Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Hiroshima

  • Preventing a Nuclear Katrina

    Surveying the devastation the day after Hurricane Katrina struck Gulf Coast towns and cities, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) likened the storm force to a nuclear attack. “I can only imagine this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago,” he told reporters. Not quite, Governor.

    The blast, fire, and radiation effects of the 15-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed some 140,000 people by the end of 1945 and injured still more. A similar weapon used today against a major city would wreak similar or even more extensive death and damage.

    The nation must and will help the greater New Orleans region recover from the worst U.S. natural disaster in decades, but there is no evacuation or post-disaster triage plan sufficient to deal with a terrorist attack with even a “small” nuclear weapon, let alone a conflict between states involving nuclear weapons. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich put it mildly when he asked, “[I]f we can’t respond faster to an event we saw coming across the Gulf [of Mexico] for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?”

    The only cure is prevention. Success primarily depends on depriving terrorists access to nuclear bomb material, which they cannot produce on their own. But it only takes about 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or 8 kilograms of plutonium to fashion a nuclear bomb. Worldwide, there are about 1,900 metric tons of HEU and more than 1,800 tons of plutonium in civilian and military stockpiles in dozens of countries. In the absence of U.S. support for a global, verifiable ban on fissile material production for military purposes and a phaseout of production for civilian purposes, the stocks will only grow.

    Significant quantities of nuclear weapons-usable material remain all too vulnerable as a result of inadequate security and accounting at hundreds of nuclear facilities, particularly in the former Soviet republics. The International Atomic Energy Agency has documented at least 18 cases of theft or smuggling of weapons-usable fissile material since 1993. In July, Georgia disclosed it had thwarted four more attempts to steal HEU over the last two years. Russia also possesses at least 3,000 relatively more portable and less secure tactical nuclear weapons.

    Just as essential levee protection and Louisiana coastal wetlands restoration projects were ignored or shortchanged, the president and most members of Congress have also failed to act on many of the recommendations of expert panels on nuclear terrorism. The 2001 bipartisan Baker-Cutler task force report on Department of Energy nonproliferation programs with Russia praised the program’s “impressive results” but warned that diffuse management and budget shortfalls leave an “unacceptable risk of failure” with potentially “catastrophic consequences.”

    The panel recommended ramping up funding for nuclear security in Russia to $3 billion annually for 10 years. Nevertheless, critical nuclear threat reduction programs were cut in the fiscal year 2002 budget submission. Congress later restored the funding, and the administration has sought and received substantial contributions from European allies. In the administration’s latest budget request, Energy and Department of Defense programs to secure nuclear material and weapons were approximately $515 million.

    Some projects have been accelerated. U.S. officials report they have “secured” 75 percent of Russia’s estimated 600 metric tons of plutonium and HEU and will complete the rest by 2008. Additionally, nearly 50 of Russia’s known nuclear warhead sites now have state-of-the-art security. Still, there may be as many as 100 sites that do not. Clearly, there is more that must be done and quickly.

    Congress itself has complicated and slowed the work by requiring the president to certify Russian compliance with arms control agreements before releasing funds for securing and disposing of Russia’s dangerous nuclear and chemical stockpiles. This year, Congress should finally pass legislation to suspend this self-defeating requirement. To overcome lingering distrust, break through disputes about who is liable for accidents, and reaffirm their mutual commitment to the task, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin must corral their own bureaucracies and put nuclear threat reduction at the top of the agenda.

    One of their highest priorities should be higher funding and early completion of the Energy Department’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative. This includes returning U.S. and Russian-origin HEU and spent fuel from vulnerable sites throughout the world and converting the 105 civil research reactors that use HEU fuel to low-enriched uranium fuel. They should also agree to new tactical nuclear weapons transparency and security arrangements and begin to decommission and dismantle obsolete tactical nuclear weapons based in Europe and elsewhere.

    As Bush himself said in 2001 about the threat of nuclear terrorism, “History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act.” Mr. President, now is the time to accelerate action on effective measures aimed at preventing the ultimate disaster before it is too late.

    Originally published by the Arms Control Association.

  • Katrina, a Parallel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

    War does not determine who is right – only who is left – Bertrand Russell

    Among the different ways to describe the terrible destruction posed by Hurricane Katrina, several officials from Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as some anchormen from the media, have been making comparisons between this natural disaster and the one unleashed by man.

    The devastation, death and misery caused by a category 4 hurricane is undeniable. The extent of the damage is measured by hundreds of miles. The economic costs will be staggering. The loss of human life is always regrettable and in this case the numbers could climb into the thousands.

    The real figures will not be known for sometime. Undoubtedly, it will surpass the deaths during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But even considering a figure of 6 to 10 thousand, and that will hopefully be the maximum loss of life in this tragedy, there is no comparison with the immediate obliteration of more than 70,000 people in Hiroshima and some 40,000 in Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more to die in the aftermath.

    The powerful tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and the adjacent nations last December killed approximately the same number of people lost in the two Japanese cities.

    Let us not forget that the enormous power of a nuclear device demands a detonator equivalent to the energy generated by the atomic bombs used in 1945. If we are so speechless and numbed by the destruction caused by Katrina, what can we expect if our nightmares of a nuclear holocaust materialized?

    We are witnessing the serious consequences caused by the hurricane, among them the possible death of a very special city, New Orleans. Chaos and lawlessness escalates in the “Big Easy.” Countless people are tired, hungry and desperate. Shooting at helicopters trying to rescue survivors has even occurred. The law of the jungle descends upon one of the most beloved American cities.

    The fantasy world of Hollywood portrays disasters, space invasions and even nuclear wars. After the scenes of devastation, at the end, the sun shines again and a beautiful rainbow streams across the horizon. Life continues as usual.

    This false idea of security is harbored by the government that has plans for the “survival and continuation of government” after a nuclear war or terrorist attack. If the situation in Louisiana and Mississippi were to get dangerously out of hand, what would be the reality of a world AFTER a nuclear holocaust?

    Humans have perfected the art of killing. By our own inventions we could put an end to human existence and possible all other forms of life.

    Nature will continue banging on us, sometimes badly but it does not threaten to annihilate its own creatures. Unless a big comet hits us and sends us into oblivion as happened with the dinosaurs, the nuclear threat will continue to be the Damocles sword hanging over our heads.

    In the meantime, we could use the enormous resources currently going to preparations for nuclear war to make preparations against natural disasters and to help to repair the destruction caused by Katrina. Perhaps we can give New Orleans a new lease on life together with the other damaged areas.

    Ruben Arvizu is director for Latin America of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

  • Hiroshima Peace Declaration 2005

    This August 6, the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing, is a moment of shared lamentation in which more than 300 thousand souls of A-bomb victims and those who remain behind transcend the boundary between life and death to remember that day. It is also a time of inheritance, of awakening, and of commitment, in which we inherit the commitment of the hibakusha to the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of genuine world peace, awaken to our individual responsibilities, and recommit ourselves to take action. This new commitment, building on the desires of all war victims and the millions around the world who are sharing this moment, is creating a harmony that is enveloping our planet.

    The keynote of this harmony is the hibakusha warning, “No one else should ever suffer as we did,” along with the cornerstone of all religions and bodies of law, “Thou shalt not kill.” Our sacred obligation to future generations is to establish this axiom, especially its corollary, “Thou shalt not kill children,” as the highest priority for the human race across all nations and religions. The International Court of Justice advisory opinion issued nine years ago was a vital step toward fulfilling this obligation, and the Japanese Constitution, which embodies this axiom forever as the sovereign will of a nation, should be a guiding light for the world in the 21st century.

    Unfortunately, the Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty this past May left no doubt that the U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and a few other nations wishing to become nuclear-weapon states are ignoring the majority voices of the people and governments of the world, thereby jeopardizing human survival.

    Based on the dogma “Might is right,” these countries have formed their own “nuclear club,” the admission requirement being possession of nuclear weapons. Through the media, they have long repeated the incantation, “Nuclear weapons protect you.” With no means of rebuttal, many people worldwide have succumbed to the feeling that “There is nothing we can do.” Within the United Nations, nuclear club members use their veto power to override the global majority and pursue their selfish objectives.

    To break out of this situation, Mayors for Peace, with more than 1,080 member cities, is currently holding its sixth General Conference in Hiroshima, where we are revising the Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons launched two years ago. The primary objective is to produce an action plan that will further expand the circle of cooperation formed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the European Parliament, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other international NGOs, organizations and individuals worldwide, and will encourage all world citizens to awaken to their own responsibilities with a sense of urgency, “as if the entire world rests on their shoulders alone,” and work with new commitment to abolish nuclear weapons.

    To these ends and to ensure that the will of the majority is reflected at the UN, we propose that the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, which will meet in October, establish a special committee to deliberate and plan for the achievement and maintenance of a nuclear-weapon-free world. Such a committee is needed because the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and the NPT Review Conference in New York have failed due to a “consensus rule” that gives a veto to every country.

    We expect that the General Assembly will then act on the recommendations from this special committee, adopting by the year 2010 specific steps leading toward the elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020.

    Meanwhile, we hereby declare the 369 days from today until August 9, 2006, a “Year of Inheritance, Awakening and Commitment.” During this Year, the Mayors for Peace, working with nations, NGOs and the vast majority of the world’s people, will launch a great diversity of campaigns for nuclear weapons abolition in numerous cities throughout the world.

    We expect the Japanese government to respect the voice of the world’s cities and work energetically in the First Committee and the General Assembly to ensure that the abolition of nuclear weapons is achieved by the will of the majority.

    Furthermore, we request that the Japanese government provide the warm, humanitarian support appropriate to the needs of all the aging hibakusha, including those living abroad and those exposed in areas affected by the black rain.

    On this, the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, we seek to comfort the souls of all its victims by declaring that we humbly reaffirm our responsibility never to “repeat the evil.”

    “Please rest peacefully; for we will not repeat the evil.”

    Tadatoshi Akiba Mayor The City of Hiroshima

    Tadatoshi Akiba, the mayor of Hiroshima and the president of Mayors for Peace, serves on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council. The Mayors for Peace received the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2004 World Citizenship Award.

  • From Hiroshima to Humanity

    From Hiroshima to Humanity

    The first test of a nuclear weapon occurred on July 16, 1945. The test took place in the New Mexico desert at a place called Jornada del Muerto, the “Journey of Death.” The head of the scientific research effort for the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted these lines from the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, when he saw that first nuclear explosion turn the sky white: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

    Within a month, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, on August 6th and 9th respectively. While there was general elation in the US at the subsequent ending of the war, some American leaders expressed misgivings about the necessity and morality of the use of nuclear weapons.

    General Dwight Eisenhower was critical of the use of the bomb and voiced his concerns to Secretary of War Stimson. Eisenhower later wrote, “ Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of ‘face.’ It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

    Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, was even stronger in his condemnation of the use of atomic weapons on Japan. “My own feeling,” he said, “was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children….”

    This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the aging hibakusha, survivors of the bombings, will gather to again make their plea that nuclear weapons be abolished. Many of these survivors have made it their life work to assure that their past is not humanity’s future. They are convinced that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist, and that we must eliminate these weapons before they eliminate us.

    Sixty years after Hiroshima and nearly fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, there are still some 20,000 to 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The US and Russia have over 95 percent of these weapons, and each still maintain some 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. In all, nine countries are believed to have nuclear weapons: US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Japan is a virtual nuclear weapons state, having both the plutonium and the technology to become a major nuclear power in a matter of weeks. There is much concern that Iran is on its way to also becoming a nuclear weapons state.

    Nuclear proliferation is a serious problem, but so is the failure to achieve nuclear disarmament. In the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, the non-nuclear weapons states agreed not to develop or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapons states agreed to assist them with developing peaceful nuclear technology and to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

    Most of the parties to the treaty, nearly all countries in the world, believe that the nuclear weapons states have not fulfilled their obligation to achieve nuclear disarmament. At the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2000, the nuclear weapons states agreed to move toward fulfilling their part of the bargain by adopting 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. The Bush administration has since disavowed these obligations.

    In 2005, at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the Bush administration’s policies of non-cooperation were made clear to the world, although not necessarily to the American people, when the US put up obstacles to even creating an agenda for the conference. The administration doesn’t seem to understand that nuclear proliferation and nuclear disarmament are inextricably interlinked: without nuclear disarmament, nuclear proliferation is virtually assured.

    Nor is there a clear understanding of the ineffectiveness of a nuclear arsenal in defending against a terrorist nuclear threat. If terrorists succeed in obtaining nuclear weapons, they will not hesitate to use them. They will not be deterred by the thousands of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear weapons states because it is impossible to deter a group you can’t locate. Thus, nuclear weapons provide no defense against extremist nuclear threats or attacks. Additionally, a costly missile defense system offers no protection against a terrorist nuclear attack that is more likely to be delivered by a suitcase or van than by an intercontinental ballistic missile.

    George Bush has pointed out that “free societies don’t develop weapons of mass terror and don’t blackmail the world.” This suggests that either he does not think the US is a free society, which is unlikely, or he doesn’t understand that nuclear weapons are weapons of mass terror. On the sixtieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, it would be valuable for someone on his staff to explain to him that the US was the first country to develop such weapons of mass terror and the only country to have used them.

    The American people need to wake up to the jeopardy we face due to the lack of US leadership toward nuclear disarmament. So long as the US holds onto these weapons, others will be encouraged and inspired to develop them. By taking seriously its legal and moral obligations to achieve the elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world, the US will be improving its own security, protecting its cities, and leaving behind the Journey of Death – the all too apt name of the birthplace of nuclear weapons – in favor of the path of peace.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age. His latest books are Today Is Not a Good Day for War and Einstein – Peace Now!

  • Sixty Years After the Bombs

    It has been 60 years since the U.S. government used atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons killed 200,000 people outright and left tens of thousands of others dying of radiation-induced cancers or afflicted by birth defects, immunological disorders and psychological traumas. It was a grim beginning to the nuclear age and led millions of people around the globe to conclude that the world stood on the brink of destruction.

    Fortunately, since 1945, we have managed to avert that fate. Thanks to widespread public pressure and the efforts of some far-sighted statesmen, governments around the world have exercised a surprising level of nuclear restraint. They have resisted the temptation to carry their quarrels to the level of nuclear war and have agreed to important nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.

    Perhaps the most important of these measures is the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by virtually all nations. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations pledged to forgo developing nuclear weapons and nuclear nations pledged to divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons. In this fashion, nations agreed to move toward a nuclear-free world.

    As a result, out of almost 200 nations, only eight – Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States – are now nuclear states, although another, North Korea, might have them, too. Furthermore, the number of nuclear weapons in existence has declined, from about 70,000 at the height of the Cold War to some 30,000 today.

    Unfortunately, during the past decade, this modest progress has been reversed. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India and Pakistan became nuclear states and additional nations have shown signs of joining the nuclear line.

    The policies of the Bush administration have been regressive. It has spurned the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and abandoned negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament. It also has championed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons – despite the fact that the U.S. already possesses some 10,000 of them – and affirmed its willingness to initiate nuclear war. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s policies helped to wreck the recent NPT review conference at the U.N., where nations condemned its double standard.

    The Bush administration’s determination to preserve U.S. nuclear options seems particularly inappropriate to its “war on terror.” There is no morally acceptable way to employ nuclear weapons against terrorists, for terrorists do not control fixed territory. Instead, they intermingle with the general population and cannot be bombarded with nuclear weapons without causing a Hiroshima-style massacre of civilians.

    Conversely, the maintenance of nuclear stockpiles by the United States and other nations provides terrorists with the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons through theft, bribery or purchase. Thus, the only way to ensure against a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons or materials is to eliminate them from national arsenals.

    In these increasingly dangerous circumstances, many thousands of Americans – joined by concerned people around the globe – will be holding events this August to commemorate the atomic bombings and to demand that the nations of the world get back on track to nuclear disarmament. On Aug. 6, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, these actions will be especially large and prominent at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab in New Mexico, the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab in California, the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada and the Y-12 Nuclear Facility in Tennessee. On Aug. 9, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, there will be candlelight vigils held at city halls across the United States.

    There also is pressure for nuclear disarmament emerging in Congress, where Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., has introduced a resolution in the House (HR 373) calling for a comprehensive disarmament program. “There will be no security for America or our world,” she said, “unless we take all steps necessary for nuclear disarmament.”

    Today, 60 years after the inception of the nuclear era, these words are all too true. Thus far, through nuclear restraint, we have managed to stave off the specter of nuclear annihilation that has haunted the world since 1945. The future remains a race between wisdom and catastrophe.

    Lawrence S. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany and author of “Toward Nuclear Abolition.”

    Originally published by the Washington Examiner.

  • Hiroshima, America, and Humanity’s Future

    We are again in the season of Hiroshima. Many will gather at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to remember that fateful day 60 years ago when an atomic weapon was first used on a human population and obliterated the city of Hiroshima.

    In America, unfortunately, far too few individuals will take note of this anniversary. Many of those who do remember Hiroshima will recall it as an event of triumph, not disaster.

    Throughout most of the world, the name Hiroshima has come to represent man’s technological capacity for massive destruction. Hiroshima was the culmination of the high-altitude bombing and long-range killing that came increasingly to characterize World War II.

    Hiroshima opened the door upon a new world, a world in which it is possible for humanity to destroy itself by its own inventions of highly destructive weaponry. Hiroshima was the world’s first look at a technology that could destroy countries, end civilization, and foreclose a human future.

    Following the bombing on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was a wasteland. It might have been left this way as a monument and reminder of the new dangers confronting humanity. But that wasn’t to be.

    The bombed Hiroshima is the Hiroshima of death. It is a harbinger of what may befall humanity. It is a warning, but a warning that seems far distant in our fast-moving, materialistic world.

    The physical evidence of the crime has been largely covered over and a thriving new Hiroshima has been built from the ruins – a Hiroshima that demonstrates humanity’s capacity for healing and rebuilding. Sixty years after the bombing, Hiroshima itself is a place of hope. It is a city resurrected, and filled with life.

    What remains of the destroyed Hiroshima can now be found in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and in the hearts of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. They cling to the message, “Never Again! Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist.” They also cling to the hope that humanity can rise above its destructive impulses.

    The rebirth of Hiroshima reflects the power of the human spirit, but the problem presented to humanity by Hiroshima has not gone away. As the leading scientists who signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto put it fifty years ago: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?”

    Many of the scientists who created nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project thought that they should not be used on human populations. They warned that if nuclear weapons were used on Japan, the result would be a nuclear arms race. They unsuccessfully tried to convince US political leaders that the atomic bomb should first be demonstrated to Japanese leaders in a remote, uninhabited place, in order to allow them a chance to surrender. But the pleas of the scientists were unsuccessful. They had lost control of their creation, and government leaders chose to use the bomb before the Soviets entered the war in the Pacific.

    The atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurred at the end of a terrible war, but it marked the beginning of a new collective madness that would result in the US and USSR each threatening the other with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Today the numbers of weapons is lower than at the height of the Cold War, but the collective insanity continues.

    Fifteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US and Russia have friendly relations. Yet, each side still maintains more than 2,000 long-range nuclear weapons targeted on the other on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. Can this be described in any other way than collective madness?

    Do the people of the world, particularly Americans and Russians, understand what this means? Opinion polls indicate that 85 to 90 percent of people everywhere would choose to eliminate nuclear weapons, so long as all countries do so. They understand that it would improve their security, as well as be morally and legally correct. But among politicians, there is little movement toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

    In the year 2000, the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including an “unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals….” It seemed to be a significant breakthrough. Yet, five years later, at the 2005 NPT Review Conference, the United States had fulfilled none of its obligations under the 13 Practical Steps, and refused to allow an agenda for the conference that even made reference to them.

    The Bush administration wants funding for new nuclear weapons, particularly earth penetrating nuclear weapons or “bunker busters.” They want a world in which there is no place outside the range of their nuclear weapons. It is a frighteningly dangerous world in which the United States would remain reliant upon nuclear weapons and continue to threaten their use for the indefinite future.

    At Hiroshima, the bomb dropped by the United States killed 140,000 people, mostly civilians, and it was celebrated in the US as a military victory. In doing so, the US made victims not only of the people of Hiroshima, but of all humanity, including ourselves. In today’s world, any city anywhere is subject to being destroyed at a moment’s notice.

    It is painful, yet necessary, to recall details of that fateful day. On the morning of August 6, 1945, people in Hiroshima set off to work or school. Earlier a US plane had flown over the city, and an alarm had sounded. Then came the all-clear signal. Then another plane, this one the US B-29, Enola Gay. It dropped its single bomb, which fell for 43 seconds, and at 8:15 a.m. the city of Hiroshima was destroyed. Individuals close to the epicenter were incinerated. Those further away were killed by blast and fire. Many of the initial survivors developed “radiation sickness,” and died in the coming days, weeks, months and years of cancers and leukemias.

    On August 9, 1945, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki was bombed and destroyed with another atomic weapon. On the same day, Harry Truman told the American people about Hiroshima. He struck a religious note in talking about the bomb, “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

    Herbert Hoover, a former American president, had a far different reaction: “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

    Leading American generals and admirals were equally appalled by the use of atomic weapons. Eisenhower later said, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, wrote: “…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…. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children….”

    Nuclear weapons do not discriminate. They kill men, women and children. In this way, among others, they are illegal under International Humanitarian Law, as the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996.

    Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of cowards. Those who would possess nuclear weapons need only find men and women willing to make them, service them and press the button to release them.

    Nuclear weapons destroy the destroyers. Reflecting on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gandhi said, “What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see. Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner.”

    As Americans look back at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we, too, should be reflecting on what has happened to our collective soul. We should be reflecting on who we are, as we cling to our weapons of massive destruction, and lead the world in opposing nuclear disarmament.

    It may be a dangerous world, but our future lies in forgiveness and decency, not force of arms. In the US, we spend half of the world’s total military expenditure, more than $500 billion annually, and we still are not secure. We seek inexpensive sources of oil, and we pay the price in blood, our own but mostly that of others.

    If we continue on the path we are on, an American Hiroshima will be in our future. It is inevitable. If the disillusioned and disaffected extremists of the world obtain nuclear weapons, they will use them and the US will be a likely target. The irony of this is that none of our thousands of nuclear weapons will make us any safer. In fact, they make us less secure by creating a situation in which others will also keep nuclear weapons and some of these may end up in the hands of extremists.

    But when it comes to nuclear weapons, there are no moderates. All nuclear policies are dangerous and extreme, except those that contribute to the elimination of nuclear weapons. All possessors of nuclear weapons are extremists. If terrorism is threatening or killing innocent civilians, then nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of terrorism and those who possess them are the ultimate terrorists.

    How are we to change? Perhaps Hiroshima provides a place to begin. The horrors of Hiroshima are not only the past, but potentially in the future as well. We can begin with finding our sorrow. We can begin with recognizing the suffering we have caused and are causing still. We can begin with apologies and forgiveness.

    Hiroshima has largely recovered from its wounds. The city has been rebuilt. The flowers have returned. The survivors have made it their mission to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity. They have forgiven the crime.

    But America will not heal from the trauma of the devastation we have caused and continue to cause until Americans say No to wanton power, No to nuclear weapons, No to war and No to leaders who lie us into war. Until we summon the power to resist, we will continue to be victims of our own massive and unbridled power. It is within our power to change, but not without ending our addiction to power and our double standards that support this addiction. America must reassert its commitment to decency, not destruction.

    The 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto – issued ten years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as thermonuclear weapons were being developed and tested – concluded with these words: “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

    We have a choice, and where there is choice there is hope. If we do nothing, we will remain on the path of universal death. If we choose to change the world, it is within our power to do so. Hiroshima is our past; it doesn’t need to be our future. We can join with the survivors of Hiroshima in committing ourselves to assuring that atomic weapons will never again be used by taking the sensible and reasonable step of abolishing these instruments of genocide.

    Unfortunately what is reasonable is not always possible. To end the threat to humanity and other forms of life created by nuclear weapons, there are two different sets of problems to be solved. The first is to articulate what needs to be done. The second is to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of accomplishing these goals.

    Let us look first at what needs to be done. At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have proposed the following eight commitments by the nuclear weapons states.

    1. Commitment to good faith negotiations to achieve total nuclear disarmament.
    2. Commitment to a timeframe for marking progress and achieving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.
    3. Commitment to No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nuclear weapons states and to No Use against non-nuclear weapons states.
    4. Commitment to irreversibility and verifiability of disarmament measures.
    5. Commitment to standing down nuclear forces, removing them from high alert status.
    6. Commitment to create no new nuclear weapons.
    7. Commitment to a verifiable ban on the production of fissile materials, and placing existing materials under strict international control.
    8. Commitment to accounting, transparency and reporting to build confidence and allow for verification of the disarmament process.

    We view these as a minimal level of commitment to demonstrate the “good faith” effort to achieve the total elimination of nuclear weapons that is required by international law. Other commitments could be added to these, such as support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and agreement to refrain from weaponizing outer space.

    Essentially, the international community knows what needs to be done to achieve the phased elimination of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the larger problem is with not what is needed but what is politically possible. This leaves behind the realm of what is reasonable and sensible, and enters the realm of prerogatives of political decision makers.

    Despite the threat to humanity and despite reason, none of the commitments above have been acted on by the United States, the world’s most powerful nuclear weapons state. Without US commitment to these goals, it is unlikely that less powerful nuclear weapons states will commit to them. Thus, progress on nuclear disarmament is stalled by US intransigency. The US is not the leader in nuclear disarmament, but rather its major obstacle. This was apparent at the 2005 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, where the US pointed the finger at others, such as Iran and North Korea, but was unwilling even to discuss its own obligations to achieve nuclear disarmament under the treaty and under international law in general.

    Within the US, democracy is the province of the people and their representatives, with the mass media playing a critical role in educating the people so that they may make reasoned political choices and give their informed consent to the actions of leaders. It is the political leaders of the US who have been the obstacle to global nuclear disarmament, and for the most part the people are unaware of this because they do not learn about it from the mass media.

    The only way to change the policies of the government is for the people to voice their concerns, but largely the people are not informed of the positions of their government on nuclear issues. Nor are they given reasonable analyses of the pros and cons of US nuclear policies because the media has been lax in doing its job.

    Humanity’s best hope for ending the nuclear weapons threat that confronts us all is for the American people to engage this issue as if their lives depended upon its outcome. The truth is that our lives, and those of people throughout the world, do depend upon US nuclear policies. We cannot wait for leaders who will recognize and solve these problems for us. We must speak up and we must educate our neighbors and our elected officials.

    The choices are clear. One way is to continue on the disastrous path we are on, a path on which our nuclear arsenal plays a pivotal role in providing a false sense of security. Or we can change the direction of our policies, with the US seeking to strengthen its own security and global security by providing leadership to achieve the phased and total elimination of nuclear weapons. To move to this path, the American people are going to have to wake up and demand that their government, acting in their names, end its reliance on nuclear weapons and fulfill its moral and legal obligations to end the nuclear weapons era.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the author of Today Is Not a Good Day for War.

  • Hiroshima Cover-Up Exposed

    In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

    The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. The full story of this atomic cover-up is told fully for the first time today at E&P Online, as the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings approaches later this week.

    Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.

    As editor of Nuclear Times magazine in the 1980s, I met Herbert Sussan, one of the members of the U.S. military film crew, and Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian who first showed some of the Japanese footage on American TV in 1970. In fact, that newsreel footage might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling.

    The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Md., in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.

    When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.

    “I always had the sense,” McGovern told me, “that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child….They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were sorry for our sins.”

    Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.

    More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. “The main reason it was classified was…because of the horror, the devastation,” he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

    The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.

    Ten years ago, I co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) the book ” Hiroshima in America,” and new material has emerged since. On August 6, the Sundance cable channel will air “Original Child Bomb,” a prize-winning documentary that I worked on. The film includes some of the once-censored footage — along with home movies filmed by McGovern in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    The Japanese Newsreel Footage

    On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the U.S. readied plans for occupying the defeated country — and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.

    But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. In early September, just after the Japanese surrender, and as the American occupation began, director Sueo Ito set off for Nagasaki. There his crew filmed the utter destruction near ground zero and scenes in hospitals of the badly burned and those suffering from the lingering effects of radiation.

    On Sept. 15, another crew headed for Hiroshima. When the first rushes came back to Toyko, Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer, felt “every frame burned into my brain,” he later said.

    At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years “the world…knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction.”

    Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.

    Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.

    Shooting the US Military Footage

    In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern — who as a member of Hollywood’s famed First Motion Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler’s “Memphis Belle” — had become one of the first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.

    As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would be a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that “the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions.”

    McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and “caption” the material, so it would have “scientific value.” He took charge of this effort in early January 1946, even as the Japanese feared that, when they were done, they would never see even a scrap of their film again.

    At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on January 1, 1946 to document the results of the U.S. air campaign in more than 20 Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.

    The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki. “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there,” Sussan later told me. “We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust….I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud.”

    Along with the rest of McGovern’s crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world.

    At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients — and then took off his white doctor’s shirt and displayed his own burns and cuts.

    After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot “Sanshiro Sugata,” the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.

    The Suppression Begins

    While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing and labeling all their black & white footage into a rough cut of just under three hours. At this point, several members of Japanese team took the courageous step of ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the Americans took over the project.

    Director Ito later said: “The four of us agreed to be ready for 10 years of hard labor in the case of being discovered.” One incomplete, silent print would reside in a ceiling until the Occupation ended.

    The negative of the finished Japanese film, nearly 15,000 feet of footage on 19 reels, was sent off to the U.S. in early May 1946. The Japanese were also ordered to include in this shipment all photographs and related material. The footage would be labeled SECRET and not emerge from the shadows for more than 20 years.

    The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the U.S. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels in huge footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than 30 years.

    McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.

    Fearful that his film might get “buried,” McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. “He was that kind of man, he didn’t give a damn what people thought,” McGovern told me. “He just wanted the story told.”

    In an article in his hometown Buffalo Evening News, McGovern said that he hoped that “this epic will be made available to the American public.” He planned to call the edited movie “Japan in Defeat.”

    Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn’t want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make four training films.

    In a March 3, 1947 memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps, explained that the film would be classified “secret.” This was determined “after study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is believed that the information contained in the films should be safeguarded until cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission.” After the training films were completed, the status would be raised to “Top Secret” pending final classification by the AEC.

    The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film “and not let anyone touch it — and that’s the way it stayed,” as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the top secret area.

    “Dan McGovern stayed with the film all the time,” Sussan later said. “He told me they could not release the film [because] what it showed was too horrible.”

    Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on the footage “would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history.” A reply from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack “wide public appeal.”

    McGovern, meanwhile, continued to “babysit” the film, now at Norton Air Force base in California. “It was never out of my control,” he said later, but he couldn’t make a film out of it any more than Sussan could (but unlike Herb, he at least knew where it was).

    The Japanese Footage Emerges

    At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. Fearful that it might get lost forever in the military/government bureaucracy, he secretly made a 16 mm print and deposited it in the U.S. Air Force Central Film Depository at Wright-Patterson. There it remained out of sight, and generally out of mind. (The original negative and production materials remain missing, according to Abe Mark Nornes, who teaches at the University of Michigan and has researched the Japanese footage more than anyone.)

    The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail. A rare article about what it called this “sensitive” dispute appeared in The New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been “Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years.” Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a “hold” on the Japanese using it–even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.

    Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, few in the U.S. challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its “first-use” nuclear policy: Under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn–in the sand. The U.S., in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on other occasions.

    On Sept. 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film “not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense).”

    Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black & white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.

    From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look. Soon Barnouw realized that, despite its marginal film quality, “enough of the footage was unforgettable in its implications, and historic in its importance, to warrant duplicating all of it,” he later wrote.

    Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. Barnouw arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press. A throng turned out and sat in respectful silence at its finish. (One can only imagine what impact the color footage with many more human effects would have had.) “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945” proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the roof of a building.

    In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed interest in airing it. “Only NBC thought it might use the film,” Barnouw later wrote, “if it could find a ‘news hook.’ We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for.” But then an article appeared in Parade magazine, and an editorial in the Boston Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see this film: “Television has brought the sight of war into America’s sitting rooms from Vietnam. Surely it can find 16 minutes of prime time to show Americans what the first A-bombs, puny by today’s weapons, did to people and property 25 years ago.”

    This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of dropping the bomb.

    “I feel that classifying all of this filmed material was a misuse of the secrecy system since none of it had any military or national security aspect at all,” Barnouw told me. “The reason must have been–that if the public had seen it and Congressmen had seen it–it would have been much harder to appropriate money for more bombs.”

    The American Footage Comes Out

    About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.

    In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo teacher named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the U.S. military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.

    There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the U.S. military footage.

    Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, D.C. verified this. He found eighty reels of film, labeled #342 USAF, with the reels numbered 11000 to 11079. About one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: “School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damagedCommercial school demolishedSchool, engineering, demolished.School, Shirayama elementary, demolished, blast effectTenements, demolished.”

    The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me at the time, “If no one knows about the film to ask forit, it’s as closed as when it was classified.”

    Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called “Prophecy” and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.

    That fall a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New York Film Festival, called “Dark Circle.” It’s co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, “No wonder the government didn’t want us to see it. I think they didn’t want Americans to see themselves in that picture. It’s one thing to know about that and another thing to see it.”

    Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s–or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    In late 1982, editing Nuclear Times, I met Sussan and Erik Barnouw—and talked on several occasions with Daniel McGovern, out in Northridge, California. “It would make a fine documentary even today,” McGovern said of the color footage. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a movie of the burning of Atlanta?”

    After he hauled the footage back to the Pentagon, McGovern said, he was told that under no circumstances would the footage be released for outside use. “They were fearful of it being circulated,” McGovern said. He confirmed that the color footage, like the black and white, had been declassified over time, taking it from top secret to “for public release” (but only if the public knew about it and asked for it).

    Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long lingered. Here McGovern added his considerable voice. “The main reason it was classified wasbecause of the horror, the devastation,” he said. “The medical effects were pretty goryThe attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don’t make people sick.”

    But who was behind this? “I always had the sense,” McGovern answered, “that people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force–it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody,” he declared. “If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war.”

    Even so, McGovern believed, his footage might have surfaced “if someone had grabbed the ball and run with it but the AEC did not want it released.”

    As ” Dark Circle” director Chris Beaver had said, “With the government trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad publicity.”

    Today

    In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people they filmed in 1946. By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On September 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?

    In the mid-1990s, researching “Hiroshima in America,” a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

    The 50th anniversary of the bombing drew extensive print and television coverage–and wide use of excerpts from the McGovern/Sussan footage–but no strong shift in American attitudes on the use of the bomb.

    Then, in 2003, as adviser to a documentary film, “Original Child Bomb,” I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. She not only did so but also obtained from McGovern’s son copies of home movies he had shot in Japan while shooting the official film.

    “Original Child Bomb” went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and this week, on August 6 and 7, it will debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race–and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.

    Greg Mitchell is the editor of E&P and former editor of Nuclear Times. He co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) the book Hiroshima in America and served as adviser to the award-winning film “Original Child Bomb.”

  • Lessons from Hiroshima, 60 Years Later

    The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago were stunning and sobering events. They brought World War II to an end, and everyone was thankful for that. Not too many of us stopped to think about the full implications of those bombs for our future. We were too busy celebrating the end of that terrible war.

    One of the people who had it absolutely right at the very beginning about the meaning of Hiroshima was the great French writer Albert Camus. He wrote in a French resistance newspaper: “Our technological civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.” We are still facing that choice.

    Both the US and the USSR tested nuclear weapons in the atmosphere until the early 1960s, while they continued to create more efficient weapons. It didn’t take either country long to get those weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles and then submarine-launched ballistic missiles. They created a situation in which the world could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. This threat of a massive nuclear exchange was thought to provide an ad hoc policy to prevent nuclear war. It was called the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, for which the acronym was M.A.D. or MAD. Never was an acronym more accurately descriptive.

    We came very close to a nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very frightening time, and we can all be thankful that sanity managed to prevail. There were high-ranking US officials at the time who were pressing for bombing Cuba, which would have meant a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That was one of many close calls during the Cold War.

    With the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be a real chance again to put nuclear dangers behind us, and once again the opportunity was largely missed. Today, in the 60th year of the Nuclear Age, we still have some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and some 4,000 of these are on hair-trigger alert. You have to wonder about a species that seems so incapable of eliminating the greatest danger to its own survival. Not so incidentally, the United States has more nuclear weapons in its arsenal than any other nation.

    There has been much emphasis in the news about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in such countries as North Korea. All countries should abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Few Americans are aware, however, that the treaty also provides that the US and other nuclear-weapons states must reduce their numbers of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, disarmament by nuclear-weapons states receives limited attention in news reporting, at least within the United States. I think this might be because the continuing existence of our own vast arsenal doesn’t seem to Americans, even if they are aware of it, to be nearly as dangerous as the threat of new nations acquiring the ghastly weapons.

    The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the hibakusha — have continually warned, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist.” In the end, I believe this is the most important lesson of Hiroshima. We must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.

    The best security, perhaps the only security, against nuclear weapons being used again, or getting into the hands of terrorists, is to eliminate them. Most of the people of the world already know this. Now it is up to the world’s people to impress the urgency of this situation upon their governments. We must act now. The future depends upon us.

    Anything less would be to abandon our responsibility to future generations.

    Walter Cronkite is an eminent broadcast journalist and serves on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council. He was anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962-1981, and currently hosts “Lessons from Hiroshima, 60 Years Later,” now airing on public radio stations nationwide.

  • Memories of Hiroshima

    In late July 2004, as I opened the window curtains of my posh room in the Rihga Royal Hotel and looked out at the city of Hiroshima, I was struck by how marvelously it had been restored. Fifty-nine years ago, Hiroshima had been nearly obliterated by the fire and blast of the U.S. atomic bombing, which killed 140,000 people by the end of 1945 and left tens of thousands of others dying slowly and painfully from radiation poisoning. Now the city had been thoroughly rebuilt, with its sea of modern buildings, surrounded by green mountains, glittering in the sunshine. More than a million people lived there.

    Decades ago, Danilo Dolci, the Italian pacifist, had criticized the rebuilding of Hiroshima, claiming that its ruins should be left as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear war. It was a harsh judgment, but I could understand his point. If the human race could tidy up from its murderous nuclear follies this well, what would prevent it from repeating them? In a variety of forms, this question pressed heavily upon me throughout my stay in Japan.

    I was visiting the country for ten days to lecture on nuclear disarmament-related issues. As the author of a recently-completed trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, I had been asked to speak at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, at the Peace Research Institute of Meiji Gakuin University (in Tokyo), at assorted venues in Tokyo and Hiroshima as an overseas guest of Gensuikin (the Japan Congress Against Atomic & Hydrogen Bombs), and by the Hiroshima Association for Nuclear Weapons Abolition. Through these talks and conversations with activists, I probably learned more from the Japanese than they learned from me.

    In a number of ways, the Japanese peace and disarmament movement was experiencing a difficult time. Although it continued to constitute a powerful presence in the nation’s life, its membership was declining and young people, particularly, did not seem to be drawn to it. Symptomatically, the number of visitors to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was dwindling. To many Japanese, the antinuclear campaign seemed frozen in time, irrelevant to contemporary events. In addition, Gensuikin, one of the two major nuclear disarmament groups in Japan, had been undermined by the collapse of the staunchly antimilitarist Socialist Party and by the ebbing strength of the labor movement–for decades its two key pillars of support. Meanwhile, the leaders of the ruling conservative party (Japan’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party) were planning to “revise” Article 9, the antiwar clause of Japan’s constitution. They had even begun to talk about developing nuclear weapons for Japan. Also, there was great frustration at the militarism of the Bush administration–particularly its war upon Iraq, its abandonment of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and its plan to build new nuclear weapons.

    Overall, then, there was a sense of frustration and, at times, pessimism, among peace-minded Japanese people. Again and again, I heard the question raised: With the hibakusha (the survivors of the atomic bombing) now elderly and dying, who will take up their key role in the nuclear disarmament campaign? When, during a Gensuikin-organized press conference, I was asked that question by a Japanese newspaper reporter, I did my best to answer it. But I am not sure I did a very good job.

    On the other hand, Japan’s nuclear disarmament campaign had a level of strength and integration in the broader society that North American peace groups might well envy. Gensuikin’s annual conference, which opened in Hiroshima on August 4, drew 3,500 registered participants. Its opening session, with thousands of activists in attendance, featured powerful antinuclear speeches not only by Shigetoshi Iwamatsu and Shingo Fukuyama (the chair and secretary general of Gensuikin), but by Tadatoshi Akiba (Mayor of Hiroshima and Chair of Mayors for Peace, a worldwide organization) and the president of Rengo (Japan’s labor federation). Its press conference was covered sympathetically by Japan’s major newspapers. Its local groups, usually headed by labor union activists, worked throughout Japan on issues ranging from opposing nuclear weapons, to defending Article 9, to agitating against the expansion of U.S. military bases.

    Furthermore, Japan’s nuclear disarmament movement found a powerful supporter in Hiroshima’s Mayor Akiba. A mathematician who was educated at MIT and, despite his progressive views, elected to the highest office in this rather conservative city, Akiba was a dynamic proponent of the movement. His administration had given very substantial funding to the Hiroshima Peace Institute and, in 2004, its staff members and the speakers at its annual symposium (including this writer) were wined and dined by the mayor at his official residence.

    Addressing Hiroshima’s annual atomic bombing commemoration ceremony on August 6, Akiba delivered an eloquent plea for the abolition of nuclear weapons. “The city of Hiroshima,” he stated, “along with the Mayors for Peace and our 611 member cities in 109 countries and regions,” had declared the period through the following August a “Year of Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World.” The goal would be the signing of a Nuclear Weapons Convention in 2010 and the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020. He also denounced “the egocentric view of the U.S. government” (which had been “ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law”), criticized terrorists for their “reliance on violence-amplifying” strategies, and condemned North Korea and other nations for “buying into the worthless policy of `nuclear insurance.’”

    The August 6 commemoration ceremony at which Akiba spoke was quite impressive. Boy scouts and girl scouts distributed bouquets of flowers to participants, school children attended in large numbers, and perhaps 20,000 people turned out for the event, conducted in the Peace Park under a broiling sun. A representative of the United Nations delivered a speech by Secretary-General Kofi Annan that warned of “the shadow of nuclear war hanging over our world.” Two local sixth graders spoke of children’s stake in world peace. Even conservative Japanese Prime Minister Junichero Koizumi addressed the assemblage, professing his concern for peace and nuclear disarmament–although members of the audience later criticized his mumbled statement, which, given his dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq and disdain for Article 9, they considered quite hypocritical.

    The most moving events occurred that evening, when thousands of people gathered to float colored lanterns down Hiroshima’s rivers, in honor of the lives lost in the atomic bombing. Unlike the commemoration ceremony, this was an informal venture, and the milling crowds, diverse music, and disparate activities in the adjoining Peace Park gave it a more spontaneous flavor.

    As our small group of Gensuikin activists and their overseas guests wended its way through the crowd, we came upon the Children’s Peace Monument, a statue of young Sadako Sasaki. At age two, Sadako had survived the atomic attack on Hiroshima; but, at age twelve, she was stricken by radiation-induced leukemia. Despite the pain, she began folding paper (origami) cranes in the hope of a cure, for there is a Japanese legend that if one folds a thousand cranes, one will be granted a wish. Sadako, however, died before reaching that number. Thereafter, her grief-stricken friends completed the process, and ever since then millions of Japanese schoolchildren–and people around the world–have folded cranes in her memory.

    As we approached Sadako’s statue, I noticed the vast number of tiny cranes that had been so carefully folded and strung together. And there was a group of young Japanese schoolchildren on the site, singing songs of peace. The children, I thought, were absolutely beautiful, and as I listened to their high-pitched voices raised in song, I had to make an effort not to burst into tears. How could the rulers of nations have approved the atomic bombing of such children in the past? How could they still be making plans to slaughter them in the future?

    Mulling over my experiences in Japan, I think that people should worry less about Hiroshima’s reconstruction and the aging of the hibakusha. We do not require the ruins of cities or even the testimony of survivors to remind us of the need to reject nuclear weapons. We have only to look at the beauty of the world–and especially its children–to understand that nuclear war is a monstrous crime.

    Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

  • The Hibakusha Voice and the Future of the Anti-Nuclear Movement

    Mr. Tsuboi Sunao would appear to be an ordinary healthy elderly Japanese man except for the large patch of white skin that medical specialists call leucoderma on his forehead. He is a cheerful 79 year old, but over the past 60 years he has been critically ill four times, each time being told that he would not survive. He first fell ill immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima when he was unconscious for 40 days. He is presently suffering from prostate cancer. Despite his illness he has been and still is an active campaigner against nuclear arms and one of the best known hibakusha, or victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In December 2003 he went to Washington D.C., to protest against the permanent display of the “Enola Gay” in the new wing of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He was not against the actual display of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people by the end of 1945. Rather he was against the exhibition of this plane without any explanation of the consequences caused as a result of the attack that took so many civilian lives and left tens of thousands of others to suffer throughout their lives.

    Mr. Tsuboi does not expect to be alive when Hiroshima City commemorates the 70th anniversary of the atomic attack in 2015. Indeed, it is almost certain that not only Mr. Tsuboi, but also most hibakusha will have passed away by then, as approximately 5000 hibakusha have died every year over the past ten years. Due to the rapidly diminishing number of hibakusha the “weathering of the Hiroshima experience” as it is called in Japan has become a serious concern for many citizens of this city in recent years. The number of children from various parts of Japan who visit the Atomic Bomb Museum in Peace Park on school excursions has also decreased sharply in recent years so that “oblivion to the Hiroshima memory” is becoming a nation wide phenomenon.

    In one corner of the Hiroshima Peace Park stands the statue of a young girl, Sadako, stretching her arms towards the sky. Sadako’s story is well known throughout the world, as books in many languages have been published about this girl who died of leukemia at the age of 12 in 1955, ten years after the bombing of Hiroshima. While ill in hospital Sadako attempted to make one thousand folded paper cranes, working on these until shortly before her death, in the belief that she would survive if she could achieve her goal. As a result of her efforts, the paper crane became a symbol of peace in Japan. Since her death visiting school groups from all over Japan have placed thousands of strings of paper cranes around her statute in memory of her lost youth and the Hiroshima tragedy. Sadly, over the past few years, these paper cranes have been set on fire a number of times, probably by young people, “just for fun.” To prevent such juvenile crime the city council built a small glass enclosure behind the statue in which to protect the paper cranes. Security cameras were also installed. Yet again, a few days before August 6, Hiroshima Day, in 2003, a university student from Kobe broke the glass and set fire to the cranes. When arrested he confessed that he did it out of frustration over the grim employment situation facing new university graduates. The incidents suggest that Sadako’s sorrowful tale, and the plight of the living as well as dead atomic victims, has become irrelevant to many young people in Japan.

    Today, Japan’s experience as the only nation to encounter a nuclear holocaust also appears irrelevant to Japan’s leading politicians including Prime Minister Koizumi. Until Mr. Koizumi became prime minister five years ago, it was an annual tradition for the prime minister to meet representatives of the hibakusha for about half an hour immediately after attending the commemoration ceremony in Peace Park on August 6. It was, of course, merely a token gesture for previous successive prime ministers to make a show of government concern for the health of hibakusha. Yet even this publicity gesture was cancelled, although Mr. Koizumi still reluctantly attends the ceremony. Some of his colleagues in the Liberal Democratic Party, including former Party Secretary General Abe Shinzo, think that Japan should develop nuclear arms for defense purposes against so-called “rogue nations” such as North Korea. Until a decade or so ago, there were still a few prominent conservative politicians who tenaciously objected to the nuclearization of Japan and to the dispatch of Japan’s Self Defense Forces to overseas war zones. Today, such statesmen no longer exist within the LDP. Article 9 of Japan’s post-war Constitution forbidding engagement in any form of armed conflict has so far been widely supported by the Japanese people, partly because of a strong desire not to repeat the nuclear holocaust. Recently, however, powerful voices both within the LDP as well as opposition parties have called for elimination of the pacifist clauses of the Constitution.

    For many months now major Japanese anti-nuclear organizations and other grass-roots peace movement groups have been planning their own events scheduled for August 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet these planned events seem to offer few new ideas of how to tackle the problem of “oblivion to the Hiroshima memory” that pervades both the younger generation as well as the politicians. It is almost certain that events to commemorate the 60th anniversary will be the last chance for surviving hibakusha to appeal to the world to oppose the idea of genocide by weapons of mass destruction. I am sure that, in August 2005, they will receive much media attention from all over the world. However, the real question that the Japanese people should ask themselves is what they will do after the 60th anniversary in order to keep alive the Hiroshima memory and to utilize it to construct a peaceful world without the living voices of the hibakusha.

    A Hiroshima A-Bomb victim, Ms. Kurihara Sadako, once wrote the following passage in one of her poems:

    It was night in the basement of a broken building Victims of the atomic bomb Crowded into the candleless darkness

    Filling the room to overflowing The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death The stuffiness of human sweat, the writhing moans When, out of the darkness, came a wondrous voice “Oh! The baby’s coming!” it said ………. And so, a new life was born In the darkness of that living hell ………. We shall give forth new life! We shall bring forth new life! Even to our death

    What is urgently required for Japan’s peace movement now is a powerful cry for new life to its own ideas of peace with new perspectives in order to confront the present world of military violence and terrorism.

    Yuki Tanaka is a Research Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and a coordinator of Japan Focus. He is the author of Japan’s Comfort Women. Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II.

    This article originally appeared on ZNet