In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at the top of the list. Second on the list was the Hiroshima bombing, on Aug. 6, 1945. Third was the Nagasaki bombing three days later.
So, 35 years after the bombings of those Japanese cities, the Energy Department — the agency in charge of nuclear weaponry — was categorizing them as “tests.”
Later on, the classification changed, apparently in an effort to avert a potential P.R. problem. By 1994, a new edition of the same document explained that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were not ‘tests’ in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed … or to advance weapon design, to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety.”…
After the truth-shower 