Hotspots: The Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was made on the assumption that "all casualties would be standard explosion casualities...Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first". But a month later journalists were describing how people uninjured in the initial cataclysm were dying mysterious and horrible deaths from what they could only describe as "the atomic plague". It took two full years to get the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission operational in the devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even then data collection was piecemeal and was brought within the parameters of existing assumptions about the effects of the atom bomb. Sue Roff has discovered a black comedy of scientific shortcuts and opportunistic research design, while at the same time piecing together an interpretation of leukaemia clusters that both synthesizes and challenges major theories.