Thread by @AmienEssif

THREAD: I just put out a report on @dwnews showing that the wrong footage has been used to portray the atomic attack on Hiroshima for decades. #Hiroshima75 #Nagasaki75 #verification

(Full video here:

https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1296800973931724800

)

My research started when I was doing a report on the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and I found this in the Getty archives

Obviously, those are the same mushroom cloud. And the more I looked, the more TV and online reports I found conflating the two: CNN, France24, even us at DW.

There was another blast used to depict Hiroshima on BBC, PBS, Russia Today, etc, and this one really made me suspicious.

It was filmed from very far away, and notice how the mushroom cloud is bursting through layers of the atmosphere. That seemed way more powerful than the "Little Boy" uranium bomb.

I knew it wouldn't be that hard to find the orginal film material. There were only a handful of people in the world who knew the bomb would be dropped that day. So I found a list of their names. atomicheritage.org/history/hirosh…

Pretty quickly I found 2 things on Wikipedia: 1) Caron's and Gackenbach's photographs of the Hiroshima bomb are considered the only known still photographs of the explosion (that's not completely true)

and 2) Someone on board the observation plane "The Great Artiste" (what a name!) took the only known film footage of the explosion.

So here are the three photographs I was able to find of the Little Boy mushroom cloud:

What was immediately clear to me is that this puffy and broken column of smoke was very different from the videos I had seen over and over in the media

To make a long story short: I found the orginal film reel of the only known footage. It was taken by physicist Harold M. Agnew and it's held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. (Thanks to @HooverInst for the photo!)

Oh and here is a photo of Agnew allegedly carrying the actual plutonium core of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki

Here is his entire film reel, uploaded to YouTube by the Hoover Archives

They also provide very handy annotations that very clearly point out which shots are of Hiroshima and which are Nagasaki oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/1…

As I'd suspected, the shots of Hiroshima are not the ones we usually see in reports. Nagasaki is used instead, in the majority of cases that I have found in online archives.

But that left one remaining mystery. What is *this*?

I did a simple google reverse-image search and found out that it's the last shot in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" 🤷‍♂️

I had better luck with the Yandex search engine. I found this photograph which was labeled as "Bikini Atoll"

After putting it in black and white and mirroring it, I was certain it was the same explosion

I looked through archives of bomb tests at Bikini Atoll for hours until I found the right one: The "Cherokee" test of the US's first aerial hydrogen bomb in 1956

There's something very wrong in the archives if they attribute a video with a 1956 H-bomb test to Aug. 6, 1945 and say it's Hiroshima.

I tried finding the original misuse of this H-bomb footage, and the best I could come up with is a British Pathe News film from 1964 called "Flashback to the Hiroshima Atom Drop" britishpathe.com/video/flashbac…

The earliest misuse I found of the Nagasaki footage in place of the Hirshima footage was a video labeled in the US National Archives as "E-6 10 SEC (INSIDE THE ENOLA GAY)" catalog.archives.gov/id/88425

It uses dramatized footage of the mission filmed with professional cameras. But it inserts Harold Agnew's footage of the Nagasaki bomb, claiming it was the bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay.

My guess (though I don't have solid proof) is that if this video is really from 1945, as AP claims, then it could be the source of the Nagasaki-Hiroshima mix-up that persists until today.

But the erroneous use of a 1956 hydrogen bomb test suggests there's more going on here. The media doesn't seem to be too concerned with accuracy when portraying one of the most horrific events in human history.

Sure, there are more important things to get right - the death count, for example, which we still don't know.

But - to conclude on a serious note - now that the survivors are slowly leaving us, it's more important than ever that we don't get lazy when reporting on the only use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations. END

I have reached out to the archives at AP, Getty, and the US National Archives for comment but have not yet received a response. I'll update when/if I hear from them.