President HARRY TRUMAN (from "Hiroshima Countdown"): "Having found the atomic bomb, we have used it. It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemies and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His way and for His purposes."

SATORU KONISHU (Translated): On the day of the sixth, the bombing, the city of Hiroshima was aflame and under that flame I know that so many people perished.

JOSEPH GERSON: One of the obvious legacies is that nations and the entire human species now is at risk of nuclear annihilation.

CPT JAMES BUSH (USN, Ret.): I served ten years on nuclear submarines. Two years after I left nuclear submarines, I had cancer.

Rep. EDWARD J. MARKEY (D-MA): I think we have to have a full discussion of what went on during the Cold War in the name of national security.

NARRATOR: A half-century has passed since Hiroshima was vaporized in an atomic fireball. What price has America paid in developing nuclear weapons?

ADM JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): Fifty years ago, we exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima and invented a new way to kill hundreds of thousands of people instantly and indiscriminately. For the greater part of the intervening decades, the world has lived on the brink of nuclear holocaust. But now with the passage of superpower confrontation, we have this rare opportunity to minimize the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy. Our program today provides background.

"This barren area, three-tenths of a mile from zero point, once contained the main Japanese military headquarters. The barracks were utterly destroyed. Most of the military personnel of approximately 20,000 were wiped out."

NARRATOR: The unparalleled destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. The legacy of Hiroshima lives on for those who survived the blast but bear the physical and emotional scars of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for those who lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation, for the American taxpayers who shelled out almost $4 trillion to fund the nuclear arms race, and for those whose health was ruined and lives scarred in the name of national security.

On July 16th, 1945 scientists from the top secret Manhattan Project were preparing to test the world's first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Bets were made on the strength of the bomb's explosive power. While most scientists thought the bomb would explode with the force of several thousand tons of TNT, Hungarian immigrant Enrico Fermi waged that the bomb would destroy New Mexico and perhaps the entire world.

Thankfully, Fermi lost his bet. But at 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945, on a brilliantly sunlit, cloudless morning, Fermi's version of apocalypse came true for the 300,000 citizens of Hiroshima.

In the early morning hours of the August day that President Truman would later call "the greatest day in history," a nuclear bomb called "Little Boy" was loaded carefully into the B-29 aircraft named "Enola Gay" after the pilot's mother. A lone B-29, checking the weather over Hiroshima, triggered air raid sirens, but citizens below returned to work after the all-clear sounded. Minutes later, little notice was taken when the Enola Gay approach. Twelve-year old Miyoko Matsubara was there that day.

MIYOKO MATSUBARA: Suddenly my friend shouted. I hear the sounds of B-29 flying. Thinking that it was impossible, I look up at sky. I thought I saw some luminescent body drop from the tail of the plane.

NARRATOR: The bomb exploded about 1,850 feet above the Shima hospital, several hundred feet from ground zero.

Ms. MATSUBARA: I saw a big, big fireball, so I lay flat on the ground. At the same time, I heard deafening roar which could be the bowels of the earth.

NARRATOR: In the 1500-foot radius of the bomb's hypocenter, temperatures reached 3000 degrees within one second. The bomb's explosive power, about 26 million pounds of TNT, instantly killed nearly 100,000 people and injured tens of thousands more.

Joseph Gerson, author of "With Hiroshima Eyes," has interviewed many of the hibakushas, or survivors of the atomic bombing.

Mr. GERSON: The word that's most commonly used by all the hibakusha is "hell," they experienced hell in all of its forms. People close to the center who weren't vaporized and who managed to survive endured massive and horrible burns. One man I know, for example, was seared with more than 3000 degrees of heat across his entire body and he witnessed a pregnant woman being literally ripped apart by the blast.

NARRATOR: Satoru Konishu was sixteen years old at the time of the bombing.

Professor KONISHU (Translated): The bomb destroyed completely about four miles diameter of the city of Hiroshima and there was nobody to really go from outside to help them. The doctors died, the firemen died, and there was just no way of helping them from the carnage.

NARRATOR: Tens of thousands of people died from radiation, burns and related causes in the next few months.

Ms. MATSUBARA: I started suffer from burning high fever, diarrhea, vomiting, losing -- half of my hair fell out. I was on the verge of death for four days. I found my face. It was disfigured beyond all recognition. I couldn't believe it was my face.

NARRATOR: Three days later, another B-29 dropped a plutonium-fueled atomic bomb called "Fat Man" on the city of Nagasaki, killing and injuring over 100,000 people. Masako Yoshinaga was a fourteen-year old munitions factory worker in Nagasaki in 1945.

MASAKO YOSHINAGA (Translated): I had burns, terrible burns all over my body, but I was not aware of it at that time. It took about half a year for my all my burns to be healed. And for the next decade, ten years, I continued suffering from various illness.

NARRATOR: Radioactive fallout from the bomb continued to kill tens of thousands more in the decades that followed the two bombings.

Ms. YOSHINAGA (Translated): I lost three of my friends with leukemia and I myself have been constantly living with this fear of nuclear disease, radiation sickness that might come at anytime. I have continuously feared for my children and my grandchildren, and this is the fiftieth year of this pain and suffering.

Mr. GERSON: Even the US Government had announced that those who were going to die from the atomic bomb who had already died were all that would die. But in the end, the radiation poisoning has drawn out now for 50 years continuing to kill people.

"General Yashachiro Yumetsu of the Imperial General Staff signs for the Japanese Army. The surrender documents by which Japan agrees to lay down arms completely and to obey..."

NARRATOR: Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the declaration of war against Japan by the Soviet Union, the Japanese government sued for peace.

While the war ended, the nuclear age had just begun. It would leave a dangerous and costly legacy, convincing American officials to think about the bomb as a decisively devastating, war-winning weapon.

Mr. GERSON: Well, I think the US Government and many ambitious people in this country have avoided a really full and honest reflection or confrontation with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To face that, I think, would undermine the ability of the US to continue to threaten nuclear war, to continue to prepare for nuclear war.

NARRATOR: In August, 1945, it appeared to many politicians and military officials the atomic bomb had won the Second World War. The idea that nuclear weapons could win a war, even a Cold War, was thus born in the ashes of Hiroshima.

RICHARD HALLION: I would say I think that nuclear weapons helped win the Cold War for the West.

NARRATOR: Dr. Richard Hallion is the Air Force historian at the Air Force's Center for Military History.

Dr. HALLION: We found, for example, that the Soviet Union, after 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, very much tempered its drive in Europe -- even though it was very interested in influencing European events, very much tempered that drive in the face of the weapons.

CPT BUSH: I believe that nuclear weapons played no role in winning the Cold War.

NARRATOR: Captain James Bush commanded a nuclear missile-carrying submarine and later served as a nuclear war planner in the Pentagon

CPT BUSH: The winning of the Cold War was characterized by the fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Union. In my mind that happened because communism is an inadequate form of government.

NARRATOR: Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts has been a leader in Congress on nuclear issues.

Rep. MARKEY: I don't think the Soviet Union lost the Cold War because they thought that the United States could win an all-out nuclear conflict. I think they lost primarily because of the actuarial tables. Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov all died in a year and a half period.

So, they lost their leaders of the earlier generation and Gorbachev, in early '85, took over, essentially the John F. Kennedy of their country. That changed generationally the view that their leaders had toward nuclear weapons and how much additional security it would provide as balanced against the domestic concerns which they had left untended.

NARRATOR: Both the United States and the Soviet Union built weapons not only to deter each other from attacking, but to influence the behavior of other nations. For example, both nations have threatened to use nuclear weapons against smaller nations.

Mr. GERSON: And on numerous occasions, about 20 occasions, through the Cold War and now in the post-Cold War era, both in relationship to Iraq and North Korea, US presidents have threatened to use nuclear weapons to annihilate nations in times of confrontation.

President BILL CLINTON (11 July 1993, at Korean DMZ):

"It is pointless for them to try to develop nuclear weapons because if they ever use them, it would be the end of their country."

Dr. HALLION: And I think that balance of power between the two superpowers and their allies, I think within that, nuclear weapons played a very crucial role. What they did is they actually gave it a measure of stability. They presented extreme uses of violence. They prevented general war.

Rep. MARKEY: Well, in the United States, as in the Soviet Union, there were powerful military forces, including not only defense contractors, but those that worked in the Pentagon and the Kremlin, and the committees in the Congress and in the Politboro in the Soviet Union that drove this nuclear arms race between the two countries.

Dr. HALLION: In the case of the arsenals that were built up both within the Soviet Union and within the United States, I think these arsenals represented a reasonable approach to the military problem and the strategic problem that both sides were facing.

NARRATOR: One of the most costly legacies of Hiroshima and of the nuclear arms race was the scramble for atomic dollars by each branch of the armed services. Initially, the Air Force had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, but this soon changed.

CPT BUSH: The services definitely competed with each other to see who could get more nukes, and it was interesting the directions they went. Everybody in the Navy was very excited about the Polaris program and Polaris submarines and we put a lot of money into it and the Navy got money for it. That's what they wanted. They wanted the money. They wanted to deny the money to the Air Force. And in order to get that money, we had to have a nuclear component.

NARRATOR: Stephen Schwartz of the Brookings Institution is one of the authors of a new study on the costs of the US nuclear arsenal over the last 50 years.

STEPHEN SCHWARTZ: Well, we estimate that the total cost of the nuclear weapons program, in 1995 dollars, is nearly

$4 trillion. Now $4 trillion is an almost unimaginable sum of money. To maybe put it in perspective, if you took a stack of dollar bills like you would get at a bank and put them back to back, one stack equals $200, you could stretch it around the earth at the equator three times and send it off to the moon, and reach the moon and go beyond the moon.

NARRATOR: With substantial progress being made on the START nuclear arms reduction agreements with Russia and with the end of the Cold War, most Americans mistakenly believed that nuclear weapons spending has just about zeroed out.

Mr. SCHWARTZ: We're probably spending on the order of $25 billion a year on nuclear weapons activities. Now, granted, we aren't producing any new nuclear weapons, but we are retaining the capability to do so. We're, of course, still purchasing weapons systems like the B-2 bomber and the Trident II missile. We're upgrading systems like the Minuteman missile. We, of course, are still spending money on a very large command, control and communications apparatus for nuclear weapons.

NARRATOR: Today the United States still possesses 15,000 nuclear weapons. If the START II treaty is fully implemented, by 2003, our nation will still have roughly 8,000 nuclear weapons.

Mr. SCHWARTZ: Now people ought to realize that absent a decision from the government to get rid of nuclear weapons entirely and shut down the complex, we are going to incur these costs for a number of years.

NARRATOR: President Eisenhower wisely reminds us that every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on other domestic needs. To Joseph Gerson, continuing to spend billions of dollars on nuclear weapons is not only misguided, but also detrimental to the nation.

Mr. GERSON: We're basically sacrificing human beings in our country in order to maintain this military establishment.

NARRATOR: There are those who point to another cost of the nuclear age borne of by the burden of secrecy.

Mr. GERSON: What we see is that we have lost many of our democratic values, many of our democratic visions, many of our democratic responses in this country. We've become accustomed to secrecy for national security.

NARRATOR: The Enola Gay crew did not know their destination or even what they carried in their bomb bay until the plane was in flight hours from reaching Hiroshima. While secrecy was a necessary wartime precaution, one of the legacies of the bomb was the continuing and excessive secrecy of nuclear weapons programs.

Eileen Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize uncovering our government's darkest secrets during the Cold War. We filmed her phone interview in a TV studio in New Mexico.

EILEEN WELSOME: I think that one of the things that was created that began during the building of the atomic bomb was a culture of secrecy and it continued for decade after decade after decade. And, in some sense, it still exists today.

And that's one of the biggest legacies, is that even now we don't trust what the Department of Defense is saying, what the Department of Energy is saying.

Rep. MARKEY: I think we have to have a full discussion of what went on during the Cold War in the name of national security.

Mr. SCHWARTZ: Government officials concluded, wrongly in our opinion, that there were too many secret things about this program to let the public in on. And so, Congress basically voted on these programs without really telling people or letting them know what was going on. And, of course, if the public can't question whether or not, you know, we should really be spending this money, there's no way for them to really get in on the process.

NARRATOR: A noted philosopher, George Santayana, said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This was never more true than in considering spending on nuclear weapons programs.

Mr. SCHWARTZ: As an example, in the 1960s, we were told that we needed to have a missile defense system capable of shooting down Russian and then later Chinese ballistic missiles. We turned it on. It operated for less than a year, and President Nixon shut it down because he decided that we really couldn't justify the cost based on the very limited capability of the system. That program cost, in adjusted 1995 dollars, about

$26 billion, not including the cost of the warheads for the missiles that were based there.

Today, of course, we're having a debate over whether or not we should have a ballistic missile defense. And people in Congress and the public at large seem to have generally forgotten that we've already debated this issue and pretty much decided that it wasn't a very effective program.

NARRATOR: Secrecy also hid the health effects of radiation, which became perhaps the most terrifying legacy of the nuclear age. Captain Jim Bush learned of this firsthand by commanding a nuclear submarine.

CPT BUSH: We thought that we were defending the United States. We thought that we were preventing nuclear war. And, in many respects, I think that's correct. So, we were willing to take the chance of -- the health chance, a health risk in order to do that.

I served ten years on nuclear submarines. Two years after I left nuclear submarines, I had cancer. If that was because I was on nuclear submarines, and I believe it was, the medical community is not willing to say so.

NARRATOR: But other Americans were not asked to take these risks. Their health was threatened by their own government without their consent.

Ms. WELSOME: In Cincinnati, cancer patients were treated with whole body radiation for the Pentagon. The Pentagon was interested in finding what would happen to a soldier on the battlefield if he or she was exposed to radiation. They were looking for a biological dosimeter.

The family members allege that this experiment shortened their loved ones' lives, that it increased the pain; in some cases, it was excruciating. They vomited for days.

Rep. MARKEY: A certain number of soldiers and civilians were used as human guinea pigs in order to determine what the effects of exposure to radiation, to plutonium, to other radioactive materials would be, and then those lessons would be applied to the planning for a nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union.

Ms. WELSOME: How long will our soldiers be good before they begin vomiting, before they begin having diarrhea? Will it take an hour? Will it take three hours? If there's a nuclear attack in the United States, you know, how long will civilians have to get out of the city? It seems absurd by our standards, but they were looking at these kinds of questions.

Rep. MARKEY: What was wrong, however, is that they applied a national security shield to the proceedings, so that the soldiers and the civilians were not warned individually about the risks that could be run for their own health if they were put into these dangerous situations. And, unfortunately, the government knew how dangerous radiation was before most of these people were ever put into those experimental situations.

NARRATOR: In her research, Eileen Welsome tracked down a handful of civilians who were never told that they were nuclear guinea pigs.

Ms. WELSOME: There was an experiment that was conducted that began during the Manhattan Project and that continued when the AEC was formed. That's the Atomic Energy Commission. That was the injection of 18 people with plutonium. It was a two-phase experiment. There was the initial injections between 1945 and 1947. In 1973, this experiment war reignited, if you will, and federally paid doctors and scientists went around the country trying to exhume the bodies of these individuals.

These doctors and scientists were afraid of, A, lawsuits and, B, the fear of public relations. What would the American people do if they knew that these federally funded scientists were injecting hospital patients with plutonium?

NARRATOR: Due to the courageous efforts of Secretary Hazel O'Leary, the Department of Energy has declassified thousands of documents relating to these experiments. In February of 1995, the department released a report on radiation experiments conducted on civilians from 1944 to 1974.

Even with the recent revelations by the Department of Energy, many feel that the entire story still has not been told and our government still has not accepted full responsibility.

Ms. WELSOME: I think that in the past year, there have been hundreds of documents that have been declassified and released. Side by side with that declassification is a censorship program. So, what this censorship is doing, in effect, is keeping the media from finding out who these people are and then contacting them or their relatives. And it's also keeping the people involved from going to a public reading room or a national archive and saying, "My God, that's my uncle!"

Rep. MARKEY: And so, to a certain extent, one of the unfortunate, ironic twists of the Cold War is that the United States did more damage to American citizens in their use of nuclear materials than they ever did to the Soviet Union. And it is time for us to come to grips with that reality and to offer compensation, if appropriate, to those whose health was harmed by those experiments.

NARRATOR: On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, some feel that the most important legacy of the bomb is the morality issue raised by threatening to use or even having nuclear weapons.

Mr. GERSON: There are those who say that the threatened use of nuclear weapons and the preparations to use them is a normal and logical military response. But I think it reflects the absolute moral corruption, the political corruption that nuclear weapons have wrought.

Rep. MARKEY: Nuclear abolition should be the goal, but that's a long term goal. Short term, a comprehensive nuclear test ban, a non-proliferation regime worldwide which is as airtight as possible.

Professor KONISHU (Translated): We believe that nuclear weapons is not just a big weapon or a bigger weapon, it's a qualitatively different weapon and its sole purpose is to annihilate human beings. And so, we believe that there should be no nuclear weapons on earth.

ADM SHANAHAN: There are four actions we should take now either unilaterally or in conjunction with the other nuclear powers:

First, we should revise our nuclear use policy in order to marginalize the military and political significance of nuclear weapons.

Two, we should pursue rapidly a reduction in US and Russian nuclear stockpiles below the START II level.

Three, we should make non-proliferation a core priority.

And four, we should seek a zero alert status in order to reduce the danger of an unauthorized or accidental launch of a nuclear weapon.

For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.