This is John Bachelor. Tonight, I speak with my colleague, Charles Pellegrino,

author of Te Helen Back last train from Hiroshima. About the Hiroshima and Nagasaki

bombs and what the Los Alamos team knew about radiation, the after-effects of the atomic

weapons, before they made Trinity in the desert and before they built the bombs, little man and

fat boy. Little boy and fat man. Charlie is very explicit. They didn't know very much. A little

theory, but certainly nothing comparable to what we know now about the long-term effects, the damage

the radiation does to all age groups, especially the young, especially the vulnerable.

Charlie were afterwards worked with some of the team members of the Los Alamos team

and learned that they still were haunted by what they didn't know and what happened at Hiroshima

and Nagasaki. Is Charlie explaining? Yeah, there's a point in the film where

Oppenheimer is talking about the neutron spray from the bomb and that people who weren't injured

came up from underground or from a collapsed building and sickened and died over the next days

or weeks. They didn't really understand yet the effects of gamma rays, micro waves,

fallout, which were everything that was disintegrated even the sand that was picked up into the cloud

being instantly irradiated in the cloud and then falling down as this deadly, highly radioactive

black rain. They didn't know about that for months, weeks, months as it came in and one of the people

mentioned in the film two of them who were actually mentors of mine, Harold Yuri and Lewis Alvarez,

they had breakdowns after all of this information came in. When we were working on the asteroid and

the dinosaur and the nuclear winter, Lewis Alvarez's son Walter Alvarez told me, don't ask anything

about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Never did. Harold Yuri, it never came up. He had a complete mental

breakdown and then friends of his got him into working out. Oh, we can date and track climate

change and what the climate was if you dig into a tomb in Israel and water was getting in there,

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