“In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.” That is General Leslie Groves, speaking about radiation sickness among the survivors of the atomic bombings. “The atomic bomb is the most terrible agent of destruction known to man.” That is a U.S. Navy report, describing the same weapon. Both statements are attributed to U.S. government sources from the months following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and both now sit in the same collection of declassified paperwork.
The compilation
Both lines appear in a briefing book that the National Security Archive at George Washington University posted on August 7, 2023, titled “78th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings: Revisiting the Record.” The Archive is not a government body. It is an independent, nongovernmental research organization that collects and publishes declassified U.S. government records. The posting draws on an earlier Archive project, “Reexploring the Manhattan Project and the Problem of Radiation Effects, 1944–1945,” which is itself a compilation assembled long after the events it describes, not a document written at the time. Groves’ line comes from his testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy on November 30, 1945, filed in the collection as Document 27. The Navy report, filed as Document 30, carries no author’s name and no date in the record as released.
What Japan was reporting
In the weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese doctors and officials reported that people who had survived the blast and the fires were continuing to sicken and die, with symptoms consistent with radiation exposure. The documented U.S. response was to treat these accounts as propaganda. A memorandum filed in the Manhattan Engineer District’s records (RG 77, Top Secret Documents, File no. 5b) describes a telephone call on August 28, 1945, between Groves and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Rea, the surgeon in charge of the base hospital at Oak Ridge. The memo is marked Top Secret, meaning access was limited to personnel with the highest wartime clearance. Rea had no specialized training in the biological effects of radiation. According to the memorandum, the two men agreed the Japanese reports were propaganda. On September 8, 1945, Groves’ deputy in the Pacific, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, told reporters at a press briefing that an Australian correspondent’s account of radiation sickness in Hiroshima was propaganda as well. The record shows what was decided, and by whom. It does not show why.
The missing why
No document in this compilation lays out what evidence, medical or otherwise, led Groves and Rea to call the Japanese reports propaganda. There is no memo weighing reported symptoms against known effects of gamma radiation, no cited data contradicting the Japanese accounts, no note of who else, if anyone, was consulted before the call was made. That absence is a fact about the paperwork, not a fact about what Groves knew. It does not prove the dismissal was made in bad faith, and it does not prove it was made in good faith either. It is a decision recorded without its reasoning, in a file that otherwise kept fairly careful track of itself.
What doesn’t line up
Set the two documents side by side and the mismatch is hard to soften. Groves told the Senate committee on November 30, 1945, that radiation sickness caused no undue suffering and was, in his words, a pleasant way to die. He told the committee no one had suffered radiation injury except at the instant the bomb exploded. The Navy report in the same collection calls the bomb the most terrible agent of destruction known to man and states that the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was exactly what target planners had predicted. The Navy document has no listed author and no date, so it is not possible, from the compilation alone, to say whether it was written before Groves’ testimony, after it, or around the same time, or whether its authors were drawing on the same reports about survivor health that had already reached Groves’ own office. Two official descriptions of the same weapon, from the same government, within the same several months, and nothing in the surviving file shows anyone set them side by side at the time.
The Archive’s word for it
The National Security Archive’s own framing of this material, published in 2023, states that Manhattan Project leadership “confounded” the Japanese reports with propaganda rather than treating them as medical fact. That word is the Archive’s, not Groves’, not Rea’s, and not the Navy report’s. It is a researcher’s judgment, written decades after the testimony it describes, not a line drawn from the 1945 paperwork itself. The 1945 documents state what was said and done. The Archive’s sentence states what, in 2023, someone concluded those actions amounted to.
What the file doesn’t settle
Several points remain open. The Navy report has no listed author and no date, so its place in the sequence of events cannot be fixed. No surviving document explains the medical or evidentiary basis, if any, behind calling the Japanese reports propaganda. Nothing in the file indicates that Groves’ Senate testimony and the Navy’s assessment were ever compared by anyone at the time, or that officials even registered that both existed. The National Security Archive publishes both documents in the same briefing book and stops there. It does not reconcile them, and nothing else in the released record does either.
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**Changes made:**, Added missing closing quotation mark in the headline. Changed “1944-1945” hyphen to an en dash (“1944–1945”) for consistency with date-range punctuation style. All other instances of “Groves’,” “Rea’s,” and other possessives were already correctly formed for names ending in “s.”, No subject–verb agreement errors, tense shifts, article errors, or homophone misuses were found elsewhere in the text. No relative-to-today date references were present; all dates are already absolute (e.g. “August 7, 2023,” “November 30, 1945,” “September 8, 1945”), so no changes were needed there.