Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: atomic bombings

  • Overcoming the Obstacles to a Nuclear Weapons-Free World

    As we gather in this historic location to observe the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my first thoughts turn to the hibakusha. I pay my respect to these brave people who have suffered so much and who have taught the world. The stories of the hibakusha must never be lost. Future generations must understand the reality of nuclear weapons. They must continue to learn from these brave people who overcame Armageddon and chose the path of life. The hibakusha rejected retaliation and embraced reconciliation as their guiding force. That is a lesson for the ages.

    I also wish to pay my deepest respect to Mayor Akiba for his world-wide leadership in building Mayors for Peace into a vibrant organization in the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The 20/20 Vision Campaign, articulated so brilliantly by Mayor Akiba, has provided new hope for all those who desire to live in a nuclear weapons-free world. I congratulate the people of Hiroshima for having selected such an outstanding world figure to represent their interests. I pledge today the continuing support of the Middle Powers Initiative for Mayor Akiba and the Mayors for Peace campaign.

    * * *

    The framework for a nuclear weapons-free world is coming into view even as the daily news seems discouraging. It is perhaps paradoxical that a light can be seen, by those with vision, even in the darkness of the moment.

    My experience tells me that it is reasonable to hope for, and to work for, a world beyond the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a parliamentarian, diplomat and educator, I have worked on nuclear disarmament issues for more than 30 years. I understand the lassitude and obstinacy of governments all too well. But I also see the developments taking place in civil society where increasing numbers of highly informed and deeply committed activists are cooperating with like-minded governments to get things done to improve human security. The Anti-Personnel Landmines Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the new surge of government commitment to Official Development Assistance have come about because of civil society’s input into government machinery.

    We stand on the threshold of the construction of a viable plan for a nuclear weapons-free world resulting from the active cooperation of knowledgeable leaders of civil society working with those politicians and officials of like-minded governments who truly want to move forward.

    The day will arrive when either nuclear weapons abolition takes effect or the world will be devastated by a nuclear attack. One or the other will happen. No person, informed on the gravity of the situation, can deny it.

    * * *

    Dear friends, the eyes of the world are on Hiroshima today. It is our task to ensure that political decision-makers stay focused on solving the problems at the epicenter of Hiroshima. We must have national policies that ban the production, deployment and use of nuclear weapons by countries in all circumstances for all time. There can be no more equivocation. We must project our message for all to hear: nuclear weapons are immoral, they are illegal, they are the ultimate evil. No civilized person can any longer defend the possession of nuclear weapons. They must be banished from the face of the earth.

    We who are assembled here today must gather new energy for our struggle. It is not yet too late to prevent a nuclear catastrophe – the third use of nuclear weapons. But the hour is late. The nuclear weapons States refuse to negotiate the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is occurring. Nuclear weapons have become part of war-fighting strategies. Terrorists seek nuclear weapons. The Second Nuclear Age has begun. This is the message we must get out to all those who think the nuclear weapons problems went away with the end of the Cold War.

    Let us take heart as we renew our work today. We who stand for the abolition of nuclear weapons are not some isolated minority. Unthinking politicians may try to marginalize us. But we are part of a growing majority. An international poll of citizens in 11 countries showed that 86 percent of people either strongly agree or agree to some extent that all nations should sign a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. In Japan, the figure was 97 percent. The people of Japan want the abolition of nuclear weapons. We must tell the Government of Japan to work harder to obtain what the Japanese people so ardently desire.

    In the United States, 76 percent of the people favour a treaty to ban all nuclear weapons. Yet the government of the United States stands today as the biggest obstacle to nuclear disarmament. I make that statement as a Canadian, a next-door neighbour of the United States, one who has lived among and loves the American people. But my parliamentary and diplomatic experience has shown me how the present Administration of the U.S. is undermining the rule of law. By refusing to accept today the commitments made in 1995 and 2000 to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the government of the U.S. is weakening the non-proliferation regime. They have the ill-conceived idea that they can reserve to themselves the right to continued possession of nuclear weapons while proscribing their acquisition by other countries.

    We must say clearly to the U.S.: you cannot have a two-class world on nuclear weapons. You owe it to humanity to work with other countries in a constructive manner to negotiate the complete elimination of all nuclear weapons. As Chairman of the Middle Powers Initiative, I approach this work in a positive and constructive spirit, not one of recrimination. I want to help the U.S. understand that, together, the world community can build the architecture to provide security in a nuclear weapons-free world.

    I am announcing today that the Middle Powers Initiative will sponsor an “Article VI Forum” for like-minded States to start work on identifying the legal, political and technical requirements for the elimination of nuclear weapons. We will invite senior representatives of 28 countries to a special meeting in early October at the United Nations to specify steps that could be taken unilaterally, bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally to enhance security without relying on nuclear weapons. This process may well produce the outline of how negotiations, as called for in Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reinforced by the International Court of Justice, can proceed. A framework for negotiations could be started. The Article VI Forum, with its ongoing work, will, of course, pay attention to non-proliferation issues, but the focus will be principally on nuclear disarmament issues, which are at the true center of the nuclear weapons crisis.

    The MPI cordially invites the Government of Japan to join the Article VI Forum. Membership in the Forum, in the opening stages, will be confined to like-minded non-nuclear weapons States. They need to spend some time working together and allow their creativity and commitment to surface. At some point in the new deliberations, the nuclear weapons States interested in joining a new process to fulfil their Article VI commitments could be invited to join.

    All of this work is intended to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty so that negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons will not only be pursued but concluded. I see this work as a direct contribution to the Mayors for Peace campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Convention to come fully into effect by 2020. The immediate steps of Mayors for Peace to stimulate productive work at the United Nations First Committee and to get talks started early in 2006 is highly commendable. Governments must begin to work together on specific issues leading to nuclear disarmament, as Mayors for Peace has stated. It is the duty of middle power states to lead the way. The Article VI Forum would help them to fulfil this function.

    The MPI work in building some momentum through having like-minded States concentrate on preparing the way for a nuclear weapons-free world and the Mayors for Peace work in driving the First Committee work forward go hand-in-hand. Together, the Middle Powers Initiative and Mayors for Peace can contribute to progress. We can show all the nuclear weapons States that the world can work together in addressing this greatest of all security problems. However, MPI and M4P cannot do this alone. Much will depend on public backing and political support for these new initiatives. A rising public demand for nations to get on with negotiating and implementing a Nuclear Weapons Convention to ban the production and deployment of all nuclear weapons may take hold in the future. The work of Mayors for Peace, with its growing and extensive network around the world, could stimulate that demand.

    It can be expected that one or more of the nuclear weapons States will resist and continue to claim that it still needs nuclear weapons. But such claims would have less and less credibility in a world where the architecture for security without nuclear weapons became better understood and where the universal norm against the possession of nuclear weapons was growing in stature.

    * * *

    Let us always remember: we have the historical momentum for the abolition of nuclear weapons on our side. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, the International Court of Justice, the votes of the majority of nations are all calling for an “unequivocal undertaking” and systematic progress towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. The proponents of nuclear weapons have been reduced to ridiculous arguments to justify nuclear retention. Not only are nuclear weapons immoral and illegal, they are devoid of any intellectual standing. Those who defend nuclear weapons should be laughed at – as one day they will, when humanity discovers it has the strength to overcome the merchants of evil. Future generations will look back on our time and say without hesitation that nuclear weapons were an anachronism, the obsession of old men trapped in the past. It will be a source of wonder to future generations how humanity ever tolerated the means to its own mass destruction.

    It is our job to work towards this future of enlightenment. The people of the world want us to succeed in building true human security. We must feel confident that we can do the job. We must know that we can respond to our historical calling. We must be forever determined to build a nuclear weapons-free world. Hiroshima gives me that strength and hope.

    Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C., a former Canadian Senator, is Chair of the Middle Powers Initiative and serves on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council. Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C. is the recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Peace Leadership.

  • The World’s Worst Terrorist Act

    As the clock struck 8:15 a.m. in Japan this very day exactly 60 years ago, the world witnessed a wholly new kind and scale of brutality, leading to mass death. The entire city of Hiroshima was flattened by a single bomb, made with just 60 kg of uranium, and dropped from a B-29 United States Air Force warplane.

    Within seconds, temperatures in the city centre soared to 4,000 C, more than 2,500 higher than the melting point of iron. Savage firestorms raged through Hiroshima as buildings were reduced to rubble. Giant shock-waves releasing blast energy ripped through the city, wreaking more destruction.

    Within seconds, 80,000 people were killed. Within hours, over 100,000 died, most of them crushed under the impact of blast-waves and falling buildings, or severely burnt by firestorms. Not just people, the body and soul of Hiroshima had died.

    Then came waves of radiation, invisible and intangible, but nevertheless lethal. These took their toll slowly, painfully and cruelly. Those who didn’t die within days from radiation sickness produced by exposure to high doses of gamma-rays or poisonous radio-nuclides, perished over years from cancers and leukaemias. The suffering was excruciating and prolonged. Often, the living envied the dead. Hiroshima’s death toll climbed to 140,000.

    This was a new kind of weapon, besides which even deadly chemical armaments like mustard gas pale into insignificance. You could defend yourself against conventional-explosive bombs by hiding in an air-raid shelter or sandbagging your home. To protect yourself from a chemical attack, you could wear a gas mask and a special plastic suit. But against the nuclear bombs, there could be no defence –military, civil or medical.

    Nuclear weapons are unique for yet another reason. They are, typically, not meant to be used against soldiers, but are earmarked for use against unarmed non-combatant civilians. But it is illegitimate and illegal to attack non-combatant civilians. Attacking them is commonly called terrorism. Hence, Hiroshima remains the world’s worst terrorist act.

    Hiroshima’s bombing was followed three days later by an atomic attack on Nagasaki, this time with a bomb using a different material, plutonium. The effects were equally devastating. More than 70,000 people perished in agonising ways.

    US President Harry S. Truman was jubilant. Six days later, Japan surrendered. The US cynically exploited this coincidence. It claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved thousands of lives by bringing the war to an early end. This was a lie. Japan was preparing to surrender anyway and was only waiting to negotiate the details of the terms. That entire country has been reduced to a wasteland. Most of its soldiers had stopped fighting. Schoolgirls were being drafted to perform emergency services in Japanese cities.

    American leaders knew this. Historians Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden have just disclosed in the British New Scientist magazine that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed Japan was “looking for peace”.

    General Dwight Eisenhower said in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, also said that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.

    The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender”.

    The real function of the two bombs was not military, but political.

    It was to establish the US’s superiority and pre-eminence within the Alliance that defeated the Axis powers, and thus to shift the terms of the ensuing new power struggle in Washington’s favour.

    The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings inaugurated another rivalry: the Cold War, which was to last for four decades. They also triggered fierce competition among the other victors of the World War to acquire nuclear weapons. The insane arms race this launched but hasn’t ended yet.

    From a few dozen bombs in the early 1950s, the world’s nuclear arsenals swelled to several hundred warheads in a decade, and then several thousand by the 1970s. At the Cold War’s peak, the world had amassed 70,000 nukes, with explosive power equivalent to one million Hiroshimas, enough to destroy Planet Earth 50 times over.

    One-and-a-half decades after the Cold War ended, the world still has 36,000 nuclear weapons. Nothing could be a greater disgrace!

    Nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and have never ceased to horrify people and hurt the public conscience. The damage they cause is hard to limit in space –thanks to the wind-transporting radioactivity over thousands of miles –or in time. Radioactive poisons persist and remain dangerous for years, some for tens of thousands of years. For instance, the half-life of plutonium-239, which India uses in its bombs, is 24,400 years. And the half-life of uranium-235, which Pakistan uses in its bombs, is 710 million years!

    Nuclear weapons violate every rule of warfare and every convention governing the conduct of armed conflict, they target non-combatant civilians. They kill indiscriminately and massively. They cause death in cruel, inhumane and degrading ways. And the destruction gets transmitted to future generations through genetic defects. That’s why nuclear weapons have been held to be incompatible with international law by the International Court of Justice.

    The world public overwhelmingly wants nuclear weapons to be abolished. The pro-abolition sentiment is strong and endorsed by 70 to 90 percent of the population even in the nuclear weapons-states (NWSs), according to opinion polls. More than 180 nations have forsworn nuclear weapons by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But a handful of states remain addicted to their “nuclear fix”. Led by the US, five NWSs refuse to honour their obligation under the NPT to disarm their nuclear weapons. And three of them, India, Pakistan and Israel, haven’t even signed the treaty.

    India and Pakistan occupy a special position within the group of NWSs. They are its most recent members. They are regional rivals too, with a half-century-long hot-cold war, which has made South Asia the world’s “most dangerous place”. There is an imperative need for India and Pakistan, rooted in self-preservation, to negotiate nuclear restraint and abolition of nuclear weapons. But the chances of this seem rather dim.

    Even dimmer is the possibility of the five major NWSs embracing nuclear disarmament. Their reluctance to do so largely springs from their faith in nuclear deterrence. This is a dangerously flawed doctrine. It makes hopelessly unrealistic assumptions about unfailingly rational and perfect behaviour on the part of governments and military leaders and rules out strategic miscalculation as well as accidents. The real world is far messier, and full of follies, misperceptions and mishaps. Yet, the deterrence juggernaut rolls on.

    Today, the system of restraint in the global nuclear order is on the verge of being weakened. The US-India nuclear deal (discussed here last week) is a bad precedent. But even worse are US plans to develop nukes both downwards (deep-earth penetrators or bunker-busters) and upwards (“Star Wars”-style space-based Ballistic Missile Defence). If the US conducts nuclear tests in pursuit of this, that will impel others to follow suit, and encourage some non-nuclear states to go overtly nuclear, raising the spectre of another Hiroshima.

    Sixty years on, that would be a disgrace without parallel. Humankind surely deserves better.

    The writer is a Delhi-based researcher, peace and human rights activist, and former newspaper editor.

    Originally published by The News International.