The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation. US military crews and Japanese newsreel teams shot color and black & white footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped. The newsreel footage was suppressed for 25 years; the US military footage was hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. Some of the newsreel footage "might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling." This August 6 and 7 the Sundance channel is showing Original Child Bomb (review, QuickTime trailer), a documentary that combines the newsreel and military footage. The title is inspired by Thomas Merton's poem.
Lieutenant Daniel McGovern, a filmmaker for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), and Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer of one of the Japanese film crews, used some of the footage in the documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (This page has links to many of the memos from the late 1940s about classifaction of the footage.) McGovern was instrumental in preserving the US military footage and secrely made a print of the Japanese newsreel footage that ended up being the only surviving copy. [from MetaFilter.com]
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