COMMENTARY : Fifty Years of Fallout : ‘Hiroshima,’ TV’s latest dramatization of the first atomic bombing, represents a step forward from productions that unquestioningly present the official U.S. line, but it too is deeply flawed.

Next Sunday evening, exactly 50 years after an American plane dropped an atomic bomb over Japan, Showtime will premiere a three-hour movie called “Hiroshima.”

This is the third original movie about Hiroshima to appear on television in the past six years, an extraordinary number considering the grimness of the subject. What we call the “Hiroshima raw nerve” remains as sensitive as ever, and filmmakers--as well as television executives--are increasingly willing to address it.

How accurately and fairly they depict the decision to use the bomb, and its consequences, is another matter entirely.

The Television Age coincides with the Nuclear Age, but the creators of network dramas, like their counterparts in the feature film business, pretty much avoided Hiroshima for many years. This reflected the overall American response to the atomic bombing, which was generally one of affirmation or denial.

But below the surface, many Americans felt pain, confusion or anger about the atomic bombings. They sensed that they were not being told everything about alternatives that President Harry S. Truman may have ignored. It might be said, in fact, that America remains haunted by the atomic bombings--all the more so because they remain obscure, distant and mysterious.

This is evident in the loud and sometimes bitter debate over Truman’s decision that has occurred in this 50th anniversary year. We are still paying a price for television’s failure to even attempt to come to terms with the atomic bombing for many years.

For that reason, the Showtime movie represents a step forward from the years when the official version of Hiroshima was accepted with little question. Yet it, too, continues the long television tradition of missed opportunities regarding Hiroshima.

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Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Hiroshima would have been practically a no-show if it hadn’t been for Rod Serling. A 1963 episode of his “Twilight Zone” series focused on a physicist who builds a time machine that gives him a chance to change three events in history. One of them is Hiroshima, but the physicist fails in his frantic attempt to warn residents to evacuate the city.

The following year, Serling wrote the script for an ABC holiday special, “Carol for Another Christmas,” directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The Scrooge figure is a nuclear hawk; one of the ghosts that visit on Christmas Eve takes him to a barren Hiroshima to remind him of what the other end of the bomb looks like.

Yet these Serling scenarios examined only the result of using the bomb--not the controversy over Truman’s decision to deploy it in 1945.

The most important Hiroshima program to appear during this period was not a drama at all but a 16-minute documentary. For a quarter-century, visual images of Hiroshima on television--whether in movies or news coverage--had been restricted to shots of rubble, not people. Then, in 1970, Erik Barnouw completed his landmark documentary “Hiroshima/Nagasaki, August 1945.”

The film made use of newsreel footage that had been shot by Japanese cameramen in 1945, then seized by the American military and declared top secret until the late 1960s. This was grainy, black-and-white footage, but few Americans had seen anything like it before. There were scenes of Japanese doctors treating A-bomb victims suffering from horrendous burns and radiation disease.

Barnouw was shocked by the absence of network interest in the film. NBC declared that it might air part of the film if it could find a “news hook,” and Barnouw later commented: “We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for.” A Boston Globe editorial condemned the networks for ignoring the Barnouw movie, which it called “the most important documentary film” of the century, adding that every American should see it.

This provoked National Educational Television (the forerunner of PBS) to schedule a broadcast of the film on Aug. 3, 1970, marking the 25th anniversary of Hiroshima. The program produced one of the network’s largest audiences.

Barnouw was pleased but also haunted by his experience. He believed that if the Japanese footage “hadn’t been suppressed, and if the public and Congress had seen it in the 1950s, it would have been a lot harder to appropriate money to build more bombs.”

The Barnouw film, in any case, was an exception. For many years after, television images of Hiroshima once again emphasized rubble and excluded human effects.

By 1980, Hiroshima had faded far enough into the past to become fodder for made-for-television movies. The first to appear, a melodrama called “Enola Gay,” starred Patrick Duffy (of “Dallas”) as the pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb, and Billy Crystal as a radar expert. A kind of atomic soap opera, it featured many factual distortions and pictured the use of the bomb as undoubtedly warranted.

A few months later, the nuclear freeze movement appeared in the United States, and this may have prompted PBS to air the excellent “Oppenheimer” miniseries created by the BBC. It explored the enigma that was J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Sam Waterston), the physicist who directed the bomb project. Its handling of the Hiroshima decision reflected Oppenheimer’s own ambivalence, but a turning point had arrived: Before “Oppenheimer,” nearly every treatment of the subject, in both films and television, strongly endorsed the use of the bomb; afterward, every film would take a more skeptical approach.

By this time, new evidence about Truman’s decision had emerged, threatening the official Hiroshima narrative--that the bomb was necessary to end the war and save American lives. Filmmakers would draw on fresh facts and scholarly analysis to look beyond the official story. In this endeavor, they were well ahead of the news media and public opinion, which continued to support Truman’s decision rather strongly.

“Day One,” based on Peter Wyden’s book and produced in 1989 by Aaron Spelling, presented many sides of the story. It showed that Truman failed to explore alternatives to using the bomb, such as adjusting our demand for unconditional surrender or waiting for the Soviet entry into the war in August, 1945, to shock the Japanese into surrender. Like “Fat Man and Little Boy,” the Roland Joffe film of the same period, “Day One” considered Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, the hidden force behind Truman’s decision. Yet as a film, “Day One” was so pedestrian that it failed to have much impact.

In 1990, Hiroshima at ground zero came to television. The creators of “Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes” borrowed John Hersey’s device of telling the story through the eyes of several survivors, including a Jesuit priest and an American prisoner of war. But once again, the results were melodramatic, muddled and dull. One of the producers insisted that the film was not interested in historical or moral issues but was merely “an uplifting statement about the survival of the human spirit.”

Obviously, there is something about the ambiguity and moral tragedy of this subject--and the political controversy surrounding it--that discourages a bold or imaginative rendering.

Now comes Showtime’s “Hiroshima,” perhaps the most ambitious and creative of all the TV films. At three hours, this Canadian-Japanese co-production can cover a lot of ground. It treats the subject (and potential viewers) with respect, focusing on high-level intrigue with few trivial digressions. And like the other recent movies about this subject, it raises questions about the wisdom of Truman’s decision.

Among other things, we learn a little about Japanese peace feelers, pre-Hiroshima--it will probably be news to most viewers that there was a peace faction in Japan--and we hear American leaders cite many reasons, besides saving lives, for using the bomb, such as justifying its $2-billion price and impressing the Soviets.

Unfortunately, “Hiroshima” (like all previous films on this subject) is deeply flawed. Doubts expressed early in the film eventually give way to the orthodox view--like a door swinging open and then quietly closing. Material supporting all sides in the debate over Truman’s decision is included, but the emphasis is likely to draw most viewers only in the direction of supporting the use of the bomb.

The film, in other words, fails to give adequate weight to the other options. It does not express clearly that the choice decision-makers faced in late July, 1945, was not “drop the bomb or invade Japan,” but “drop the bomb or negotiate.” The repeated efforts by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and others to modify U.S. demands for unconditional surrender, allowing Japan to keep its emperor, get little attention until after the bomb is dropped.

And missing almost entirely is the importance of the Soviet entry into the war, which had long been scheduled for August and in fact occurred two days after the first atomic bomb fell. A viewer would never know from “Hiroshima” that many scholars believe that the Soviet declaration of war had as much to do with the Japanese surrender as the atomic bomb did.

Under the direction of Roger Spottiswoode, Truman (played by Kenneth Welsh) is portrayed as an unconvincing mixture of hayseed naivete and wise reflection. He deeply ponders his decision and is credited with a reluctance to use the bomb--which by all accounts is a complete falsehood. The film includes several fabrications in this area. “Hiroshima’s” Truman, for example, points out that the use of the bomb would be a possible war crime covered by the Geneva Convention; in fact, he expressed no such qualms and rushed to use the bomb without pausing to consider viable alternatives.

“Hiroshima” is further skewed by the relative lack of attention to the victims of the bombing. Footage of badly injured Japanese, while graphic, appears for only about half a minute. This severely understates the human costs of Truman’s decision. And, crucially, “Hiroshima” makes no mention of radiation diseases and other delayed effects of the bomb that caused death and suffering to extend well beyond the September, 1945, end point of the film.

The film does capture some of the tragedy on the ground, but it is pictured as a tragedy born of necessity. This is manifest particularly in regard to the Nagasaki bombing, which the film (ignoring the consensus of historians) indicates was surely needed as a knockout blow.

In the end, the Showtime film fits the decades-long pattern of Hiroshima on television, which in turn reflects all too well the overall American reaction. Americans seek an increasing awareness of what really happened in August, 1945, but too often we retreat, out of discomfort, to the official story. This means that the Hiroshima raw nerve will remain for another generation of bolder filmmakers and other Americans to confront.

* “Hiroshima” airs next Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime.