Setsuko Thurlow at the 2015 NAPF Evening for Peace.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has entered into force! This truly marks the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons! When I learned that we reached our 50th ratification, I was not able to stand. I remained in my chair and put my head in my hands and I cried tears of joy. I have committed my life to the abolition of nuclear weapons. I have nothing but gratitude for all who have worked for the success of our treaty. I have a powerful feeling of solidarity with tens of thousands of people across the world. We have made it to this point.
As I sat in my chair, I found myself speaking with the spirits of hundreds of thousands of people who lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was immediately in conversation with these beloved souls — my sister, my nephew Eiji, other dear family members, my classmates, all the children and innocent people who perished. I was reporting to the dead, sharing this good news first with them, because they paid the ultimate price with their precious lives. Like many survivors, I made a vow that their deaths would not be in vain and to warn the world about the danger of nuclear weapons, to make sure that no one else suffers as we have suffered. I made a vow to work for nuclear disarmament until my last breath. And now we have reached a milestone in our decades’ long struggle — the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will become international law!
I have a tremendous sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, a sense of satisfaction and gratitude. I know other survivors share these emotions — whether we are survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; or test survivors from South Pacific island nations, Kazakhstan, Australia and Algeria; or survivors from uranium mining in Canada, the United States or the Congo. All those who have been victimized by the barbaric behavior of nine nations who continue to develop more horrendous weapons, prepared to repeat nuclear massacres far more devastating than the atomic bomb that leveled my hometown, Hiroshima. For the victims and survivors, this initial success with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is tremendously uplifting. I celebrate this moment with my brothers and sisters across the world who have been victimized, and still raise their voices, and still survive.
We also celebrate with those people across the world who recognize the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons, instruments of radioactive violence and omnicide that have kept the entire world hostage for all these 75 years. We celebrate with the global community of anti-nuclear activists who have come together and have worked for the success of this treaty. I am especially grateful to my dear colleagues in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICAN laid the groundwork to collaborate across the divide of diplomacy and activism, to achieve something of profound and lasting importance.
I also want to acknowledge how moved I am that in the preamble to the treaty, hibakusha are identified by name. This is the first time in international law that we have been so recognized. We share this recognition with other hibakusha across the world, those who have suffered radioactive harm from nuclear testing, from uranium mining, from secret experimentation. And furthermore, the treaty recognizes that indigenous people have been disproportionately affected by the production of nuclear weapons. We in hibakusha and indigenous communities uniquely understand that not only the use of nuclear weapons in war but also the testing and production of nuclear weapons causes death and unspeakable suffering through invisible radioactive contamination. And here the treaty recognizes that women and girls are more susceptible to the effects of radiation — that there are gendered implications to radioactive violence.
I am moved to acknowledge the positive obligations of the treaty as well — such as victims assistance and environmental remediation which will be a hallmark for taking responsibility for the inter-generational effects of radiation. It is vitally important that we all understand that the nuclear age will continue far beyond the nuclear weapon age. We will need to contain and care for radioactive materials into the far future.
But for now, in this joyous present moment, we can rejoice in making our first move. I cannot truly express with words my feelings of overwhelming gratitude. How we have struggled in spite of being confronted by indifference and ignorance! How we have struggled in spite of being ridiculed by nuclear armed and nuclear dependent states! In spite of that and more, we have made it to this point — nuclear weapons are now illegal under international law!
Nuclear abolitionists everywhere can be incredibly encouraged and empowered by this new legal status. Now, with greater intensity and purpose, we will push forward. While this is a time to celebrate, it is not a time for us to relax. The world is ever more dangerous. Yes, we have made it to this point, but we have a long path to cover until we reach our goal of the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
It is unlikely that I will see that day. It is unlikely that any atomic bomb survivor with their own lived memories will bear witness on that day but with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, we can be certain that that beautiful day will dawn. And on that day, we hibakusha, test survivors, indigenous people and others, victim to the inter-generational cruelty of radioactive poison, will be remembered and someone alive at present will report to us. Because of our work, our solidarity, our love for this world, we will be a part of a much greater celebration in spirit, when nuclear disarmament will be achieved as part of a greater movement that encompasses peace, justice, equality and compassion for all.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has opened a new door, wide. Passing through it we begin a new chapter in our struggle — with a mighty embrace of gratitude from those we have lost, and a heartfelt welcome from those who are yet to come. The beginning of the end of nuclear weapons has arrived! Let us step through the doorway now!
Setsuko Thurlow is a survivor of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and a member of the NAPF Advisory Council.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2017.
Your Majesties,
Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
My fellow campaigners, here and throughout the world,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great privilege to accept this award, together with Beatrice, on behalf of all the remarkable human beings who form the ICAN movement. You each give me such tremendous hope that we can – and will – bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.
I speak as a member of the family of hibakusha – those of us who, by some miraculous chance, survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For more than seven decades, we have worked for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
We have stood in solidarity with those harmed by the production and testing of these horrific weapons around the world. People from places with long-forgotten names, like Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga, Bikini. People whose lands and seas were irradiated, whose bodies were experimented upon, whose cultures were forever disrupted.
We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.
Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.
I was just 13 years old when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, on my city Hiroshima. I still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15, I saw a blinding bluish-white flash from the window. I remember having the sensation of floating in the air.
As I regained consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself pinned by the collapsed building. I began to hear my classmates’ faint cries: “Mother, help me. God, help me.”
Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can.” As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death alive. I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation.
Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air.
Thus, with one bomb my beloved city was obliterated. Most of its residents were civilians who were incinerated, vaporized, carbonized – among them, members of my own family and 351 of my schoolmates.
In the weeks, months and years that followed, many thousands more would die, often in random and mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of radiation. Still to this day, radiation is killing survivors.
Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew, Eiji – his little body transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony.
To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons. Every second of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everyone we love and everything we hold dear. We must not tolerate this insanity any longer.
Through our agony and the sheer struggle to survive – and to rebuild our lives from the ashes – we hibakusha became convinced that we must warn the world about these apocalyptic weapons. Time and again, we shared our testimonies.
But still some refused to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities – as war crimes. They accepted the propaganda that these were “good bombs” that had ended a “just war”. It was this myth that led to the disastrous nuclear arms race – a race that continues to this day.
Nine nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations. The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.
On the seventh of July this year, I was overwhelmed with joy when a great majority of the world’s nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having witnessed humanity at its worst, I witnessed, that day, humanity at its best. We hibakusha had been waiting for the ban for seventy-two years. Let this be the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.
All responsible leaders will sign this treaty. And history will judge harshly those who reject it. No longer shall their abstract theories mask the genocidal reality of their practices. No longer shall “deterrence” be viewed as anything but a deterrent to disarmament. No longer shall we live under a mushroom cloud of fear.
To the officials of nuclear-armed nations – and to their accomplices under the so-called “nuclear umbrella” – I say this: Listen to our testimony. Heed our warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil.
To every president and prime minister of every nation of the world, I beseech you: Join this treaty; forever eradicate the threat of nuclear annihilation.
When I was a 13-year-old girl, trapped in the smouldering rubble, I kept pushing. I kept moving toward the light. And I survived. Our light now is the ban treaty. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it.”
Tonight, as we march through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame, let us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror. No matter what obstacles we face, we will keep moving and keep pushing and keep sharing this light with others. This is our passion and commitment for our one precious world to survive.
This letter, by Hiroshima survivor and NAPF Advisory Council member Setsuko Thurlow, was delivered to President Obama via Ben Rhodes on June 6, 2016.
Dear President Obama,
Since your historic visit to Hiroshima in May, several people have been asking me to share my thoughts. What would I have said to you directly if we’d had an opportunity to sit down and speak face to face?
Setsuko Thurlow at the 2015 NAPF Evening for Peace.
The first thing that comes to mind that I would have shared with you is an image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji — transformed into a charred, blackened and swollen child who kept asking in a faint voice for water until he died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would be 75 years old this year. This idea shocks me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a 4-year-old child who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. And it is this death of innocents that has been the driving force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. Eiji’s image is burnt into my retina.
Many survivors have been passing in recent years with their dreams of nuclear abolition unfulfilled. Their motto was, “abolition in our lifetime”. The reality of our twilight years intensifies our sense of urgency, now met with stronger commitment. When you say: “it may not happen in my lifetime”, this gives us enormous grief.
I was not in Hiroshima when you visited, but I understand it was packed with media, and I could tell that of course your visit was carefully controlled and choreographed: who sat where; who were invited to approach you; the children and hibakusha who were hand picked by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. But still you came. Your speech was heartfelt but it avoided the issue. I know from my personal experience as hellish as all war is nothing can be equivalent to nuclear violence.
You said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.” To me your words echoed those of former German President Richard von Weizeker’s inspiring speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Germany’s surrender. Many Japanese people were deeply inspired by the manner in which he confronted the past and dealt with wartime atrocities with integrity, when he said, “We Germans must look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion… There can be no reconciliation without remembrance.”
The Japanese Government should emulate this profound sentiment in confronting the past and dealing with our as yet unresolved relationships with neighboring countries, particularly Korea and China. Tragically, the current Abe Administration is seeking to expand Japan’s military role in the region and forsake our much-cherished Peace Constitution.
And in the United States, as you are no doubt aware, an unfortunate remembrance has been underway. The National Park Service and the Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Unlike the memorials at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the United States seeks to preserve the history of the once top-secret sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, as a sort of celebration of that technological ‘achievement’. Among the first so-called ‘successes’ of this endeavor was creating hell on earth in my beloved Hiroshima.
Is this how we should ensure that the “memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade”?
Setsuko Thurlow’s family in 1937.
As a 13-year-old schoolgirl, I witnessed my city of Hiroshima blinded by the flash, flattened by the hurricane-like blast, burned in the heat of 4000 degrees Celsius and contaminated by the radiation of one atomic bomb. A bright summer morning turned to dark twilight with smoke and dust rising in the mushroom cloud, dead and injured covering the ground, begging desperately for water and receiving no medical care at all. The spreading firestorm and the foul stench of burnt flesh filled the air.
Miraculously, I was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building, about 1.8 kilometers from Ground Zero. Most of my classmates in the same room were burned alive. I can still hear their voices calling their mothers and God for help. As I escaped with two other surviving girls, we saw a procession of ghostly figures slowly shuffling from the centre of the city. Grotesquely wounded people, whose clothes were tattered, or who were made naked by the blast. They were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing, flesh and skin hanging from their bones, some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands, and some with their stomachs burst open, with their intestines hanging out.
Through months and years of struggle for survival, rebuilding lives out of the ashes, we survivors, or ‘hibakusha’, became convinced that no human being should ever have to repeat our experience of the inhumane, immoral, and cruel atomic bombing. And it is our mission, to warn the world about the reality of the nuclear threat; and to help people understand the illegality and ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. We believe that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.
And still today, to paraphrase President Kennedy, the sword of Damocles dangles evermore perilously. Most experts agree that nuclear weapons are more dangerous now than at any point in our history due to a wide variety of risks including: geopolitical saber rattling, human error, computer failure, complex systems failure, increasing radioactive contamination in the environment and its toll on public and environmental health, as well as the global famine and climate chaos that would ensue should a limited use of nuclear weapons occur by accident or design.
Thus, we have a moral imperative to abolish nuclear arsenals, in order to ensure a safe and just world for future generations. As you said in Hiroshima, “we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”
Why then, with all due respect to you Mr. President, is the US government boycotting the United Nations disarmament negotiations born of the Humanitarian Initiative, the most significant advance for nuclear disarmament in a generation?
Within the last five years, I have witnessed the rapid development of a global movement involving states without nuclear weapons and NGOs working together to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. This movement has shown beyond all doubt that nuclear weapons are first and foremost a grave humanitarian problem, and that the terrible risks of these weapons cast all techno-military considerations into irrelevance. Following three International Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons – inexcusably boycotted by your administration – 127 nations have joined the Humanitarian Pledge to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. These nations are calling on Nuclear Weapon States and those who stand with them, to begin a process for nuclear disarmament.
To repeat the words of Richard von Weizeker: “We must look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion.” The truth is, we all live with the daily threat of nuclear weapons. In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes, every second of every day, nuclear weapons, thousands on high alert, are poised for deployment threatening everyone we love and everything we hold dear.
Last month in Japan you poignantly said: “That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago.”
I beg you to reframe this profound sentiment to understand that the people we love, our smiling children, the embrace of loved ones, these precious moments and precious people are all under threat of annihilation because of the existence of nuclear weapons, and the policy of deterrence that you currently authorize and provide for nations under the US nuclear umbrella, including my home country Japan. This perversion, in its truest sense, means that the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack in war now seeks its own protection through far more diabolical hydrogen bombs. And you Mr. Obama, the only sitting US President to visit Hiroshima, came accompanied by a duty bound officer with the nuclear briefcase, should you need the codes to command a remote missileer to insert a floppy disc as a prelude to the end of life on earth.
If you truly wanted to hasten our “own moral awakening” through making nuclear disarmament a reality, here are three immediate steps:
Stop the U.S. boycott of international nuclear disarmament meetings and join the 127 countries that have endorsed the Humanitarian Pledge to create a new legal instrument and new norms for a nuclear weapons ban treaty as a first step in their elimination and prohibition.
Stop spending money to modernize the US nuclear arsenal, a staggering $1 trillion over the next three decades, and use this money to meet human needs and protect our environment.
Take nuclear weapons off high alert and review the aging command and control systems that have been the subject of recent research exposing a culture of neglect and the alarming regularity of accidents involving nuclear weapons.
President Obama, you uniquely have the power to enact real change. This could be your legacy. To usher in an era of real disarmament where lifting the threat of nuclear war could ease all people to “go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child.”
This speech was delivered by Setsuko Thurlow in Toronto, Canada on August 6, 2016.
Setsuko Thurlow at the 2015 NAPF Evening for Peace.
Today is the 71st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The calendar never fails to bring me the special reminder each year of the unforgettable day, August 6, 1945, that changed my life and that of the entire world. As I attempt to ponder the meaning of my survival from that hell on Earth I remember Einstein’s words, “Splitting the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe”. Try to visualize his words! It is a chillingly frightening truth. His words have been ringing in our ears for the past 71 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with more intensity in recent years; as the world we live in is getting more dangerous with over 15,000 nuclear weapons, which are far more destructive than those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while the majority of the world’s people continue to live in denial, blissfully ignorant and complacent of the reality.
Having lived through such an unprecedented catastrophe, we survivors, Hibakusha, became convinced of our mission to warn the world about the reality of those indiscriminate, inhumane, and cruel nuclear weapons, and their utter unacceptability. Thus, we have been calling for the total abolition of such devices of mass murder. We believe that as long as nuclear weapons exist there is no guarantee of security.
It was because of this awe-inducing power of the atomic bombs that some enlightened leaders of the world, foreseeing the potential annihilation of civilization, speedily established the United Nations and called for stringent control on nuclear technologies to ensure that no one would ever use them for weapons again. The UN General Assembly’s first ever resolution tried to address “the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy”. The U.S. enjoyed a monopoly for testing and producing nuclear weapons until the USSR caught up in 1949, and other nuclear weapon nations followed soon after. As the arms race intensified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came into force in 1970 and in 1996 the International Court of Justice, the highest court of International Law, was requested to give an advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons and the legal obligations of the nuclear weapon states. Many of us here remember those days with occasional small “moral victories” we celebrated, but mostly fury and outrage for the lack of progress in the disarmament diplomacy.
In the past several years witnessing nuclear disarmament diplomacy at work in the United Nations and at international conferences has been a relatively new experience for me. I found it to be profoundly disturbing to see the lack of tangible progress in diplomatic negotiations in spite of the 46 years since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came into force. The nuclear weapon states are not genuinely committed to the treaty as demonstrated by their not having complied with their legal obligations under Article VI to work toward nuclear disarmament in good faith. They are acting as if it is their right to keep their nuclear weapons indefinitely, and are manipulating the negotiation process to suit their perceived national interest. This totally unacceptable nuclear status quo has been driving many exasperated non-nuclear weapon states and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to demand a legally binding instrument to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.
This condition was conducive to the birth of a rapidly growing global movement, the Humanitarian Initiative, involving 127 non-nuclear weapon states and over 440 non-governmental organizations in 98 countries and the United Nations and its agencies, working together to outlaw nuclear weapons. Over several years with three successful conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons hosted by the governments of Norway, Mexico and Austria, this movement refocused attention from the military doctrine of deterrence to the humanitarian dimension of nuclear weapons. The result has been a strong push for a legally binding treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
The Humanitarian Pledge was issued by the Austrian government at the conclusion of the Vienna conference in December 2014, committing Austria to “identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons”. This pledge has now been endorsed by 127 nations although unfortunately not by Canada. This reference to the “existing legal gap” is the reality that while chemical and biological weapons are banned, nuclear weapons, the most destructive of all weapons of mass destruction, have not yet been explicitly banned under international law.
In the many years of my work for nuclear disarmament I have never felt as hopeful and as encouraged as I do now. To witness how the Humanitarian Initiative movement has mobilized people around the world to overcome the resistance by the nuclear weapon states and to move towards prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. This year the United Nations established the Open Ended Working Group to “substantively address and make recommendations to the United Nations General Assembly about concrete, effective legal measures, legal provisions and norms” to attain and maintain a nuclear weapons free world. Now, the working group is in its final, crucial phase. A growing number of non-nuclear weapon states are expressing support for the immediate commencement of negotiations on a legally binding agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons, despite strong opposition from the nuclear weapon states and their allies. The General Assembly will vote on this report in October. We are on the verge of a breakthrough for a path for this most significant chance in our lifetime for nuclear disarmament. We must seize this opportunity.
Now, let me tell you an inspiring and empowering story about the recent successful campaign that our ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a global coalition of NGOs) colleagues in the Netherlands achieved. Frustrated by the Dutch government policy of supporting NATO policies a citizens’ initiative by PAX, ASN Bank and the Dutch Red Cross, made great efforts collecting 45,608 Dutch citizens’ signatures for a petition supporting a ban treaty and to calling for a parliamentary debate on nuclear weapons on April 28th of this year. The result was that a vast majority of their Parliament voted for a nuclear weapons ban, which the government was forced to accept. The public gallery was so crowded that another room was needed for the overflow of supporters. The news media extensively covered this huge success of citizens’ action. The intent of the motion was that the Netherlands should now be working actively to reach out to other NATO member states to build solidarity. I was gratified to play a small part of this campaign by speaking to the Members of Parliament via a recorded video statement. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Canadian people can follow in the footsteps of the Netherlands?
And now, where does our Canadian government stand in the fast developing international negotiations for a legally binding instrument for the prohibition of nuclear weapons? Regrettably, Canada presents itself as a subservient defender of the nuclear weapons superstar state south of the border, and its allies with their heavy reliance on the doctrine of deterrence.
For many of us working for nuclear disarmament we rejoiced the arrival of the Trudeau government too soon because this government seemed to have inherited the same retrograde nuclear policies from the previous government. Foreign Minister Stephane Dion’s letters to Canadian peace groups are full of retrograde ideas and leaves me chilled, and it feels as if we are on different planets. He is rigidly maintaining the nuclear status quo and has a seeming unwillingness to consider different perspectives of disarmament initiatives. Sadly, his opposition to the Humanitarian Initiative leaves Canada out of step with the majority of the world. His total lack of sense of urgency about the increasing risk of nuclear weapons can be seen in this quote from one of his letters:
“Canada has consistently promoted the notion that complete nuclear disarmament can only occur in an environment that guarantees security for all states.”
Is he waiting for an ideal, perfect time to initiate disarmament? Has there ever been any time as that in human history? Will there be in the future?
We must wake up the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the entire Parliament as our colleagues in the Netherlands have succeeded in doing. Otherwise, like Einstein says, this beautiful country of Canada, together with the rest of the world, will drift toward “unparalleled catastrophe”.
The Open Ended Working Group is winding up, with the final report being issued in Geneva this month. The momentum is growing. Let’s join the historic initiative for nuclear disarmament. Let’s seize this opportunity. This action of hope will be the best way to honour those annihilated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 71 years ago.
Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, received the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award on October 25, 2015.
Setsuko Thurlow at the 2015 NAPF Evening for Peace.
I am delighted to be here tonight, and meet all of you, working hard for a peaceful and just world free of nuclear weapons. I am honored and humbled to receive your Award tonight. I am truly grateful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Tonight I would like to share with you my personal testimony of surviving the atomic bombing as a child victim, and then living in North America advocating for the abolition of nuclear weapons. For the 70th anniversary of the bombings, it is appropriate to reflect upon and ponder the meaning of living in the nuclear age.
For most of my adult life, I have devoted my energy to disarmament education through sharing my experience of Hiroshima. It is always difficult for me to remember my painful childhood memories, and repeat that story over the years. However, I believe that it is important for me to provide a human face and voice in the complex and abstract discourse on nuclear weapons and help people to increase their awareness of the issue with empathy, sensitivity, and moral and ethical consideration.
That fateful day, August 6, 1945, as a 13-year-old school girl and a member of the Student Mobilization Program, I was at Army headquarters, 1.8 kilometers from ground zero. About 30 of us students were assigned to work as decoding assistants of secret messages. At 8:15 a.m., as Major Yanai was giving us a pep talk at the assembly, suddenly I saw in the window a blinding bluish-white flash and I remember having the sensation of floating in the air. As I regained consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself pinned by the collapsed building. I could not move. I knew I faced death. I began to hear my classmates’ faint cries, “Mother, help me,” “God, help me.” Then, suddenly I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying, “Don’t give up! Keep moving! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening. Crawl towards it. Get out as quickly as possible.” As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that same room were burned alive.
Outside, I looked around. Although it was morning, it was as dark as twilight because of the dust and smoke rising in the air. A soldier ordered me and two other surviving girls to escape to the nearby hills.
I saw streams of ghostly figures, slowly shuffling from the center of the city towards the nearby hills. They did not look like human beings; their hair stood straight up and they were naked and tattered, bleeding, burned, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing, flesh and skin hanging from their bones, some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands, and some with their stomachs burst open, with intestines hanging out. We students joined the ghostly procession, carefully stepping over the dead and injured. There was a deathly silence broken only by the moans of the injured and their pleas for water. The foul stench of burned skin filled the air.
We managed to escape to the foot of the hill where there was an army training ground, about the size of two football fields. It was covered with the dead and injured, who were desperately begging, often in faint whispers, “Water, water, please give me water.” But we had no containers to carry water. We went to a nearby stream to wash off the blood and dirt from our bodies. Then we tore off our blouses, soaked them with water and hurried back to hold them to the mouths of the injured, who desperately sucked in the moisture. We did not see any doctors or nurses all day. When darkness fell, we sat on the hillside and all night watched the entire city burn, numbed by the massive, grotesque scale of death and suffering we witnessed.
My father left town early that morning. When he saw the mushroom cloud rising above the city he hurried back to the devastated city. My mother was rescued from under our collapsed home, and was able to escape to her brother’s house outside the city. My sister and her four-year-old son were burned beyond recognition while crossing a bridge going to the doctor’s office in the center of the city. Several days later they both died in agony. An aunt and two cousins were found as skeletons. My sister-in-law is still missing.
We rejoiced in the survival of my uncle and aunt in the outskirts of the city, but several days later they began to have purple spots all over their bodies, which was a sign of radiation poisoning. According to my parents, who cared for them until their deaths, their internal organs seemed to be rotting and coming out as a thick, black liquid. Radiation, the unique characteristic of the atomic bombing, affected people in mysterious and random ways, with some dying instantly, and others weeks, months or years later by the delayed effects, and radiation is still killing survivors today, 70 years later.
While my own group was at the army headquarters, the majority of my school friends along with several thousand grade 7 and 8 students from all the city’s high schools were engaged in the task of clearing fire lanes in the center of Hiroshima. Most of them were killed instantly by the heat of 4,000 degrees Celsius. Many were simply carbonized or vaporized. My sister-in-law was there, supervising students, and never came back to her young children.
Thus, my beloved city of Hiroshima suddenly became desolation, with heaps of ash and rubble, skeletons and blackened corpses. Out of a population of 360,000, most were non-combatant women, children and elderly who became victims of the indiscriminate massacre of the atomic bombing. By the end of 1945 some 140,000 had perished. As of now, 260,000 have perished in Hiroshima alone from the effects of the blast, heat, and radiation. As I use the numbers of the dead, it pains me deeply. Reducing the dead to numbers trivializes their precious lives and negates their human dignity.
In the aftermath of the bombing, not only did people have to endure the physical devastation of near-starvation, homelessness, lack of medical care, rapidly spreading social discrimination against survivors as “contaminated ones by nuclear poison,” total lack of support by the Japanese government, the collapse of the authoritarian social system, and the sudden introduction to a democratic way of life, but also they suffered from psycho-social oppression by the Allied Forces Occupation Authority following Japan’s surrender.
Setsuko Thurlow’s family in 1937.
The Occupation Authorities, headed by General MacArthur, established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose sole purpose was to study the effects of radiation of the bombs on human bodies, and not to provide treatment to the injured. Needless to say, the survivors felt treated as guinea pigs, first as the targets of the indiscriminate atomic bombing, then as the subjects of the medical research. The Occupation Authorities also censored media coverage of survivors’ suffering and confiscated their diaries, correspondence, poems, films, slides, photographs, medical records, etc.– 32,000 items in all, which were shipped to the U.S.
The triumphant scientific and technological achievement in making the atomic bomb could freely be published, but the human suffering inflicted by the atomic bomb was not to be heard by the world. Following the massive trauma of the bombing, survivors had to repress themselves in silence and isolation, and were thus deprived of the normal process of grieving and mourning.
With the return of full sovereignty to Japan in 1952, a flood of medical, scientific, historical and political and legal information became available enabling scholars, researchers, and journalists to analyze survivors’ experiences in historical perspective and global context. They became aware that the main motive for the atomic bombings was political rather than military. They rejected the American myth that the use of the bombs was necessary to avoid a costly invasion of Japan to save lives. This argument was refuted for the following reasons:
President Truman and several of his advisors knew that the Japanese military organization had practically ceased to function;
The Japanese government had made initial overtures for a negotiated surrender;
The unclarified status of the Emperor in an unconditional surrender was the main stumbling block for the Japanese;
The U.S. desire to position itself as the dominant power in East Asia in the post-war period;
The planned invasion of Japan (Operation Olympic) was not scheduled until November 1st, almost three months after the actual bombings. Why the rush?
The U.S. attempt to use the bombs before the U.S.S.R.’s promised entry into the war against the Japanese Army in Manchuria three months after the German surrender, and to claim the territorial rewards.
Also, the U.S. interest in testing two different nuclear weapons, uranium and plutonium, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, was further reason Hiroshima had been purposely left intact so that the impact of the detonation could be measured more accurately. With the understanding of the historical perspective, the survivors saw themselves as pawns in the opening moves of the Cold War rather than as sacrifices on the altar of peace.
On the cenotaph in the Peace Park in Hiroshima is an inscription that reads, “Rest in peace; the error will not be repeated.” What error and whose error were purposely left ambiguous. Although some wanted to point an accusing finger at the U.S., people came to see the issue on a higher philosophical plane as a universal need for nothing less than a cultural transformation away from our obsession with violence and war. This enlightened view did not ignore, however, the fact that the use of weapons of mass destruction against non-combatants was a crime against humanity, and a violation of international law.
Through months and years of struggle for survival, rebuilding lives out of the ashes, we Hibakusha survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became convinced that no human being should ever have to repeat our experience of the inhumanity, illegality, immorality, and cruelty of atomic bombing, and that our mission was to warn the world about the threat of this ultimate evil. We believe that, “Humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist indefinitely,” and it is our moral imperative to abolish nuclear weapons in order to secure a safe, clean, and just world for future generations. With this conviction we have been speaking out around the world for the past several decades for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
In the summer of 1954, after my graduation from university, I travelled to the U.S. to attend college on a scholarship. At a press interview I was asked to elaborate on and give my opinion regarding the unprecedented birth of a massive anti-nuclear movement in Japan. The interviewer was referring to the U.S. testing of the largest hydrogen bomb, up to that time, at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, which caused the Islanders severe public health problems and environmental damage. In addition, all members of the crew of a nearby Japanese fishing boat were covered by radiation fallout, “ash of death,” and became seriously ill. One fisherman died. Suddenly, Japanese realized that the U.S. had no regret or remorse about the massive consequential suffering of nuclear weapon victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now of the Marshall Islands, for the purpose of testing, production, and the potential future use of nuclear weapons. Almost overnight this anti-nuclear movement became nationwide, with citizens’ groups collecting 20 million signatures, and pushing for the passage of a resolution for the abolition of nuclear weapons at all levels of government. My response to the interviewer was frank and critical. I strongly called for the ending of the U.S. nuclear testing. As a result of my remarks I began to receive unsigned hate letters. This was my introduction to the United States.
I was deeply disturbed by the way many Americans uncritically and blindly followed the government line justifying the atomic bombings. It was a chilling reminder for me of the wartime behavior of Japanese in unthinkingly swallowing government propaganda and brainwashing. The hostile reaction I received forced me to do some soul-searching. It was a temptation to quit and remain silent, but I came out of this traumatic experience with a stronger commitment to keep speaking out against the indiscriminate massacre of civilians with new types of mass killing devices.
During this lonely time, I discovered the writings of some U.S. scholars with profound analyses of the issue. Such work inspired and supported me. One of these thinkers was Richard Falk, Professor of International Law at Princeton University, who I understand is now working with you in this organization, who said to this effect:
The bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were viewed as contributions to the ending of a popular and just war. Therefore they have never been appraised in the necessary way as atrocities. They have never been understood as they certainly would have been understood had Hiroshima and Nagasaki been located [in an Allied country]. Somehow we have got to create that awareness, so that Hiroshima is understood to have been on the same level of depravity, and in many ways far more dangerous to us as a species and as a civilization than was even Auschwitz.
The failure to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities, the regarding of those two bombs as “good bombs” that contributed to winning and ending a just war, helped the American consciousness to accept the subsequent development of nuclear weapons, thus linking the justification of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the disastrous nuclear arms race and Cold War.
Living in North America as a Hiroshima survivor advocating for the abolition of nuclear weapons has given me many challenges as well as rewarding opportunities. In the 1950s and even in the 1970s, I often felt like a lone voice in the wilderness facing peoples’ indifference, denial, justification, and even open hostility. An example of this hostility was a bomb scare at the Hiroshima–Nagasaki photographic exhibition, which was organized at the National Gallery of Art, causing the evacuation of the entire building. But there were also times when I felt euphoric, for example in 1982 when one million people from all over the world marched in downtown New York to Central Park demanding nuclear disarmament! After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, people went back to sleepwalking with the dream that the nuclear arms race was no longer threatening the world.
Unfortunately, nuclear weapons are more dangerous today than at any time during the brief history of the nuclear age, due to a wide variety of risks including: proliferation (with some 16,000 nuclear bombs possessed by 9 nations) and modernization (with $1 trillion planned by the U.S. alone over the next three decades); human error; computer failure; complex systems failure; radioactive contamination already in the environment and its toll on public and environmental health; as well as the global famine and climate chaos that would ensue should a limited use of nuclear weapons occur by accident or design. There is also the danger of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.
On top of the increasing risks of nuclear weapons use, it is profoundly disturbing to see the lack of tangible progress in diplomatic negotiations in spite of the fact that it has been 45 years since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was introduced. The nuclear weapon states are not genuinely committed to the treaty as demonstrated by their not having complied with their legal obligation under Article VI to work toward nuclear disarmament in good faith. They are acting as if it is their right to keep their nuclear weapons indefinitely, and are manipulating the negotiation process to suit their perceived national interests. This unacceptable nuclear status quo has been driving many impatient non-nuclear weapons states and NGOs to negotiate a legally binding tool to achieve the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.
Setsuko Thurlow speaking at the ICAN Civil Society Forum in December 2014.
Tonight I am delighted and most hopeful to witness the mounting momentum from a rapidly growing global movement, the Humanitarian Initiative, involving 121 non-nuclear weapon states and the NGOs working together to outlaw nuclear weapons. In the past two years, Norway, Mexico, and Austria have hosted International Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and, together with UN agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), have been reframing the narrative away from the abstract military doctrine of security and deterrence toward the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, with the result being a strong push for a Ban Treaty. The Humanitarian Pledge, introduced by Austria, “to identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” is now supported by 121 countries. These developments are breathtakingly exciting and empowering for all of us campaigners around the world.
At this point I would like to take a few minutes to show you a yellow banner which my alma mater in Hiroshima made for me. This is a list of 351 names of my schoolmates and teachers who perished in the Hell on Earth that day. When I use large numbers to describe the massive scale of death and casualties of Hiroshima, peoples’ minds are numbed and they have difficulty relating to such abstract numbers meaningfully. As I show this to you I want you to feel and imagine that each name here represents an individual human being, a real person who was loved by someone and who was engaged in his or her life until 8:15 that morning.
I’m showing this especially to the many young people here tonight. Unlike me, who had a gift of an extra 70 years, your lives are just blossoming to embrace life’s gifts such as careers, marriages, families, and so forth. I want you to live your God-given lives as fully and happily as you can. But, to do so, we all must ensure that our common home, planet Earth, is here intact for you to enjoy. It is a shared responsibility to protect it and nurture it, not only for ourselves, but for future generations.
Before closing, I have one more thought I would like to share with you: President Obama, in his famous speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, said, “…As the only nuclear power to have used nuclear weapons, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead… So, today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
The world was overjoyed by his integrity, and the Nobel Peace Prize was presented to encourage him to do more for peace as the new president of the most powerful nation of the world.
He rightfully acknowledged the U.S. moral responsibility to lead the world’s most urgent task of abolishing nuclear weapons. As disappointed as we may be in his lack of accomplishment in this field, President Obama is the only U.S. President, while in office, who publicly acknowledged America’s responsibility of using the first nuclear weapons in history. If he has the political will and enormous courage, he can still achieve more towards a nuclear weapons-free world during his remaining year at the White House. But not without public pressure. Study the issue, do critical thinking, and urgently communicate your thoughts and feelings with your families, friends, neighbors, political representatives, and President Obama. That’s the citizen’s responsibility in a democratic nation.
To learn more about the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Evening for Peace, click here.
This article was originally published by the Huffington Post.
As the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, several people have been asking me to share my thoughts about those days in 1945, when our world changed forever. The first thing that comes to mind is an image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji — transformed into a charred, blackened and swollen child who kept asking in a faint voice for water until he died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would be 74 years old this year. This idea shocks me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a 4-year-old child who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. And it is this death of innocents that has been the driving force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. Eiji’s image is burnt into my retina.
In June I had the opportunity to visit Berlin and Potsdam to meet German citizens to talk about my experience in Hiroshima. Germans and Japanese experienced a similar historical trauma as aggressor-states in World War II. But there has been a decisively different way that the Japanese and German governments are dealing with their wartime responsibilities.
Many Japanese people were deeply inspired by the manner in which the German government confronted the past and dealt with wartime atrocities with integrity. Former President Richard von Weizeker’s inspiring speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Germany’s surrender touched the conscience of the world, and earned our profound respect when he said “We Germans must look truth straight in the eye — without embellishment and without distortion… There can be no reconciliation without remembrance.”
The Japanese government should emulate this profound sentiment in confronting the past and dealing with our as yet unresolved relationships with neighboring countries, particularly Korea and China. Tragically, the current Abe administration is seeking to expand Japan’s military role in the region and forsake our much-cherished Peace Constitution.
And in the United States, a repugnant remembrance is soon to be unveiled. The National Park Service and the Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Unlike the memorials at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the United States seeks to preserve the history of the once top-secret sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, where international scientists developed the world’s first nuclear bomb, as a sort of celebration of that technological ‘achievement’. Among the first so-called ‘successes’ of this endeavor was creating hell on earth in my beloved Hiroshima.
As a 13-year-old schoolgirl, I witnessed my city of Hiroshima blinded by the flash, flattened by the hurricane-like blast, burned in the heat of 4000 degrees Celsius and contaminated by the radiation of one atomic bomb.
Miraculously, I was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building, about 1.8 kilometers from Ground Zero. Most of my classmates in the same room were burned alive. I can still hear their voices calling their mothers and God for help. As I escaped with two other surviving girls, we saw a procession of ghostly figures slowly shuffling from the centre of the city. Grotesquely wounded people, whose clothes were tattered, or who were made naked by the blast. They were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing, flesh and skin hanging from their bones, some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands, and some with their stomachs burst open, with their intestines hanging out.
Within that single flash of light, my beloved Hiroshima became a place of desolation, with heaps of skeletons and blackened corpses everywhere. Of a population of 360,000 — largely non-combatant women, children and elderly — most became victims of the indiscriminate massacre of the atomic bombing. As of now, over 250,000 victims have perished in Hiroshima from the effects of the blast, heat and radiation. 70 years later, people are still dying from the delayed effects of one atomic bomb, considered crude by today’s standard for mass destruction.
Most experts agree that nuclear weapons are more dangerous now than at any point in our history due to a wide variety of risks including: geopolitical saber rattling, human error, computer failure, complex systems failure, increasing radioactive contamination in the environment and its toll on public and environmental health, as well as the global famine and climate chaos that would ensue should a limited use of nuclear weapons occur by accident or design. Yet few people truly grasp the meaning of living in the nuclear age.
This is why I have been overjoyed at witnessing the recent development of a global movement involving Non Nuclear Weapon States and NGOs working together to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. This movement has been reframing the problem of nuclear weapons from deterrence credibility and techno-military issues to the issue of humanitarian consequences. The result is a strong push for a nuclear Ban Treaty to begin a process for nuclear disarmament. Norway, Mexico and Austria have collaborated with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the International Committee of the Red Cross to organize three successful International Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.
At the end of the most recent conference in Vienna last December, the Austrian government unveiled the “Austrian Pledge” to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. Now referred to as the Humanitarian Pledge, it is supported by 113 nations that are calling on Nuclear Weapon States and those who stand with them, to begin a process for nuclear disarmament.
To repeat the words of Richard von Weizeker: “We must look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion.” The truth is, we all live with the daily threat of nuclear weapons. In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes, every second of every day, nuclear weapons, thousands on high alert, are poised for deployment threatening everyone we love and everything we hold dear.
How much longer can we allow the nuclear weapon states to wield this threat to all life on earth? The time has come for action to establish a legally binding framework to ban nuclear weapons as a first step in their total abolition. I passionately urge everyone who loves this world to join the growing global movement. And let us make the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the appropriate milestone to achieve our goal: to abolish nuclear weapons, and safeguard the future of our one shared planet earth.
It is a great privilege to accept this award, together with Beatrice, on behalf of all the remarkable human beings who form the ICAN movement. You each give me such tremendous hope that we can – and will – bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.
As the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, several people have been asking me to share my thoughts about those days in 1945, when our world changed forever. The first thing that comes to mind is an image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji — transformed into a charred, blackened and swollen child who kept asking in a faint voice for water until he died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would be 74 years old this year. This idea shocks me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a 4-year-old child who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. And it is this death of innocents that has been the driving force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. Eiji’s image is burnt into my retina.