Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Ralph Hutchison

  • Did Hiroshima Awaken the President?

    This article was originally published by the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

    There was a lot of talk leading up to President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, much of it speculating on what he would or should or would not or should not say. I was interviewed by print and television reporters, and that seemed to be the first question out of the box, usually in the context of “Apologize for the bomb?” My answer to that was easy. Having been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and having hosted hibakusha— survivors of the bombings—half a dozen times or more, I quickly noted that I never heard any request for an apology. For those who were there, and who lived to reflect on that horrific moment, it was never about the past, except insofar as the past informs the present and future. Their request was not for regret, but for commitment; they asked that we join them in making “Never again!” a guarantee by abolishing nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

    Now the Presidential visit is history. He made a pretty good speech, though Senator Edward Markey’s op-ed about preaching temperance from a barstool warrants even more attention.

    The one thing I feel certain of is that the speech Obama delivered in Hiroshima is among the least important things he did there. At least I hope that is so. If I had been asked to advise the president on his priorities, my top three would have been: Look, Listen, and Feel.

    Look. The visual power of Hiroshima, the physical presence of the dome, the before and after diorama and artifacts in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the charred schoolgirl’s lunch tin with carbonized rice cannot be fully realized from pictures or descriptions. Like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, one can only completely comprehend the scope in person. In the case of Hiroshima, the scene is the opposite of grandeur. But it should be faced.

    Listen. The stories of the hibakusha, told on video and in person, are compelling. They remind everyone who listens that the atomic bomb was not simply an amazing technological achievement or a powerful military weapon; it was a monstrous destroyer of lives and histories and families and pets and culture and hope. It’s use ushered in the nuclear age, when humankind not only stepped into a new technological era, but into a new moral era. Now we are inescapably aware of what we are capable of, and with that knowledge comes a moral imperative—one we have yet to fully, appropriately, and morally meet.

    Feel. The enormity of Hiroshima and the devastating power of the stories can be numbing. Facing Hiroshima means facing something deeply dark in our souls—not just our national soul, but our human souls. I want the weight of Hiroshima to bear down on President Obama; I want him to feel it when he gets back to Washington, DC and sits down to look at his daughters across the breakfast table. I want, at least one morning, for him to notice his watch 8:15, and to think, “It was just this time of day…”

    I am hopeful that the President has done all of these things. He did stand in Hiroshima and acknowledge that he saw it firsthand. He listened. He met with hibakusha, two gentlemen, and spoke privately with them, hugged one of them. And if the catch in his voice when he spoke of children was any indication, he felt the truth of the Bomb. I believe he will look at Sasha and Malia and see in their eyes the hope of the future.

    And it is what he does then, not what he did in Hiroshima, that will be the most important thing.

    If he himself experiences the moral awakening he called for in Hiroshima, he can set in motion the eventual disarmament he so fondly speaks of. He can declare it is not okay anymore to say “maybe not in my lifetime.” He can announce he is abandoning plans for a new $15 billion thermonuclear bomb manufacturing plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (yes, it’s true—$3 billion has already been spent on the design). He can tell the weaponeers at Lawrence Livermore Lab to stop working on a new warhead for the Long Range Stand-Off cruise missile, and he can tell the pentagon to shut down the LSRO program.

    These first steps would be the first significant actions of this president toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Everything else has been to “reduce the danger,” or to discourage nuclear proliferation, all the while embracing nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of defense policy for the US. The new bomb plant, and the ongoing upgrades and modifications of US warheads, have launched a new global nuclear arms race. Undoing that will take action, not words.

    Taking these bold steps would send a powerful message to the rest of the world, one we promised more than 40 years ago in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Simply put: we are not just talking about a world free of nuclear weapons, not just determined to have one some day—we are going there now. Other nations would follow, because nuclear weapons are as irrational to them as they are to us.

    Who would oppose the President? Some right-wing hawks, no doubt, who think the best foreign policy for the United States is to bully the world into doing things our way. But not all of them—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, William Perry, almost every living former National Security Adviser, hundreds of Generals and Admirals around the globe, including the former head of NATO’s Strategic Forces, General Lee Butler, and General James “Hoss” Cartwright, four star Marine general who served as Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Charles Horner, four star Air Force general. All of these men have called for the United States to take concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament. They are not Pollyannas. They understand the risks and rewards of nuclear weapons more than most people on the planet; their careers have required them to contemplate policy and use in practice, and not just in theory.

    So, what I want from my President now is this: take some time to let Hiroshima sink in. And then use your new knowledge as the platform from which you step out to walk the walk, leading us toward a world free of nuclear weapons, the world of Never Again.

  • Comments on the Manhattan Project National Historical Park

    Comments of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance on the
    Manhattan Project National Historical Park
    Oak Ridge, Tennessee
    1 February 2016

    The job of a National Historical Park is not only to preserve and commemorate history, but to explain it to future generations. In some cases, the history being preserved and interpreted reflects moments of our nation at its best— as in the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in New York and its story of the long struggle for women’s suffrage.

    Other National Historical Parks reflect darker moments in our history—the Kalaupapa National Historical Park in Hawaii tells the story of the physical and cultural isolation of residents suffering from Hansen’s Disease, then called leprosy, who were removed from their families and forcibly relocated and imprisoned on the peninsula. It is a complicated and nuanced story that must be set in the historical context to be understood. Parts of the story sound cruel and barbaric; other parts sound tragic but, in the context of medical understanding in that time, necessary. Even the patients themselves would tell complicated stories—for some the isolation was a refuge.

    The Manhattan Project National Historical Park project also presents complicated challenges to the interpreter. On the one hand, it commemorates a truly stunning achievement of human endeavor—scientific and technical, yes, but also engineering and building, social and cultural. It is rooted, at least in part, in a war effort that almost the entire culture embraced as noble. It’s a story of sacrifice and determination mostly by people who had no idea what they were engaged in.

    But like most history that warrants preservation, it is also a story that transcends the time and place in which it took place. The Manhattan Project changed the world; the creation of the world’s first atomic weapon which was then used to create incomprehensible human suffering, and which led to the devotion of many trillions of dollars to an arms race which is still with us today, reverberating in headlines daily as other nations consider or embark on their own quest to do what we have done.

    The Oak Ridge part of this story has been told for decades at the American Museum of Science and Energy. For the most part, the exhibit there limited the story of Oak Ridge to the creation of the first atomic bomb and it was told in the context of the great secret that enveloped the city and the workers. In the last ten years, the exhibit has expanded somewhat to acknowledge the effects of the bomb once used, and the impact it has had on the entire world.

    But the story of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge is even more complicated than that—there was more than one secret. Like the Kalaupapa story, there is a side wrapped up in that history that is not so easy to tell. If we are to learn what it means for humans to wrest power from nature in ways that inform us not only about the past but also cast a light into the future, we have to tell the whole story.

    I have talked over the years with workers from those first years of Oak Ridge. Decades later, their feelings about their work ran the gamut from pride in their achievement to deep sadness and guilt about the results of their labor. I remember one woman telling me about riding the bus home from work at Y12 to LaFollette the day the news of Hiroshima broke—amid the cheering and celebration of her fellow commuters, she said, she sat with her head pressed against the window of the bus thinking, “I don’t belong here.”

    But the reason she and I were talking was not because of the bomb, not directly. It was because her life had been profoundly affected by a long series of health problems that, some twenty-five years later, a doctor in Wisconsin who knew nothing of her work history identified as due to radiation exposure.

    Most of the workers in Oak Ridge were unaware of the nature of great technical secret they were working on. They were also unaware that they were at risk as they worked. For some, the risk was part of a sacrifice they would have borne willingly if informed; for others, not so much. But in any case, they were not informed; they were not warned; protections were scarce if there were any at all. Even the scientists who knew the technical secret did not understand all the risks in those days before health physics. My friend recalled a day when she was taken from her station, her clothes confiscated, she was showered repeatedly and sent home; her urine was monitored for several days, and she was given no explanation, no information, no additional monitoring, no follow-up care. Asking questions, of course, was forbidden in the secret city.

    The Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge kept other secrets. Environmental protection was not high on anyone’s list, really, in the 1940s, and certainly it took a backseat to the effort to win the war. And we were generally ignorant about the impact of contaminants on the environment. It was only later, as people learned more, that decisions were made to keep secrets—the environmental impacts of the Manhattan Project activities—the full effects of radiation releases due to slug ruptures at the air-cooled Graphite reactor—were secret even from the people who knew about them.

    But it happened. It is part of the Manhattan Project story. Some of the radionuclides still rest in the sediments of the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers. A health physicist once told me that a person with a sensitive enough Geiger country could measure Oak Ridge in the Mississippi delta.

    So—tell the history, all of it. The history of the moment as well as its impact on the world we live in today. Those who come to the Manhattan Project National Historical Park should be informed enough to make their own judgments about the accomplishments and the costs of the project, to decide for themselves what to celebrate and what to mourn.