'The Greatest Argument For Peace The World Has Ever Seen'

Herbert Sussan wants to spend the rest of his life fighting against nuclear weapons. He is weak now, having been hospitalized for cancer, heart problems, a growth on his lungs, and other serious ailments. His balding head bears a lump and scar where surgeons removed a blood clot from his brain. His strength is returning quickly, but he still speaks slowly and walks laboriously with a cane. Robust and healthy for the first 60 years of his life, he finds it frustrating to wait for full recovery.

"I don't know how long I have to live," he says, "but I know I want to dedicate my life to removing nuclear weapons from the face of the earth."

Sussan seems an unlikely person to be engaged in an anti-nuclear crusade. During his career as a top television writer, director, and senior producer, he has traveled throughout the world and held major responsibilities with CBS, NBC, and Columbia Pictures. Involved in television from its inception, he was one of the founders of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. His popular television series, Wide, Wide World, won him an Emmy, one of the many honors that adorn his walls.

But his illustrious career has not dimmed his passion about nuclear weapons. To understand his fervor, we have to go back to World War II, when Sussan, a student in motion picture production at the University of Southern California, was drafted into the U.S. Air Force.

At the end of the war in the Pacific, President Truman ordered the formation of a special unit to undertake a "strategic bombing survey" to analyze the damage American bombers did to Japanese cities. First Lt. Sussan was assigned to this special unit as motion picture producer and coordinating officer. His job was to direct crews taking still and motion pictures of the smashed Japanese cities. To make sure he could fulfill the mission, the air force sent him thousands of feet of then-rare color film from all over the Pacific.

"I looked on the trip as a great lark," he now admits. "It was a chance to travel the length and breadth of Japan at government expense, a wonderful way to end up my time with the military. We were given a special, private, self-contained train with all the comforts and equipment necessary to shoot film on location. And we could requisition whatever else we wanted. The Japanese were having trouble getting enough food, but we often had so much steak and ice cream that we'd have to throw away the excess."

The photographic team decided to start in Nagasaki, the southernmost city on their itinerary. Since the team members were given only 38 days and were under orders to cover 23 cities, they planned to stay in Nagasaki only a day or so.

"But as our train slowly steamed through a high pass and came around a bend and down through the valley into Nagasaki, my life was changed forever. I was utterly stunned by what faced me. For miles there was nothing but the rubble of what had been a city. The tracks went through absolute ruin. Scorched and blistered tile that had once been the roofs of homes was scattered everywhere. Here and there were the shattered, twisted remains of buildings. To the right we saw the remains of two schools. On the left were the remnants of a medical college and a cathedral. The train just went slowly down these tracks to where the station had been, but there was no station. The quietness of it all! It was like an enormous graveyard.

"I had been in the air force five years. I had seen the rubble of cities that had gone through numbers of attacks. But nothing and no one prepared me for what I saw from this one bomb. To think that these miles of rubble came from one weapon was unbelievable.

"The bomb dropped on Nagasaki destroyed torpedo factories and other military installations. But I learned later that it also exploded above the biggest Christian community in the Far East. The large Urakami Cathedral had been smashed into giant chunks." It was in Nagasaki that Christianity had been introduced to Japan more than 300 years earlier.

After surveying the city, Sussan decided that the original orders would never do. He got in touch with General Orville Anderson, military head of the strategic bombing survey, and received permission to stay as long as necessary.

"We were the only people there at that moment with the equipment and film to capture the horror, the reality, of what this bomb was capable of doing. No one else would ever have a chance to be there at that time with all the material needed to do the job. I thought, 'If people could only see this devastation, this holocaust, it would be the greatest argument for peace the world has ever seen.' It became a fixation with me. I kept saying to myself, 'This story has to be told.' "

The devastation struck Sussan forcefully because he is a sensitive, creative person. "That's part of my work. I could imagine what had happened. I could feel with the people of Nagasaki. In any case, my concern developed the minute I arrived. I just could not understand what kind of world we would have if these weapons were part of it. I remember thinking, 'This kind of weapon cannot exist on earth and people live on earth as well.' "

But the other members of the photographic unit did not react as Sussan had done. "An officer from the Defense Intelligence Agency was mainly concerned with seeing how effective the bomb had been. He kept asking for specific photos to show the heat and blast effects. The marine colonel who commanded the occupying troops was all business as usual. Lots of soldiers and nurses took snapshots like you take pictures at a resort. They took home pieces of blistered tile or melted glass as souvenirs. I was amazed. I just couldn't understand their reaction."

During the weeks they stayed in Nagasaki, Sussan took thousands of feet of film of physical damage: factories with steel girders that had been twisted like spaghetti, a medical college complex leveled dramatically by the directional force of the blast, shadowed imprints of buildings that had been turned to cinders by the immense heat. Then he turned to the heart-rending task of trying to record as many living victims as possible.

"I was amazed at the almost total acquiesence of everyone we approached. I could discern no resentment. No one was forced to be photographed. I told the people that, hopefully, if they participated, the world would see what had happened and this holocaust wouldn't happen again.

"We decided to record all the burn victims who were still alive. We were deeply impressed by two young American doctors who had requested all available penicillin in the Pacific. They were developing new techniques for treating these massive, horrible burns.

"I will never forget one young man. The skin on his back had been entirely burned away. I shuddered when we turned on the photographic lights. There was nothing but raw flesh. The doctors were keeping him alive in a total bath of penicillin... Amazingly, I found out later, he lived, married, had a family, and is still alive today.

"Many of the other victims, of course, died after we photographed them. They had massive infections or radiation sickness. I didn't even know what radiation was. I only learned of it when we saw the damaged X-ray plates at the Red Cross Hospital. I'm convinced that the radiation I received in Nagasaki and Hiroshima gave me the cancer I have today."

After weeks of photographing, Sussan and the unit went on to Hiroshima, arriving in March, 1946. The devastation of this larger, more cosmopolitan city affected Sussan even more strongly. It reminded him of his own hometown, New York City.

All in all, Sussan shot the equivalent of 30 feature-length movies in Japan: 95,000 feet of color film and more than 2,000 still photos. A few Japanese photographers were the only other people to make a record of the atom bombs' devastation, and much of their film was confiscated by the American occupation forces. Sussan took the only color motion pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Sussan returned to the United States on a Saturday with his two footlockers full of undeveloped 16mm film and called the Pentagon. But most employees there were away for the weekend. Not being able to obtain instructions, Sussan finally stowed the footlockers in a broom closet in an empty air force building just north of Washington's National Airport and went home.

He returned to Washington on Monday and reported the film's location to General Anderson, who immediately sent military police with a motorcycle escort to pick it up.

"He told me 'The film has been classified to stay within the War Department only. It's limited strictly to government use. General Anderson asked me to stay on and make films for the air force, but after five years of service, I wanted to get out of the military. I made a report on the still photos and then left the service.

"When I entered civilian life, I had an extremely tough year. I would walk through the East Side of New York and visualize the beautiful brownstone houses destroyed as they were in Japan. I would look into people's faces and see burns and keloid scars. I couldn't do anything for a year. I kept thinking of all that film, locked up and classified. If people could just see what I had seen, I thought, it would convince individuals and governments of the horror of nuclear war. I felt that we could perform an ultimate service both for our country and for the world, that somehow our filmed documentary could have a hand in the elimination of war and that sensible governments would reject nuclear weapons, forever."

Even when he finally began working again, Sussan had an obsession about the film. As he was rising in the television industry he kept approaching government and private individuals, urging the declassification of the film, arguing the importance of the world seeing it. He talked to television commentators like Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley. Given his high position in the television industry, he was, even able to take up the matter with Presidents Truman and Eisenhower as well as with various secretaries of defense and high military officers.

"When I produced a program called Salute to the Air Force, I beseeched the generals there to try to get me the footage. Whenever I saw an opportunity, I'd talk about it. Wherever I went, the response was always the same: 'There's no merit in showing what happened to the Japanese people.' 'Americans wouldn't understand; they wouldn't be interested.' 'It's strictly a military film, made for the government, not for the public.'

Benoit-Levy, a famous French documentary filmmaker told me, 'To release the film would be the worst thing for the USA. It would just increase other countries' hatred of America.'

"Only once in 37 years did I see even one foot of my film. The military used some of my footage in making two training films. One was on how to use an A-bomb. The other was on medical aspects of a nuclear attack. I was able to see them, but I couldn't sit through the showing. I got physically ill. It was so frustrating to see my film used for the exact opposite of what I'd intended.

"Not once in all those years did I see a minute of hope for getting my film released. I got more and more discouraged. I almost gave up."

Sussan did not know that a group of Japanese citizens shared his passionate concern and were trying to track down film on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After years of work, they put together one of the most gripping photographic books ever published, Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction. They determined, as they put it, "to send gift copies of a photographic and pictorial record of the atomic bombing to our children and fellow human beings around the world." For each 300-page volume sold in Japan, they donated a similar volume to a school library or similar institution abroad. They also sent copies to United Nations representatives, U.S. senators, and other key people. During the late 1970s, they distributed more than 40,000 copies in six languages all over the world.

In 1980, Sussan heard of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Publishing Company and went to see a photographic display it was sponsoring at the United Nations.

"When I saw the display and the book," Sussan recalls, "I was deeply moved. I realized that, whereas I had been unsuccessful, they had succeeded to some degree. But they had only still photos, not film. I told Tsutomu Iwakura, their executive director, about my film. He went to Washington and found that, unknown to me, the footage had just been declassified. It had been moved from "military storage to the National Archives and was available to the public."

Iwakura was extremely excited when he saw the film. He spent five days in the archives, reviewing it. But U.S. government representatives told the Japanese that they would have to buy the film if they wanted it. As a purely private group, they did not have the enormous funds required. Undaunted, however, they returned to Japan in July, 1980.

While Sussan lay in a hospital bed receiving treatments for cancer, the publishing company started the "Ten Foot Campaign." The idea was for thousands of Japanese donors to each buy 10 feet of the film. Eventually, some 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed over 120 million yen (more than $500,000), and the publishing company purchased the film.

The company made two documentaries using some of the Sussan footage and screened them at the June 12, 1982 peace march in New York. There Sussan saw his film for the first time.

The Japanese plan to make more films out of Sussan's thousands of feet of footage, but these are mostly for Japanese viewers. Sussan would like to make his own production for American audiences. Physically weak, but determined, he is exploring all the possibilities.

"I was the only person in the world to actually be there and make the film. I know why they said what they said and did what they did. A lot of sequences are unexplainable unless you were there. For example, I know that a burned streetcar in the film was four miles from ground zero and was filled with school girls going on an outing. There's also footage of a Christmas Mass in Nagasaki's smashed cathedral. The U.S. military had no interest in footage of that kind, but I put it in there for a reason. I remember every moment of taking that film. I would be so pleased to find a way to get this footage and to make the film I wanted to make 37 years ago. I don't know how long I have to live, but I'm prepared to dedicate the rest of my life to that.

"Having seen the effects of the most meager atomic weapon, and having seen the effects that keep going on, generation after generation, I believe that if we or anyone else uses our nuclear arsenal, the world is over. To have officials of our government or any government speak of limited war or of using these weapons in any way is horrendous.

"I want my children and their children to live full lives. Nuclear war represents the end of everything. I've walked around for 37 years with this message. I have the results of it--this cancer in my own body. If people understood what nuclear war means, they'd rise up and act so that governments couldn't continue with their present policy.

"We have to see nuclear weapons as sin--not political gain or loss. They must be eliminated from the face of the earth."

When this article appeared, Richard K. Taylor was a Sojourners contributing editor, worked part-time with Sojourners peace ministry, and was the co-author, with Ronald Sider, of Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope, which was released in November of 1982.