Bombardment of Nagasaki-shi

The U.S. used atomic weapons against Japan 78 years ago. We listen back to archival interviews with psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and journalists Lesley M.M. Blume and Evan Thomas about the decision.

Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney was the last officer to lead an atomic mission and was involved in both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombing runs. He has written a memoir entitled "War's End" (Avon Books) which provides a first hand account of the planning and the execution of one of the history's most destructive combat missions.

This Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. We talk with James Yamazaki, the Japanese-American pediatrician who was sent to Nagasaki four years later to study the impact of radiation on children. Yamazaki has written a memoir about his life and work in Nagasaki called Children of the Atomic Bomb. He is currently clinical professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine at the University of California. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)