Like Vas’ film [Summer of Hiroshima], Hiroshima-Nagasaki goes back to the earth-shattering events of 1945. It is a short black-and- white film made at Columbia University under the supervision of Erik Barnouw, based on archival footage shot originally by Japanese camera-persons. It shows simply and horrifically the devastating effects of the two atomic explosions on both human beings and a city structure. Like Dark Spring, it was assembled from footage that had for years been kept from the eyes of the public by successive American governments. Besides describing how Hiroshima- Nagasaki came to be made, Barnouw’s article raises two important points relating to secrecy and network attitudes. For years, various administrative rulings kept the Hiroshima footage under close wraps. Why? What was the purpose of keeping such dynamic material hidden when it was surely in the public interest for it to be made available? Barnouw tentatively suggests that officials feared that screening the material would lead to a public horror at the events shown so great as to hamper U.S. ability to develop the hydrogen bomb. Barnouw’s second point concerns the attitude of the networks. When Hiroshima-Nagasaki was finished and given a press screening, not one commercial network official bothered to attend – the film had been made by a non-network person and therefore could not be used. That the film might have been of major public importance was obviously a secondary consideration. Only when UPI hailed the film as worthy of serious attention did the networks finally deign to view it, but they continued to claim they had no use for it.

Alan Rosenthal, New Challenges for Documentary, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1988