersey would try to get into Japan and write about "what happened not to buildings but to human beings." They didn't know the exact angle yet, but they knew it had to be done. If the press corps in Tokyo either would not or could not undertake the story, the New Yorker would try. Here was one fewer wartime atrocity story that would not go ignored, as Ross had feared.
He had come to realize that "[if] civilization was to mean anything, we had to acknowledge the humanity of even our misled and murderous enemies." [said Hersey]
Fro the most part, Hersey's wartime record made him a viable candidate for clearance—and, from the New Yorker's point of view, the perfect Trojan horse reporter. He had played by the rules throughout the war; his body of work largely belied a dutifully patriotic reporter.
It turned out to be a fortuitous flu. As he convalesced onboard, crew members brought Hersey a few books from the ship's library, including The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. The 1927 book detailed the lives of five people in Peru who were killed when a rope suspension bridge over a canyon broke with all five on it. Wilder's account tracked the lead-up to the accident and how these protagonists all found their way to that tragic moment.
Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war. But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people—mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks—going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.
"My hope was that the reader would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain, some of the disaster," he said later.
The filmmakers' Hiroshima footage had been sent back to Washington, D.C., and would be classified for decades; Lieutenant Sussan had been told by the head of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that the film was to be "limited strictly to government use."
"If people could only see this devastation, this holocaust, it would be the greatest argument for peace the world has ever seen," Lieutenant Sussan later stated.
Hersey was stunned upon first beholding the city. He simply could not comprehend how so much damage had been done "by one instrument in one instant."
All along, Hersey had been aware of the irony that "a magazine of humor, and light pieces, and cartoons [was] suddenly devoting itself to something so terrible," as he put it.
Six months earlier, Marines stationed in Nagasaki cleared a space in that city's bomb debris to create a football field, where they played a New Year's Day "Atom Bowl," complete with a Marine band and goal posts made from salvaged scrap wood. They had conscripted Japanese girls to act as cheerleaders.
Survivors dragged themselves under burned-out cars and trams, seeking shelter from the fires. "Frightfully injured forms beckon[ed]to us then collapsed. Hiroshima's broad main street was littered with naked, charred cadavers.
While ferrying water back to the park, he encountered a large group of Japanese soldiers, all desperate for a drink. Their eyes had melted away in their sockets; the liquid had run in rivulets down their faces, which were burned beyond recognition.
Reverend Tanimoto was exhausted when he returned home that night. Like Father Kleinsorge, he had been chronically ill since August. The high fevers, bed-soaked night sweats, diarrhea, and total debilitation had begun a few weeks after the explosion of the bomb.
Hersey was wearing his military-issue war correspondent's uniform, but "unlike a soldier," thought Reverend Tanimoto, "[Hersey] had about him the refinement of a literary man."
Aline of stunned, blood-covered survivors began staggering out of the city, heading up the hillside road.
"Most people were naked," Reverend Tanimoto recalled. "Skin from faces and hands, arms and breasts was stripping off or hanging loose... It seemed like a procession of ghosts."
"Red hot iron sheets and burning boards were spiraling in the air," he later recounted. The whirlwind lifted the pastor some seven or eight feet off the ground as though he were swimming through the air.
Outside, the front steps of that hospital became slick with excrement. Soon there would be the smell of decomposing dead bodies as well, for there was no one on hand to clear them. The hospital quickly became ringed by hundreds of corpses.
Their last issue featured a profile on a hot dog-loving New York-based meat tycoon and a story of the Astoria Stakes, cushioned by cartoons and ads for Elizabeth Arden face cream, Coca-Cola, Under-wood tinned deviled ham, and Lincoln Continental Cabriolets.
The deadline pressure was on: his story would be run in the New Yorker to commemorate the August 6 anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. He was used to writing articles and books in a "white heat," as he would later put it, but this would be a complicated, nerve-racking write, given the contentiousness of his material and Ross and Shawn's rigorous editing process. Plus, there was the possibility of competitive stories coming out in other publications around the anniversary.
Now that Hersey had his survivor testimonies in hand, he gamed out his approach to make his story as engrossing as possible. He felt that the article would have to read like a novel. "Journalism allows its readers to witness history," he later said. "Fiction gives readers an opportunity to live it."
In the spirit of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Hersey planned to interweave the day-of-bombing narratives of Father Kleinsorge, Mrs. Nakamura, Reverend Tanimoto, Dr. Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, and Miss Sasaki, using cliff-hangers throughout the article. He also decided to present the survivors' stories in a subdued but unflinching manner. In the past, Hersey's journalism for Time Inc. could be stylized and laced with pronouncements, with a tendency toward omniscience. All of that would be left behind with this article.
Pencil in hand, Hersey sat down and wrote—in tidy, calm penmanship—a draft of what would become one of the most famous, simple ledes in journalism history:
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945 Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asian Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
He detailed where each of his six interviewees had been at the exact moment of detonation, and added that they did not know why they had been spared when thousands of others had died.
Hersey ended this initial section with the line he had thought of while standing on the Hiroshima train station platform: "There in the tin factory was a situation for the first moment of the atomic age: a person being crushed by books."
Luckily, in studying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surveyors had learned some lessons that the United States could heed to cut down potential loss of life and property in the event of a nuclear attack. For example, too few Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents had had access to underground shelters and been duly incinerated; therefore, the takeaway here was that U.S. cities would need a system of carefully built fallout shelters.
Yes, they wanted to shake things up with the story, but Ross worried that their peacetime readership might not be prepared for such an undiluted dose of atrocity reporting.
The proposal prompted an editorial existential crisis for Ross akin to the one he had experienced over the magazine's identity and direction in the lead-up to the war.
After torturing himself about the decision for the better part of a week—during which time Shawn continued to lobby for the cause in his gently relentless way—Ross decided to seek guidance from his magazine's own DNA. He reached for the very first issue of the New Yorker, published on February 21, 1925, and read on pages one and two, the magazine's original statement of purpose—the one in which Ross had famously impugned the "old lady in Dubuque."
Starting each day at 10:00 a.m., the team edited and rewrote until 2:00 a.m. under the gaze of unpublished James Thurber drawings staring down from Ross's walls.
With the exception of Ross's secretary and perhaps another secretarial assistant, and the magazine's senior layout man and production manager, no one at the New Yorker was told about the explosive single-story issue the Hersey team was preparing. The project was their own journalistic version of the Manhattan Project.
"At the New Yorker, they were always working on several issues at one time: the A issue, the B issue, the C issue, and so on; if one of them had just evaporated, everyone would have known."
Ross had likely Hersey's first draft. It was, in his estimation, "a very fine piece beyond any question" and had "practically everything." He felt it was poised to become the definitive piece on the dropping of the bomb.
Hersey settled on "crumpled." When he arrived at the New Yorker offices the next morning, Shawn had already written the same word down on the proof. For Hersey, this was further evidence of Shawn's editing ESP. He was, Hersey believed, "a kind of editorial Zelig" who had the ability "to thin in the vocabulary of the writers he's editing."
They needed to tear apart the article, to analyze it from every angle, and scrutinize every word because, as Ross told Hersey, if was poised to become "the most sensational one of the generation."
Therefore, "Hiroshima" had to be flawless. After all, as Ross told Hersey, it was "going to bear the greatest strain ever imposed on a magazine story."
During the war, the editors at the New Yorker had submitted their war stories for clearance to the War Department along with everyone else.
Even if the team couldn't be successfully prosecuted for any alleged transgressions, there could be a backlash against and boycott of the magazine and its advertisers. The consequence could "even be enough to close the publication," as one censorship historian put it. pg 117
Luckily for him and the New Yorker team, General Groves appeared to have overlooked Hersey's most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon. Whatever concessions the New Yorker's editorial team had had to make, for them, "Hiroshima" had survived the review process to become a document of conscience and an urgent warning about the future of civilization in the atomic age.
"Like other Americans, I felt some guilt about the bomb and about profiteering on it, and I decided to give away the income from the first re-prints," he later said. [Hersey]
Hersey left New York City altogether after finishing the proofs, heading to the tiny town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, at the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. [during publication to escape publicity]
The New Yorker had only run the story, the Time story cynically asserted, because the magazine was in the summer doldrums. Ross was characterized as juvenile, profane, and opportunistic.
For Luce, Hersey was the ingrate prodigal son who had yet to make his repentant return home. The publisher was so enraged that Hersey had written the Hiroshima story for the New Yorker that he had Hersey's portrait removed from Time Inc.'s gallery of honor.
Later, though, McCrary did finally admit that he had obstructed the junket reporters from writing fully about what they had seen in the bombed city.
"I covered it up, and John Hersey uncovered it," he states. "That's the difference between a P.R. man and a reporter."
The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal. Hersey's readers around the world were now reevaluating America's superior moral stature and demanding to know why these revelations had taken more than a year to come out. If something of this enormity had been successfully hidden from the public, what else was being hidden? What other information about these new weapons was the U.S. government concealing, and had Hersey been accurate when he wrote in "Hiroshima" that more powerful, terrifying versions of it were being developed?
Some of the scientists who had built "this toy" had also been publicly confessing their misgivings about their role in creating it. Before the bombs had even been dropped on Japan, a group of senior Manhattan Project scientists had privately lobbied against deploying them and begged the U.S. government instead to make a demonstration of the bomb's might.
Physicist Albert Einstein—whose formula, E=mc2, gave researchers a way to quantify the vast potential energy that would be released in a nuclear explosion—had long been trying to sound the alarm about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Just before the war he had alerted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Germany's alarming efforts to create an atomic bomb. Einstein had been uninvolved in the Manhattan Project and disavowed any personal fatherhood of the bomb; the creation of nuclear weapons posited, in his opinion, a catastrophic threat to the survival of humanity.
Einstein now contacted the New Yorker's publisher, Raoul Fleischmann, about "Hiroshima." He expressed his deep admiration for the work and requested a thousand reprints of the story to distribute to leading scientists around the world.
Now, in the autumn of 1946, he was growing disgusted by his fellow scientists professing guilt about their part in creating the bomb. ("I wept as I read John Hersey's New Yorker account," admitted one Manhattan Project scientist....
Hersey's book was not only deemed an instant classic by booksellers and critics but also quickly made its way into college curriculums—including some of the Ivy League universities ...
To him and other Soviet leaders, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs "were not aimed at Japan but rather at the Soviet Union." Molotov contended. "They said, bear in mind you don't have an atomic bomb and we do, and this is what the consequences will be like if you make the wrong move."
Yet it is ironic that the FBI investigated Hersey as a possible pro-Russia Communist sympathizer, given that, in the Soviet Union, he had been brand a militaristic American spy determined to sow fear in Russia and around the world.
... Japanese reviewers seemed to regard Hiroshima with a mix of sadness and cautious optimism. It "expresses a humanism which transcends the position of victor and vanquished," wrote one Japanese reviewer in the Tokyo Shimbun. "It should be read seriously, with poignant hope for peace."
Now back in the United States with his wife and family after years of war reporting abroad, Hersey began to shift his attention from reporting to fiction, acting on his theory that fiction could be stronger and more affecting than nonfiction. (His theory would prove ironic, given that "Hiroshima" remains his best-known and most influential work—despite the fact that Hersey authored more than a dozen novels throughout his lifetime.)
In 1952, the United States would successfully detonate its first hydrogen bomb—the "Hell Bomb," as Atomic Bill Laurence called it—with a payload equivalent to more than 10 megatons of TNT, making it approximately 666 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.
Unlike many of the hotshot journalists who followed in his footsteps, such as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, who were often prominent in their own stories and reveled in their celebrity, Hersey had continued to shun publicity, writing over two dozen novels and nonfiction books from his home in suburban Connecticut, Martha's Vineyard, Key West, and New Haven, where he was master of Yale's Pierson College for half a decade. "He was a member of the generation that developed the cult of the author—people like Norman Mailer were doing The Dick Cavett Show—but he didn't want any part of that," recalled his son, Baird Hersey. "He never went on tour... He didn't go on TV or radio, didn't give lectures." On the subject of the celebrity journalists who were succeeding him, Hersey called himself "one worried grandpa" and added that "the figure of the journalist [was becoming] more important than the events being written about."
William Shawn was ousted as editor of the New Yorker in 1987 by S.I. New house Jr., whose Condé Nast Publications acquired the magazine in 1985. Shawn died of a heart attack in 1992.
John Richard Hersey died of cancer a few months later, on March 24, 1993. He was seventy-eight years old.
Hersey and his New Yorker editors created "Hiroshima" in the belief that journalists must hold accountable those in power. They saw a free press as essential to the survival of democracy—a form of government which had just narrowly escaped extinction.
Yet the greatest tragedy of the twenty-first century may be that we have learned so little from the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Apparently catastrophe lessons need to be experienced firsthand by each generation. So, here are some refreshers: Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.
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