Let’s file this under more soul-less disregard for your fellow travelers. Never before seen photographs of Ground Zero at Hiroshima have emerged in time for the 64th anniversary of the record-setting war crime. The US army photo record, which had escaped the government’s suppression efforts, remained in someone’s personal stash for decades. The damning documentation his to neglect, and, fortunately, to accidentally discard.

In the early 1970s this gentleman and a friend discovered a chest full of pictures obviously taken at the epicenter of the atomic bomb blast in Japan. His friend kept the chest and he stuffed the photos into an old suitcase which he then left to the damp of his basement. Somewhere in the process of housecleaning and moving, the suitcase was thrown to the curb, where a garbage sleuth made the find.

The US military took scrupulous records of the devastation of Hiroshima. Immediately after Japan’s capitulation, Army photographers circulated all over Ground Zero, doubtless paying for it with the cancer shortly thereafter. The images were kept from the US and world public indefinitely, and relatively few of them have ever been shown.

In an attempt to trace the provenance of these photos, the original house owner was contacted for the full story. He didn’t know it, having chanced upon it himself, but he greeted the call without a clue:

“The photographs? Of Hiroshima? You have them? I thought they were in my basement! How do you get them?”

“This is wild! I must have thrown them out by accident when I was moving stuff out. I never would have purposefully gotten rid of those photographs. I’ve been carrying them around with me since 1972!”