On the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, when the United States became the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in warfare, Democracy Now! looks at how the U.S. government sought to manipulate the narrative about what it had done — especially by controlling how it was portrayed by Hollywood.

Journalist Greg Mitchell's new book, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — and America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, documents how the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki triggered a race between Hollywood movie studios to tell a sanitized version of the story in a major motion picture.

"There's all sorts of evidence that has emerged that the use of the bomb was not necessary, it could have been delayed or not used at all," says Mitchell. "But what was important was to set this narrative of justification, and it was set right at the beginning by Truman and his allies, with a very willing media."

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