Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Hiroshima

The Challenge of Hiroshima: Alternatives to Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defenses, and Space Weaponization in a North East Asian Context
Conference Statement

Six non-governmental organizations* brought together experts and activists from nine countries** in Hiroshima, Japan to discuss issues of global and regional peace and security. Almost 60 years after this city suffered the first atomic bombing, we confront new and continuing nuclear dangers in North East Asia and around the world.

An inspiring opening to the conference was provided by Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, who discussed the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons by 2020. A prominent sentiment that underlay the discussions during the meeting was the suffering experienced by the survivors of the atomic bombing, the hibakusha , and their courage and determination in their efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Despite the efforts of the hibakusha and the efforts of millions of other people for more than half a century to eliminate nuclear weapons, over twenty thousand remain deployed worldwide. Under the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States agreed to negotiate for the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. Unfortunately, there are no such negotiations in progress or even on the horizon for further nuclear reductions. Entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty also remains an unrealized goal, in no small part due to the refusal of the United States to ratify the Treaty.

North Korea has announced its withdrawal from the NPT, and that it has the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. It justifies this decision in part because the United States government has listed North Korea as a potential nuclear target. North Korea also cites other implied United States threats to use force against it, manifested by the continued deployment of powerful United States military forces in the region.

The United States and Japan are also proceeding with joint ballistic missile defense research, claiming a need to counter a North Korean missile threat. Missile defense deployment, and the possibility that it could be extended further to Taiwan , is viewed with great concern by China , and by other governments and peace movements throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

The United States is pursuing ambitious programs for the modernization of its nuclear forces, from its missiles and the warheads they deliver to the systems used to plan and execute nuclear strikes. China and Russia , the major nuclear powers in the region, also continue to modernize some elements of their nuclear arsenals, although at a far slower pace than the United States . In addition, the United States continues to develop new kinds of high technology conventional weapons, including increasingly accurate and long-range conventionally armed missiles. A growing proportion of United States military forces are being deployed in the Pacific region.

All countries in North East Asia and the surrounding region have a strong interest in a stable and peaceful environment. The development and deployment of dangerous weapons systems in the region undermines this goal.

After extensive discussions, the conference participants concluded:
- Every available diplomatic means should be employed to resolve the current standoff between the United States and North Korea , ranging from the existing six-party talks between North Korea , South Korea , Japan , China , Russia and the United States , to bilateral negotiations between North Korea and the United States.
- Joint ballistic missile defense research by Japan and the United States complicates the relationship between the three major nuclear powers, and furthers proliferation of sophisticated military technologies. Missile defense development will make a regional arms race more likely. Therefore, joint ballistic missile defense development should not proceed, and the United States should not deploy anti-ballistic missile systems in the region.
- Normalization of diplomatic relations between North Korea and Japan and between North Korea and the United States should be encouraged.
- China , Russia , and the United States , the three nuclear weapons states with forces in the region, should actively pursue global negotiations for the elimination of all nuclear arsenals, consistent with their disarmament obligations under the NPT. These negotiations should involve all nuclear weapons states, including those not party to the NPT.
As a way forward, the conference participants agreed that the six-party talks should be considered a starting point for long-term discussions to address further regional security-enhancing measures, including:
- the withdrawal of missiles to such locations as would reduce perceived threats to countries in the region;
- limitations and reductions of missiles in the region;
- the creation of a North East Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone; and
- the withdrawal of foreign military forces based in the region.
The conference participants recognized that regional security also depends on the global security environment. They were particularly concerned about the weaponization of space, and wide-ranging United States plans for space dominance and the use of space for war fighting. The conference participants recommended the beginning and early conclusion of negotiations for a treaty banning these developments.

The participants agreed that the outcome of the 2005 NPT Review Conference will be critical for the future of non-proliferation and disarmament. The cry of the hibakusha – no more Hiroshimas, no more Nagasakis – must be taken up by the people of the world, strongly enough this time that the governments finally must listen and act to fulfill their legal obligations for the total elimination of their nuclear weapons.

*Convened by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, the Hiroshima Peace Institute, the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation (INESAP), Mayors for Peace, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), and the Peace Depot. This was the fourth in a series of conferences in the project Moving Beyond Missile Defense, sponsored by INESAP and NAPF.

** Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.
October 8, 2004
Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer

Governments lie.
— I. F. Stone, Journalist

At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

“When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”

Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches convicted with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”

U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

Four days after Burchett’s story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.

Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began.3 Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”

Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.”

Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”

But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.

William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.” Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, “his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence,” as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: “After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as ‘hoax or propaganda.’ The Times’ Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett’s reports, and parroted the government line.” Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing-which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers-were written by none other than Laurence.

“Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Atomic Bill” Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.

In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. . . . It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: “Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural.”

Laurence was good at keeping his master’s secrets-from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence’s dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing-and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, “Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.”

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)

W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.” He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”

Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.” W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.

The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times “regretted the lapses” of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty’s “credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty’s award, concluding that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the articles that won the prize.

As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of “uncritical parroting of propaganda”-as long as it is from the United States?

It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped.

Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show “Democracy Now!.” This is an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them , written with her brother journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence

Democracy Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than 240 stations.

Originally published by CommonDreams.org

August 10, 2004
2004 Sadako Peace Day

This has been a very soulful commemoration of this 59th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima . We have heard beautiful and haunting music, poetry and reflections as well as the sweet sounds of small birds in the oak trees that surround us and provide a canopy above us.

This garden, Sadako Peace Garden , was created nine years ago and dedicated on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima , on August 6, 1995 , and each year since we have met in this garden on August 6 th to commemorate this important anniversary. This garden is dedicated to all who work for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons.

As we reflect today, I believe that two critical questions of our time deserve our attention: What have we learned from Hiroshima that will help us prevent future Hiroshimas? And, what are we willing to do about what we have learned?

If we have learned nothing from Hiroshima , as it sometimes seems, we are destined to have a tragic future. But even if we have learned that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must never be repeated, we still face a tragic future if we are not willing to act upon this understanding. It seems to me certain that in the Nuclear Age, ignorance and apathy will be our undoing. We cannot allow them to become the accomplices of nuclear weapons.

That is why education about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and advocacy for eliminating nuclear weapons are so critical to our common future, and why organizations like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation are so important to building a more secure future.

I want to share with you a poem that I received today by a poet in Tucson, Arizona, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk:

Hiroshima Day –
in my heart, I release
a thousand cranes

I hope that today we can all release a thousand cranes in our hearts and in our world. We are powerful beyond our imaginations, and the power of a thousand cranes released in many human hearts can change our world.

August 6, 2004
US Policy and the Quest for Nuclear Disarmament
“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil,
but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

– Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was one of the wisest and most far-seeing men who has walked the Earth. He looked further into the mysteries of the universe than any scientist of his time or any time. Tragically, it was the vision of this humane man that opened the door to atomic weapons. Even more tragically, it was Einstein, concerned about the possibility of a German atomic weapon, who encouraged President Roosevelt to establish the US atomic bomb project, leading to the creation of nuclear weapons and their use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki

From the outset of the Nuclear Age, the United States has been the world’s leading nuclear weapons power, a role it has strived diligently to maintain. The US created the world’s first nuclear weapons during World War II in its top-secret Manhattan Project, ostensibly for the purpose of deterring a German atomic bomb should the Germans have succeeded in developing one. In late 1944, when he understood that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic weapon, Joseph Rotblat, a Polish émigré working on the Manhattan Project, resigned out of deep concern for the implications of the project. In 1995, he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his continuing efforts for nuclear disarmament.

At the time that the atomic bomb was first tested on July 16, 1945 , the war in Europe had already ended with the surrender of Germany in May of that year, so there was no longer a need to deter the Germans. The war in the Pacific continued, however, and the US chose to use its new weapons within a matter of weeks on the Japan ese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . It chose these two cities, which had been largely spared until that point the US carpet bombing of other Japan ese cities, to test the destructive power of first an enriched uranium bomb, Little Boy , and then a plutonium bomb, Fat Man.

In using nuclear weapons, the US ignored the heroic efforts of Leo Szilard, a Hungarian émigré and atomic scientist who had earlier played a key role in the development of the first atomic weapons. It was Szilard who actually first conceptualized the possibility of a controlled fission reaction that could lead to the creation of a nuclear weapon. In 1939, worried about the possibility of the Germans developing an atomic weapon, Szilard went to Einstein and convinced him to send a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, urging that the US develop a nuclear weapons program to deter a possible German bomb. Szilard then worked in the Manhattan Project with Enrico Fermi on the first experimental test of a controlled fission reaction, proving the bomb was possible.

When it became clear in spring 1945 that the US would succeed in making an atomic weapon and that the Germans would not, Szilard applied his abundant energy to trying to stop the US from using the bombs on Japan ese cities. Szilard believed that using the bombs on Japan would lead to a nuclear arms race that could result in a terrible destructive force being unleashed on civilization. Through Eleanor Roosevelt he arranged to meet with President Roosevelt, but Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 , just prior to their scheduled meeting. Szilard then sought to arrange a meeting with President Truman, but was sent to see Jimmy Byrnes, a Truman mentor in the Senate who would soon be appointed Secretary of State. Byrnes essentially dismissed Szilard as a foreigner. Finally, Szilard organized a petition among Manhattan Project scientists, urging that the bomb be demonstrated to the Japan ese rather than used on cities. The petition, signed by some 70 scientists, was stalled by General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, and did not reach Truman before the bomb was used, although it is unlikely that it would have made a difference to Truman had it reached him.

Byrnes, who accompanied Truman to Potsdam , is believed to have encouraged the use of the bomb for partisan political reasons. He is said to have advised Truman that if Americans discovered how much had been spent on creating the first atomic bombs and was thus diverted from the war effort (approximately $2 billion), they would vote against the Democrats if the bomb were not used as soon as it was ready. Others have argued that the bomb was used on Japan to send a warning to the Soviet Union .

The official justification for the use of the atomic bombs on Japan was to end the war quickly and save American lives that would otherwise be lost in an invasion of Japan planned for November 1945. Since Japan was already largely defeated and elements of the Japan ese cabinet were seeking favorable terms of surrender, there is now considerable debate among historians about whether the use of the bombs was actually necessary to end the war. The picture is certainly much more complex than the prevalent American mythology, which suggests that the US dropped the bombs and as a result won the war. This mythology paints nuclear weapons as war-winning weapons and therefore useful and positive.

Perspectives on the Bombings

It is instructive to look at how the bombing of Hiroshima , the first use of a nuclear weapon on a city, was viewed in its immediate aftermath. Here are the views of four prominent individuals on August 8 and 9, 1945:

French writer Albert Camus: “Our technical 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. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only battle worth waging. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments — a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.”

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt: “The only safe counter weapon to this new power is the firm decision of mankind that it shall be used for constructive purposes only. This discovery must spell the end of war. We have been paying an ever-increasing price for indulging ourselves in this uncivilized way of settling our difficulties. We can no longer indulge in the slaughter of our young men. The price will be too high and will be paid not just by young men, but by whole populations. In the past we have given lip service to the desire for peace. Now we must meet the test of really working to achieve something basically new in the world.”

Former President Herbert Hoover: “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

A day later, on August 9 th , President Truman invoked God with regard to the use of the bomb: “We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force – to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind. It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. 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.” (Since the two bombs used on Japan ese cities caused the immediate deaths of some 135,000 people by blast, fire and incineration, and the deaths of over 200,000 people by the end of 1945, God must at the very least have been rather surprised by Mr. Truman’s prayer to use nuclear weapons “in His ways for His purposes.”)

Reflecting a few years later on the use of the atomic weapons by the US , the great Indian leader Mahatma 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.” Gandhi’s insight is unusually profound. What effect has the bomb had on the soul of America ? Perhaps we are learning about this as we watch the great dream of America becoming increasingly stuck in the tar of militarism and warfare on distant shores.

US Nuclear Policy

Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the US began an arms race with itself, testing and developing its nuclear arsenal. From 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, until 1990, when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, the US had a partner in the nuclear arms race and a justification to continue to develop its nuclear arsenal.

The US has always sought to maintain a devastating nuclear deterrent force, a force that would provide it with political advantage. In order to make its deterrent force credible, the US has sought to demonstrate its willingness to use its nuclear arsenal should it be attacked. Certainly its use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has contributed to a general belief that the US would not be inhibited by the costs in human lives from a retaliatory nuclear response.

The US has also been willing to share nuclear technology with its close allies. This applies particularly to the UK, but also to other NATO allies on whose territories the US has maintained nuclear weapons, including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and, until recently, Greece. The US has also extended its nuclear “umbrella” to its allies in Europe , Asia and the Pacific.

With some notable exceptions, such as Israel , the US has always sought to prevent the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries, but has felt free to engage in vertical proliferation by increasing the size and improving the quality of its nuclear arsenal and delivery systems for the arsenal. In doing so, the US has consistently demonstrated a double standard in asking other countries to abstain from doing what it was not willing to abstain from itself.

In its policies toward arms control and disarmament, the US has always sought measures that benefited its security, while not reducing US nuclear superiority. In recent years, however, under the Bush administration, the US has shown far less regard than in the past for nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union partnered on occasion in an attempt to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries. This resulted in the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This Treaty divided the countries of the world into nuclear weapons states (US, UK , USSR , France and China ) and non-nuclear weapons states (all the rest). The non-nuclear weapons states agreed not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons states agreed in Article IV of the Treaty to provide technical assistance to the non-nuclear weapons states in the peaceful uses of the atom, going so far as to call the peaceful uses of atomic energy “an inalienable right.” The nuclear weapons states also promised, in Article VI of the Treaty, to end the nuclear arms race at an early date and to hold good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament. When the Treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995, the nuclear weapons states agreed to “determined pursuit.of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goals of eliminating those weapons..” In 1996, the International Court of Justice interpreted Article VI of the NPT to mean: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

At the 2000 NPT Review Conference, the parties to the treaty agreed to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.”

The Greatest Danger Confronting Humanity

Let us fast forward to today. Countering terrorism is high on the agendas of the world’s most industrialized countries, especially the US . But in the eyes of most of the world, the nuclear weapons states are employing the greatest of terrorist threats, which are embedded in the concept of nuclear deterrence. If terrorism is the threat to injure or kill innocent people for political ends, then the reliance on nuclear deterrence is itself a terrorist act.

I would argue, in the company of Einstein, Rotblat and Szilard, that there is no greater danger confronting humanity than that of nuclear weapons. These weapons place all cities in jeopardy of annihilation. They place civilization in danger of massive destruction. And they place humanity and most of life on the endangered species list. For nearly sixty years humankind has lived with the destructive potential of nuclear weapons and has grown far too comfortable with these instruments of annihilation.

The US remains the most powerful country in the world, militarily and economically. It is the country that holds the key to nuclear disarmament. Without the active leadership of the US , nuclear disarmament will not be possible, and the world will continue to drift toward the use of these weapons once again. No other country has the capacity to bring the other nuclear weapons states to the table to negotiate the elimination of nuclear arms.

Nuclear dangers have not disappeared. Should terrorist groups, in the more traditional sense of the term, obtain nuclear weapons, they cannot be effectively deterred from using them. Protecting populations from nuclear attack will require a high level of international cooperation and US leadership. Current US leadership, however, is alienating the international community and its double standards are viewed as nuclear hypocrisy. Without a radical change of course in US nuclear policy, the likelihood of terrorist groups obtaining and using nuclear weapons is an increasingly likely possibility.

The US Nuclear Posture Review

Current US nuclear weapons policy is set forth in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), submitted to Congress on December 31, 2001 . This document calls for a “New Triad.” During the Cold War, the US referred to a triad of strategic delivery vehicles for its nuclear forces: inter-continental ballistic missiles; submarine launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The New Triad is composed of offensive strike systems, nuclear and non-nuclear (including the three delivery systems of the old triad); defenses, active and passive (including missile defense systems); and a revitalized defense infrastructure to meet emerging threats. One interesting aspect of the New Triad is that it will supplement nuclear strike forces with conventional strike forces delivered anywhere in the world in 30 minutes by intercontinental missiles.

Despite calling for powerful non-nuclear forces to be added to the US arsenal, the Nuclear Posture Review boldly announces, in what may be considered a taunt to the rest of the world in terms of US obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that nuclear weapons provide the US with “credible military options”: “Nuclear weapons play a critical role in the defense capabilities of the United States, its allies and friends. They provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats, including WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and large-scale conventional force. These nuclear capabilities possess unique properties that give the United States options to hold at risk classes of targets [that are] important to achieve strategic and political objectives.” In other words, the Nuclear Posture Review informs the world that nuclear weapons are useful to the United States both strategically and politically. Nearly 60 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and some 15 years after the breakup of the former Soviet Union , the US still finds that nuclear weapons serve strategic and political goals. To further these goals, the US has been developing earth penetrating nuclear weapons (“bunker busters”) and low-yield nuclear weapons (mini-nukes”), one-third the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. While announcing to the world its intent to continue to rely upon its nuclear arsenal, the US has been unabashed in demanding that other countries – including Iraq , Iran , North Korea , Libya and Syria – refrain from following its example.

The Nuclear Posture Review recognizes the lack of an effective earth penetrating nuclear device as a shortcoming of the current US nuclear arsenal, citing the fact that “more than 70 countries use underground Facilities (UGFs) for military purposes.” The report states, “New capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply buried targets..” The Bush administration is seeking $28 million in 2005 and $485 million over five years to design this new weapon.

The Nuclear Posture Review also states, “The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will: .be able, if directed, to design, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground nuclear testing if required.” It further states that options exist “that might provide important advantages for enhancing the nation’s deterrence posture.” The NPR calls for creating “advanced warhead concepts teams” that “will provide unique opportunities to train our next generation of weapon designers and engineers.” Overall, the Bush administration is seeking $6.6 billion for nuclear weapons activities in 2005, fifty percent more than the average annual expenditure for these activities during the Cold War.

Such goals and plans demonstrate little promise of US leadership for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The US cannot have it both ways, depending on nuclear weapons for security and planning to build more, on the one hand; and, on the other, providing leadership to the rest of the world for the elimination of these weapons.

The overall sense of the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review is that it is a long-term commitment to nuclear weapons at a time when the US is seeking to prevent these weapons from proliferating to other countries and terrorist organizations. Such a double standard cannot hold.

Presidential Directive 17 and the National Security Strategy of the US

In September 2002, one year after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, President Bush signed Presidential Directive 17, a classified document, which states: “The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force – including potentially nuclear weapons-to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.”

Also in September 2002, the White House issued a document entitled “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America .” In a letter accompanying this document, President Bush wrote, “The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination.. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” This is a commitment to preventive war, the kind that the US would subsequently wage, under false pretenses, against Iraq in March 2003. The National Security Strategy document states, “While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country..” When combined with Presidential Directive 17, this raises the possibility of preemptive or preventive nuclear war.

The National Security Strategy document reaffirms “the essential role of American military strength” by calling for building and maintaining “our defenses beyond challenge.” Expressing the understanding that “deterrence can fail,” the document stresses the need for US military dominance: “The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy – whether a state or non-state actor – to impose its will on the United States , or allies, or our friends.” The latter category of US friends has unfortunately become a diminishing species in response to the bellicose words and actions of the Bush administration.

Finally, the National Security Strategy document supports a special status in the world for American leaders by freeing them from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, a court supported by nearly all US allies. The document states: “We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.” In other words, the US will not allow the same standards of international law to be applied to US leaders as were applied to the defeated Axis powers at Nuremberg and as are accepted by our allies today.

Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

In March 2004, the Secretaries of State, Defense and Energy issued a joint report, entitled “An Assessment of the Impact of Repeal of the Prohibition on Low Yield Warhead Development on the Ability of the United States to Achieve Its Nonproliferation Objectives.” After reviewing Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the article that calls for nuclear disarmament and an end to the nuclear arms race, the report found, “Nothing in the NPT, including Article VI, or any other Treaty, however, prohibits the United States from carrying out nuclear weapons exploratory research or, for that matter, from developing and fielding new or modified nuclear warheads. That said, we should, of course, expect that several countries, in particular, those from the non-aligned movement, perhaps citing inaccurate or misleading press reports, will call attention to certain U.S. nuclear weapons R&D efforts.in questioning the U.S. nuclear policies and will be disappointed that more progress has not been achieved toward nuclear disarmament.”

The report then continues with a flourish of rhetoric about the US commitment to its Article VI nuclear disarmament commitments, leaving the impression that its “strong record of actions and policies.demonstrate unambiguously U.S. compliance with Article VI..” Unfortunately, most analysts not in the pay of the US government reject this rosy, some would say hypocritical, view of US commitment to its NPT Article VI obligations. They point to the failure of the US to comply with nearly all of the obligations set forth in the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to at the 2000 NPT Review Conference. The US , for example, has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; and has made no provisions for the irreversibility of reductions in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) that it pressed upon Russia .

When Undersecretary of State for International Security John Bolton spoke to the delegates of the 2004 Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, he described the “central bargain” of the NPT as the renunciation of nuclear weapons in exchange for assistance in developing civilian nuclear power. He left out of the equation the expectation of the non-nuclear weapons states that the nuclear weapons states would fulfill their Article VI obligations for nuclear disarmament. While pointing a finger at Iran and North Korea , he dismissed the possibility of US Article VI obligations, stating, “We cannot divert attention from the violations we face by focusing on Article VI issues that do not exist.”

Positions of Bush and Kerry

Under the Bush administration, the US has projected its reliance on nuclear weapons far into the future, and there has been virtually no willingness on the part of the US to comply with obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or other major international arms control and disarmament treaties. Would a Kerry presidency be substantially different? In a major policy speech on nuclear terrorism on June1, 2004, Kerry pledged to make the fight against nuclear terrorism his top security priority. While Bush has also taken steps to prevent nuclear proliferation and keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, Kerry distinguished his position from Bush’s by pledging to end the double standard of calling on others not to develop nuclear weapons while the US moves forward with research on new nuclear weapons, such as “bunker busters” and “mini-nukes.” Kerry also pledged to gain control of the nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union at a far more rapid rate than that contemplated by the Bush Administration, and Kerry promised to appoint a Nuclear Terrorism Coordinator to work with him in the White House in overseeing this effort. Finally, Kerry called for taking prompt action on a verifiable ban on the creation of new fissile materials for nuclear weapons, a step long supported by the international community and nearly all US allies, but not acted upon by the US .

Both Bush and Kerry have called for strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but only in relation to preventing nuclear materials from civilian nuclear reactors from being converted to nuclear weapons. Neither of them has set forth a plan to fulfill US obligations for nuclear disarmament under Article VI of the Treaty. Thus, both of them are prepared to commit to the Treaty to prevent others from obtaining nuclear weapons, but not to fulfilling the long-standing obligations of the US for nuclear disarmament. While Kerry’s positions on nuclear policy issues are certainly preferable to those of Bush, if only for Kerry’s support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and of international law in general, they are neither bold nor innovative; they simply are not as damaging as those of the Bush administration.

We cannot count on US nuclear policies to change significantly on the basis of US political leadership. The only real hope to bring about needed changes in US nuclear policy is by pressure applied by US citizens and foreign governments. I will briefly discuss three efforts to influence US nuclear policy.

Nuclear Disarmament Campaigns

Turn the Tide. At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we are initiating a campaign to chart a new course in US nuclear policy that we call Turn the Tide. It is an Internet-based campaign that seeks to awaken US citizens to the need to change US nuclear policy and spur them to communicate with their Congressional representatives and candidates, as well as the president and presidential candidates, and to cast their ballots based on positions on nuclear disarmament issues. The campaign is based on the following call to action:
1. Stop all efforts to create dangerous new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
2. Maintain the current moratorium on nuclear testing and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
3. Cancel plans to build new nuclear weapons production plants, and close and clean up the toxic contamination at existing plants.
4. Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No Use of nuclear weapons against any nation or group that does not have nuclear weapons.
5. Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nations possessing nuclear weapons.
6. Cancel funding for and plans to deploy offensive missile “defense” systems which would ignite a dangerous arms race and offer no security against terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
7. In order to significantly decrease the threat of accidental launch, together with Russia , take nuclear weapons off high-alert status and do away with the strategy of launch-on-warning.
8. Together with Russia , implement permanent and verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons taken off deployed status through the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
9. Demonstrate to other countries US commitment to reducing its reliance on nuclear weapons by removing all US nuclear weapons from foreign soil.
10. To prevent future proliferation or theft, create and maintain a global inventory of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons materials and place these weapons and materials under strict international safeguards.
11. Initiate international negotiations to fulfill existing treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the phased and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons.
12. Redirect funding from nuclear weapons programs to dismantling nuclear weapons, safeguarding nuclear materials, cleaning up the toxic legacy of the Nuclear Age and meeting more pressing social needs such as education, health care and social services.
Middle Powers Initiative . The Middle Powers Initiative is a coalition of eight international civil society organizations working in the area of nuclear disarmament that supports and encourages middle power governments, such as those middle power states calling for a New Agenda that have worked together in the United Nations for nuclear disarmament (Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden). The New Agenda Coalition governments took a leadership role in achieving agreement of the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to at the 2000 NPT Review Conference. With support from the Middle Powers Initiative, the New Agenda states have continued to press the nuclear weapons states to fulfill their Article VI obligations.

Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons . This is an important new initiative that calls for beginning negotiations for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons by the year 2005, completing negotiations by the year 2010, and completing the process of eliminating nuclear weapons by the year 2020. Mayors for Peace is a global organization composed of some 600 mayors from cities throughout the world. The organization is led by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , who played an active role in the 2004 Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2005 NPT Review Conference. They are planning to have more than 100 mayors from around the world at the 2005 NPT Review Conference.

There is much that needs to be done, and many good people are engaged in these efforts. However, still more is needed, and considerably more effort must be put forward by the American people. It is not clear whether this can be achieved. Americans for the most part seem too complacent, too comfortable with the power of their government, and too deferent to their government. They have not acted to curb its abuses, either with respect to nuclear weapons or to illegal wars of aggression such as the Iraq War.

Silence in the Face of Evil

Gandhi mused about what would happen to the soul of the destroying power after the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima . His inquiry remains relevant. What has happened to the soul of America , a country that once held such great hope for the world? Its leaders have followed the path of illegal and aggressive warfare, killing far more civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 . Its young soldiers have become torturers, and their photographs with the prisoners at Abu Ghraib reflect no sense of shame or even self-consciousness about the degradation and torture of the prisoners whom they were to guard and interrogate. And US citizens have been remarkably silent in the face of leaders who have led by fear and instigated aggressive foreign wars.

The American people have been docile and reticent to react to atrocities committed in their names. Their greatest sin may be silence in the face of the misuse and misdirection of US military might, and this may be a sin that has taken hold of the soul of America .

The survivors of the atomic bombings are called hibakusha in Japan ese. They were nearly all innocent civilians. Many have lived sad and painful lives following the bombings. Their cry has been “Never again! We will not repeat the evil.” They have summoned the courage to speak out and convey their experiences in the hope that they can prevent future nuclear attacks and future hibakusha . I will conclude with a poem I wrote about hibakusha and silence. It is called Hibakusha Do Not Just Happen.

Hibakusha Do Not Just Happen

For every hibakusha
there is a pilot

for every hibakusha
there is a planner

for every hibakusha
there is a bombardier

for every hibakusha
there is a bomb designer

for every hibakusha
there is a missile maker

for every hibakusha
there is a missileer

for every hibakusha
there is a targeter

for every hibakusha
there is a commander

for every hibakusha
there is a button pusher

for every hibakusha
many must contribute

for every hibakusha
many must obey

for every hibakusha
many must be silent

The use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations has been described appropriately by the former president of the International Court of Justice, Mohammed Bedjaoui, as “the ultimate evil.” General George Lee Butler, a former commander of the US Strategic Command, described nuclear weapons as “the enemy of humanity.” “Indeed,” he said, “they’re not weapons at all. They’re some species of biological time bombs whose effects transcend time and space, poisoning the earth and its inhabitants for generations to come.”

It is silence in the face of evil that allows evil to flourish. I fear this is the case in America today. There is no widespread uprising in the US for nuclear sanity and the elimination of these weapons. As a result, the nuclear threat will likely continue and the result may well be the creation of more hibakusha. This time Americans may learn the deeply painful lesson of being under, rather than above, the bomb. It is my hope that Americans will use both their imaginations and their consciences, and awaken to the serious danger that nuclear weapons pose for all humanity, including themselves, before it is too late, and will lead the world in prevailing in the greatest challenge ever faced by humanity, that of ridding the world of this ultimate evil. It is a far more difficult task than putting a man on the moon, and the first and most important step is breaking the silence that has allowed this evil to go unchallenged. This is surely necessary not only for the future of humanity, but also for the soul of America.

David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org ). He is the co-author of Nuclear Weapons and the World Court and many other studies of peace in the Nuclear Age.
July 25, 2004
Remembering Hiroshima & Nagasaki

At 1:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a US B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay, took off from Tinian Island in the Mariana Islands. It carried the world’s second atomic bomb, the first having been detonated three weeks earlier at a US test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Enola Gay carried one atomic bomb, with an enriched uranium core. The bomb had been named “Little Boy.” It had an explosive force of some 12,500 tons of TNT. At 8:15 a.m. that morning, as the citizens of Hiroshima were beginning their day, the Enola Gay released its horrific cargo, which fell for 43 seconds before detonating at 580 meters above Shima Hospital near the center of the city.

Here is a description from a pamphlet published by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum of what happened immediately following the explosion:

“The temperature of the air at the point of explosion reached several million degrees Celsius (the maximum temperature of conventional bombs is approximately 5,000 degrees Celsius). Several millionths of a second after the explosion a fireball appeared, radiating white heat. After 1/10,000th of a second, the fireball reached a diameter of approximately 28 meters with a temperature of close to 300,000 degrees Celsius. At the instant of the explosion, intense heat rays and radiation were released in all directions, and a blast erupted with incredible pressure on the surrounding air.”

As a result of the blast, heat and ensuing fires, the city of Hiroshima was leveled and some 90,000 people in it perished that day. The world’s second test of a nuclear weapon demonstrated conclusively the awesome power of nuclear weapons for killing and maiming. Schools were destroyed and their students and teachers slaughtered. Hospitals with their patients and medical staffs were obliterated. The bombing of Hiroshima was an act of massive destruction of a civilian population, the destruction of an entire city with a single bomb. Harry Truman, president of the United States, upon being notified, said, in egregiously poor judgment, “This is the greatest thing in history.”

Three days after destroying Hiroshima, after failing to find an opening in the clouds over its primary target of the city of Kokura, a US B-29 bomber, named Bockscar, attacked the Japanese city of Nagasaki with the world’s third atomic weapon. This bomb had a plutonium core and an explosive force of some 22,000 tons of TNT. It had been named “Fat Man.” The attack took place at 11:02 a.m. It resulted in the immediate deaths of some 40,000 people.

In his first speech to the US public about the bombing of Hiroshima, which he delivered on August 9, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Harry Truman reported: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” While Hiroshima did have a military base in the city, it was not the base that was targeted, but the center of the city. The vast majority of the victims in Hiroshima were ordinary civilians, including large numbers of women and children. Truman continued, “But that attack is only a warning of things to come.” Truman went on to refer to the “awful responsibility which has come to us,” and to “thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies.” He prayed that God “may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purpose.” It was a chilling and prophetic prayer.

By the end of 1945, some 145,000 people had died in Hiroshima, and some 75,000 people had died in Nagasaki. Tens of thousands more suffered serious injuries. Deaths among survivors of the bombings have continued over the years due primarily to the effects of radiation poisoning.

Now looking back at these terrible events, inevitably our collective memory has faded and is reshaped by current perspectives. With the passage of time, those who actually experienced the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become far fewer in number. Although their own memories of the trauma to themselves and their cities may remain vivid, their stories are unknown by large portions of the world’s population. The message of the survivors has been simple, clear and consistent: “Never Again!” At the Memorial Cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is this inscription: “Let all souls here rest in peace; for we shall not repeat the evil.” The “we” in the inscription refers to all of us and to each of us.

Yet, the fate of the world, and particularly the fate of humanity, may hang on how we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we remember the bombings of these cities as just another point in human history, along with many other important points, we may well lack the political will to deal effectively with the challenges that nuclear weapons pose to humanity. If, on the other hand, we remember these bombings as a turning point in human history, a time at which peace became an imperative, we may still find the political will to save ourselves from the fate that befell the inhabitants of these two cities.

In the introduction to their book, Hiroshima in America, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell write, “You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.” The same may be said of the twenty-first century. The same may be said of the nuclear predicament that confronts humanity. Neither our time nor our future can be adequately understood without understanding what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there has been a struggle for memory. The story of the bombings differs radically between what has been told in America and how the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recount this tragedy. America’s rendition is a story of triumph – triumph of technology and triumph in war. It views the bomb from above, from the perspective of those who dropped it. For the vast majority of US citizens, the creation of the bomb has been seen as a technological feat of extraordinary proportions, giving rise to the most powerful weapon in the history of warfare. From this perspective, the atomic bombs made possible the complete defeat of Japanese imperial power and brought World War II to an abrupt end.

In the minds of many, if not most US citizens, the atomic bombs saved the lives of perhaps a million US soldiers, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is seen as a small price to pay to save so many lives and bring a terrible war to an end. This view leaves the impression that bombing these cities with atomic weapons was useful, fruitful and an occasion to be celebrated.

The problem with this rendition of history is that the need for dropping the bombs to end the war has been widely challenged by historians. Many scholars, including Lifton and Mitchell, have questioned the official US account of the bombings. These critics have variously pointed out that Japan was attempting to surrender at the time the bombs were dropped, that the US Army Strategic Survey calculated far fewer US casualties from an invasion of Japan, and that there were other ways to end the war without using the atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities.

Among the critics of the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leading US military figures. General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander Europe during World War II and later US president, described his reaction upon having been told by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that atomic bombs would be used on Japanese cities:

“During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, attempting to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. . . .”

In a post-war interview, Eisenhower told a journalist, “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

General Henry “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces during World War II, wrote, “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, wrote,

“It is my opinion 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…. 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….”

Despite these powerful statements of dissent from US World War II military leaders, there is still a strong sense in the United States and among its allies that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified by the war. There is insufficient recognition that the victims of the bombings were largely civilians, that those closest to the epicenters of the explosions were incinerated, while those further away were exposed to radiation poisoning, that many suffered excruciatingly painful deaths, and that even today, more than five decades after the bombings, survivors continue to suffer from the effects of the radiation exposure.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in the past. We cannot resurrect these cities. The residents of these cities have done this for themselves. What we can do is learn from their experience. What they have to teach is perhaps humanity’s most important lesson: We are confronted by the possibility of our extinction as a species, not simply the reality of our individual deaths, but the death of humanity. This possibility became evident at Hiroshima. The great French existential writer, Albert Camus, wrote in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima:

“Our technical 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. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only battle worth waging. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments – a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.”

To rely upon nuclear weapons for security is to put the future of our species and most of life at risk of annihilation. Humanity is faced with a choice: Eliminate nuclear weapons or continue to run the risk of them eliminating us. Unless we recognize this choice and act upon it, we face the possibility of a global Hiroshima.

Living with Myths

In his book, The Myths of August, former US Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall writes:

“In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the US government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history. These exhilarating, excessive utterances depicted a profoundly altered universe and produced a reorientation of thought that influenced the behavior of nations and changed the outlook and the expectations of the inhabitants of this planet.”

Many myths have grown up around the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that have the effect of making the use of nuclear weapons more palatable. To restate, one such myth is that there was no choice but to use nuclear weapons on these cities. Another is that doing so saved the lives of in excess of one million US soldiers. Underlying these myths is a more general myth that US leaders can be expected to do what is right and moral. To conclude that our leaders did the wrong thing by acting immorally at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering civilian populations, flies in the face of this widespread understanding of who we are as a people. To maintain our sense of our own decency, reflected by the actions of our leaders, may require us to bend the facts to fit our myths.

When a historical retrospective of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which was to include the reservations of US military leaders such as Eisenhower, Arnold and Leahy – was planned for the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of these events at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, a major outcry of opposition arose from veteran’s groups and members of the US Congress. In the end, the Smithsonian exhibition was reduced under pressure from a broad historical perspective on the bombings to a display and celebration of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Our Myths Help Shape Our Ethical Perspectives

Our understanding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helps to give rise to our general orientation toward nuclear weapons. Because of our myths about the benefits of using nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a tendency to view nuclear weapons in a positive light. Despite the moral issues involved in destroying civilian populations, most US citizens can justify reliance on such weapons for our “protection.” A good example of this rationalization is found in the views of many students at the University of California about the role of their university in the management of the US nuclear weapons laboratories.

Recently, I spoke to a class of students at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I presented the students with a hypothetical situation. They were asked to imagine that they were students at a prestigious German university during the 1930s after the Nazis had come to power. They discovered a secret laboratory at their university where professors were researching and developing gas chambers and incinerators for the Nazis to use in exterminating their enemies. I then posed the question: What were their ethical responsibilities after making this discovery?

The hypothetical generated a lively discussion. The students took their ethical responsibilities within the hypothetical situation seriously. They realized that there would be danger in overtly opposing the development of these genocidal devices. Nonetheless, they were willing to take risks to prevent the university from going forward with their program to develop the gas chambers and incinerators. Some were ready to go to the authorities at the university to protest. Others were prepared to form small groups and make plans to secretly sabotage the program. Others were intent upon escaping the country to let the world know what was happening in order to bring international pressure to bear upon the Nazi regime. The students were not neutral and most expressed a strong desire to act courageously in opposition to this university program, even if their futures and possibly their lives would be at risk.

After listening to the impressive ethical stands that the students were willing to take and congratulating them, I changed the hypothetical. I asked them to consider that it was now some 70 years later and that they were students at the University of California in the year 2003. This, of course, is not hypothetical. The students are in fact enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I asked them to imagine that their university, the University of California, was involved in the research and development of nuclear weapons, that their university managed the US nuclear weapons laboratories that had researched and developed nearly all of the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal. This also happens to be true since the University of California has long managed the US nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore.

After presenting the students with this scenario, I asked them to consider their ethical responsibilities. I was expecting that they would reach similar conclusions to the first hypothetical, that they would express dismay at discovering that their university was involved in the research and development of weapons of mass destruction and would be prepared to oppose this situation. This time, however, only a small number of students expressed the same sense of moral outrage at their university’s involvement and indicated a willingness to take risks in protesting this involvement. Many of the students felt that they had no ethical responsibilities under these circumstances.

Many students sought to distinguish the two scenarios. In the first scenario, some said, it was known that the gas chambers and incinerators were to be used for the purpose of committing genocide. In the second scenario, the one they were actually living in, they didn’t believe that the nuclear weapons would be used. They pointed out that nuclear weapons had not been used for more than 50 years and, therefore, they thought it was unlikely that they would be used in the future. Further, they didn’t think that the United States would actually use nuclear weapons because our leaders would feel constrained from doing so. Finally, they thought that the United States had a responsibility to defend itself, which they believed nuclear weapons would do.

Frankly, I was surprised by the results of this exercise. I had expected that the students would oppose both scenarios and that their idealism would call for protest against their university’s management of the nuclear weapons laboratories. In the second scenario, however, they had many rationales and/or rationalizations for not becoming involved. This scenario was not hypothetical. It was real. It would actually demand something of them. Many were reluctant to commit themselves. Most had accepted the mythology about our leaders doing the right thing and the further mythology about nuclear weapons protecting us. They had not thought through the risks associated with possessing and deploying large numbers of nuclear weapons. They had not considered the risks of accidents and miscalculations, the dangers of faulty communications and irrational leaders. They had not considered the possibilities that deterrence could fail and the result could be future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, in fact, globalized Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.

Most of the students were able to avoid accepting personal responsibility for the involvement of their university in the process of developing weapons of mass destruction. Some also dismissed their personal responsibility on the basis that the university did not belong solely to them and that in fact nuclear weapons were a societal problem. They were, of course, right about this: nuclear weapons are a societal problem. Unfortunately, it is a problem for which far too few individuals are taking personal ethical responsibility. The students represented a microcosm of a larger societal problem of indifference and inaction in the face of our present reliance on nuclear weapons. The result of this inaction is tragically the likelihood that eventually these weapons will again be used with horrendous consequences for humanity.

Making the Nuclear Weapons Threat Real

Just as most of these students do not take personal ethical responsibility to protest involvement in nuclear weapons research and development by their university, most leaders and potential leaders of nuclear weapons states do not accept the necessity of challenging the nuclear status quo and working to achieve nuclear disarmament.

What helped me to understand the horrendous consequences and risks of nuclear weapons was a visit to the memorial museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when I was 21 years old. These museums keep alive the memory of the destructiveness of the relatively small nuclear weapons that were used on these two cities. They also provide a glimpse into the human suffering caused by nuclear weapons. I have long believed that a visit to one or both of these museums should be a requirement for any leader of a nuclear weapons state. Without visiting these museums and being exposed by film, artifacts and displays to the devastation that nuclear weapons cause, it is difficult to grasp the extent of the destructiveness of these devices. One realizes that nuclear weapons are not even weapons at all, but something far more ominous. They are instruments of genocide and perhaps omnicide, the destruction of all.

To the best of my knowledge, no head of state or government of a nuclear weapons state has actually visited these museums before or during his or her term in office. If political leaders will not make the effort to visit the sites of nuclear devastation, then it is necessary for the people of their countries to bring the message of these cities to them. But first, of course, the people must themselves be exposed to the stories and messages of these cities. It is unrealistic to expect that many people will travel to Hiroshima or Nagasaki to visit the memorial museums, but it is not unrealistic to bring the messages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to communities all over the world.

In Santa Barbara, where the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is located, we have tried to bring the message of Hiroshima to our community and beyond. On the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima we created a peace memorial garden that we named Sadako Peace Garden. The name Sadako comes from that of a young girl, Sadako Sasaki, who was exposed to radiation as a two-year-old in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. Sadako lived a normal life for the next ten years until she developed leukemia as a result of the radiation exposure. During her hospitalization, Sadako folded paper cranes in the hopes of recovering her health. The crane is a symbol of health and longevity in Japan, and it is believed that if one folds one thousand paper cranes they will have their wish come true. Sadako wished to regain her health and for peace in the world. On one of her paper cranes she wrote this short poem, “I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.”

Sadako did not finish folding her one thousand paper cranes before her short life came to an end. Her classmates, however, responded to Sadako’s courage and her wish for peace by finishing the job of folding the thousand paper cranes. Soon Sadako’s story began to spread, and throughout Japan children folded paper cranes in remembrance of her and her wish for peace. Tens of thousands of paper cranes poured into Hiroshima from all over Japan. Eventually, Sadako’s story spread throughout the world, and today many children in distant lands have heard of Sadako and have folded paper cranes in her memory.

In Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park there stands a monument to Sadako. At the base of that monument is this message, “This is our cry. This is our prayer. For peace in this world.” It is the message of children throughout the world who honor Sadako’s memory.

Sadako Peace Garden in Santa Barbara is a beautiful, tranquil place. In this garden are some large rocks, and cranes are carved in relief onto their surfaces. Each year on August 6th, Hiroshima Day, we celebrate Sadako Peace Day, a day of remembrance of Sadako and other innocent victims of war. Each year on Sadako Peace Day we have music, reflection and poetry at Sadako Peace Garden. In this way, we seek to keep the memory of Hiroshima alive in our community.

In addition to creating Sadako Peace Garden and holding an annual commemoration on Hiroshima Day, we also made arrangements with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Museums to bring an exhibition about the destruction caused by the atomic weapons to our community. The museums sent an impressive exhibition that included artifacts, photographs and videos. The exhibit helped make what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki real to many members of our community.

At the time of the exhibit, several hibakusha, survivors of the bombings, visited our community and spoke in public about their experiences. They brought to life the horrors of nuclear weapons by relating their personal experiences. There are also many books that collect the stories of atomic bomb survivors. It is nearly impossible to hear or read of their experiences without being deeply moved.

Here is the description of one hibakusha, Miyoko Matsubara, who was a 12-year-old schoolgirl in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Her description begins upon awakening from being unconscious after the bombing:

“I had no idea how long I had lain unconscious, but when I regained consciousness the bright sunny morning had turned into night. Takiko, who had stood next to me, had simply disappeared from my sight. I could see none of my friends nor any other students. Perhaps they had been blown away by the blast.

“I rose to my feet surprised. All that was left of my jacket was the upper part around my chest. And my baggy working trousers were gone, leaving only the waistband and a few patches of cloth. The only clothes left on me were dirty white underwear.

“Then I realized that my face, hands, and legs had been burned, and were swollen with the skin peeled off and hanging down in shreds. I was bleeding and some areas had turned yellow. Terror struck me, and I felt that I had to go home. And the next moment, I frantically started running away from the scene forgetting all about the heat and pain.

“On my way home, I saw a lot of people. All of them were almost naked and looked like characters out of horror movies with their skin and flesh horribly burned and blistered. The place around the Tsurumi bridge was crowded with many injured people. They held their arms aloft in front of them. Their hair stood on end. They were groaning and cursing. With pain in their eyes and furious looks on their faces, they were crying out for their mothers to help them.

“I was feeling unbearably hot, so I went down to the river. There were a lot of people in the water crying and shouting for help. Countless dead bodies were being carried away by the water – some floating, some sinking. Some bodies had been badly hurt, and their intestines were exposed. It was a horrible sight, yet I had to jump in the water to save myself from heat I felt all over.”

After describing her personal struggle as a survivor of the bombing, Miyoko Matsubara offered this message to the young people of the world: “Nuclear weapons do not deter war. Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist. We all must learn the value of human life. If you do not agree with me on this, please come to Hiroshima and see for yourself the destructive power of these deadly weapons at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.”

A Simple Proposal

I would like to offer a simple proposal related to remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is also a way to confront the deadening myths in our culture that surround the bombing of these cities. I suggest that every community throughout the globe commemorate the period August 6th through August 9th as Hiroshima and Nagasaki Days. The commemoration can be short or long, simple or elaborate, but these days should not be forgotten. By looking back we can also look forward and remain cognizant of the risks that are before us. These commemorations also provide a time to focus on what needs to be done to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and all life. By keeping the memory of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alive we may also be helping to keep humanity alive. This is a critical part of our responsibility as citizens of Earth living in the Nuclear Age.

Each year on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Days, August 6th and 9th respectively, the mayors of these two cities deliver proclamations on behalf of their cities. These proclamations are distributed via the internet and by other means. Copies may be obtained in advance and shared on the occasion of a community commemoration of these days. It is also a time in which stories of the hibakusha, the survivors, may be shared and a time to bring experts to speak on current nuclear threats.

The world needs common symbols to bring us together. One such common symbol is the photograph of the Earth from outer space. It is a symbol that makes us understand immediately that we all share a common planet and a common future. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are other common symbols. We know that these names stand for more than cities in Japan; they stand for the massive destructiveness of nuclear weapons and for the human strength and spirit needed to overcome this destructiveness.

The world needs to recall and reflect on the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as symbols of human strength and indomitable spirit. We need to be able to remember truly what happened to these cities if we are going to unite to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and all life. We need to understand that it is not necessary to be victims of our own technologies, that we are capable of controlling even the most dangerous of them.

In their book, Hiroshima in America, Lifton and Mitchell conclude:

“Confronting Hiroshima can be a powerful source of renewal. It can enable us to emerge from nuclear entrapment and rediscover our imaginative capacities on behalf of human good. We can overcome our moral inversion and cease to justify weapons or actions of mass killing. We can condemn and then step back from acts of desecration and recognize what Camus called a ‘philosophy of limits.’ In that way we can also take steps to cease betraying ourselves, cease harming and deceiving our own people. We can also free our society from its apocalyptic concealment, and in the process enlarge our vision. We can break out of our long-standing numbing in the vitalizing endeavor of learning, or relearning, to feel. And we can divest ourselves of a debilitating sense of futurelessness and once more feel bonded to past and future generations.”

The future is in our hands. We must not be content to drift along on the path of nuclear terror. Our responsibility as citizens of Earth and of all nations is to grasp the enormity of our challenge in the Nuclear Age and to rise to that challenge on behalf of ourselves, our children and all future generations. Our task must be to reclaim our humanity and assure our common future by ridding the world of these inhumane instruments of indiscriminate death and destruction. The path to assuring humanity’s future runs through Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s past.
* David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the co-author of Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (Middleway Press, 2002) and the editor of Hope in a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future (Capra Press, 2003). This article is being published as Blackaby Paper #4 by Abolition 2000-UK.
Sources

_____, “Records of the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing,” Nagasaki: City of Nagasaki, 1998.

_____, “The Outline of Atomic Bomb Damage in Hiroshima,” Hiroshima: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, 1994.

_____, The Spirit of Hiroshima, An Introduction to the Atomic Bomb Tragedy, Hiroshima: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, 1999.

Cantelon, Philip L., Richard G. Hewlett and Robert C. Williams (eds.), The American Atom, A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present (Second Edition), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Hogan, Michael J. (ed.), Hiroshima in History and Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Lifton, Robert J. and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, New York: Avon Books, 1996.

Matsubara, Miyoko, “The Spirit of Hiroshima,” Santa Barbara, CA: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 1994, online at: https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/hiroshima-hibakusha.html.

Udall, Stewart L., The Myths of August, A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom, New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

Walker, J. Samuel, Prompt and Utter Destruction, Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

August 1, 2003
Teaching Youth To Start Worrying About The Bomb

HIROSHIMA, Japan — After 18 years of almost daily lectures about surviving the atomic bomb dropped here on Aug. 6, 1945, Setsuko Iwamoto’s stories to classrooms full of students have a finely limned quality about them, as smooth as pebbles in a creek.

There is no straining for melodrama as the 71-year-old woman recounts how her skin seemed to melt and pour off her arms after the flash, or how whatever scraps of cloth that could be found were used by people to protect themselves from the black rain that fell afterward.

Stories of survival do not get much more compelling. But Ms. Iwamoto worries now, with Japan inching toward rearmament, that the spirit of Hiroshima and the moral power of her story are fading.

Each year, she said, the stares of the students she faces from the podium grow blanker, just as their questions about the atomic bombing grow more stilted, appearing rehearsed rather than heartfelt.

“Just a few years ago, most schoolteachers had direct memories of the war,” said Ms. Iwamoto, who said she was found to have cancer last year but appeared hale. “That’s not the case at all anymore, though, and I wonder once this kind of lecture ends, how effectively the experience of war is taught.

“In my day we had trouble just surviving every day, whereas these days everyone in Japan is comfortable,” Ms. Iwamoto added. “Children learn about war through manga [comic books] and think it is kind of cool. They have no particular sensation of Japan’s defeat.”

The profound shock of the Hiroshima bombing, and that of Nagasaki three days later, is widely credited not only with ending World War II, but with creating a strong emotional underpinning to Japan’s official creed of nonviolence, consecrated in an American-drafted Constitution that faces increasingly strident calls for revision.

Fears about Japan becoming increasingly blasé about remembering the atomic bombings, though, are not limited to the survivors, or hibakusha, as they are known here.

Hiroshima’s entire image and economy are linked to the horrendous final days of World War II, and city officials say visits by Japanese travelers are locked in a serious, long-term decline, broken only by a modest spike since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

Commissions have been formed to reverse the trend. A museum on the grounds of the Peace Park, near ground zero, has been expanded and modernized. In the hope of popularizing visits here, even a manga has been created — to celebrate the memory of Sadako Sasaki, a 12-year-old who died of blood cancer years after the bombing.

“We are faced with the challenge of conveying this experience to the next generations,” said Noriyuki Masuda, associate director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Association. “At some point we realized that what we had was a crisis involving young people’s consciousness. We have been facing a change in attitudes and a decline of interest in Japan as a nation.”

When Ms. Iwamoto completed her one-hour presentation to a lecture hall full of sixth graders who had come to Hiroshima on a field trip, five minutes were left for what was billed as a question and answer session.

In lieu of a question, a young girl who appeared to have been chosen for her excellence in study walked nervously to the microphone and read a brief speech in the name of her class. “Why must there be war?” she said flatly, ending her comments with a wish for the lecturer’s good health.

Asked if visits at a slightly older age might favor deeper thought, not to mention real questions, the girl’s teacher, Keiko Tokunaga, demurred. “This is the age when children are just beginning to think about the world,” she said, “and I think that it is the best time to introduce ideas like this. But this is just a start.”

Out on the grand plaza of the Peace Park, where the famous atomic bomb dome sits, just a stone’s throw across the Motoyasu River, one has trouble imagining that visits to the Hiroshima memorial grounds are in decline.

Over the course of a fine spring day, one group after another of uniformed students troops from the museum to the dome, typically laying wreaths and garlands of origami cranes by a statue of Miss Sasaki, the renowned 12-year-old bomb victim.

Foreign visitors, whose numbers have increased as those of Japanese have declined, are also constantly in evidence. This day, a group of volunteer greeters were excitedly awaiting the arrival of a group from Senegal, including the country’s ambassador.

At the approach of an American journalist, a group of ninth graders from Tokyo was unfailingly polite, and even excited to be answering questions about their trip here. None had discussed the bombing, or Japan’s long-fixed identity as a nation of peace, with their parents before coming.

Nor did they have many ideas of how the war began or why it ended amid mushroom clouds and hundreds of thousands of instant casualties. “This was kind of an experiment, because it was the first atomic bombing,” said Eiichiro Hiraka, a 14-year-old with a dream of becoming a professional baseball player. “Hiroshima was the perfect size for that.”

A classmate, Kaoru Iwasaki, said she had studied World War II the year before but did not remember much. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you why the war started,” she said. Asked the same question, her friend Chisato Kajitani declared that she was not very interested in the subject. “I’ve never really thought about that question before,” she said.

May 29, 2003
Peace Declarations From Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the two most important places in the world where memory is preserved about what nuclear weapons do to people and to cities. Each year on August 6th and 9th respectively, the anniversaries of the bombings, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deliver the Peace Declarations for their cities. These statements provide a pulse of the status of efforts to eliminate the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and all life.

On the 57th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba lamented that the painful experience of those who survived the bombings “appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind,” and that consequently “the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing.”

Mayor Akiba noted that the “path of reconciliation…has been abandoned.” He called for “conscientious exploration and understanding of the past.” To achieve this end, he called for establishing a “Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study Course in colleges and universities around the world,” and indicated that plans for this are already in progress. He also urged President Bush to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki to “confirm with his own eyes what nuclear weapons hold in store for us all.” Thus far, no American president has visited either city.

Mayor Akiba called upon the government of Japan “to reject nuclear weapons absolutely and to renounce war.” The Japanese government, he said, “has a responsibility to convey the memories, voices, and prayers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki throughout the world, especially to the United States, and for the sake of tomorrow’s children, to prevent war.”

Mayor Iccho Itoh of Nagasaki condemned the United States for its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; its rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and its plans to move forward with missile defenses, to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, and to use preemptive nuclear strikes. “We are appalled,” he said, “by this series of unilateral actions taken by the government of the United States, actions which are also being condemned by people of sound judgment throughout the world.”

Mayor Itoh called for the government of Japan to confirm in law the three non-nuclear principles that have guided Japan (that it will not possess, manufacture or allow nuclear weapons into the country). He also called for the Japanese government to help create a Northeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, to cease its reliance on the US “nuclear umbrella,” and “to enhance the welfare of aging atomic bomb survivors residing both within and outside Japan.”

Mayor Itoh announced that the City of Nagasaki would be hosting in 2003 a second worldwide gathering of civil society organizations to add impetus to efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The City of Nagasaki, he said, will also be reaching out to youth by promoting the Nagasaki Peace Education Program.

“The abolition of nuclear arms through mutual understanding and dialogue,” said Mayor Itoh, “is an absolute precondition for the realization of a peaceful world. It is up to us, ordinary citizens, to rise up and lead the world to peace.”

Ordinary citizens of the United States must soon come to understand the critical message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being conveyed by the mayors of these cities on behalf of those who perished and those who survived the atomic bombings. Without such understanding, and with such enormous power left in the hands of men like George W. Bush and many of his advisors shaping nuclear policy, the world moves closer to the day when more cities will share the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
*David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

August 16, 2002
Sadako Peace Day 2002

We are gathered in community at this beautiful garden, as others are gathered in Hiroshima and throughout the world, to remember the horror and consequences of the use of nuclear weapons so that we may help assure that there are not future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.

Sadako Peace Garden, named for Sadako Sasaki, a young victim of the Hiroshima bombing, is dedicated to all who work for peace and a nuclear weapons free world.

On this occasion, I would like to offer three suggestions.

First, believe in your dreams. No dream is impossible, even a world at peace, even a world free of nuclear weapons. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” The world and future generations badly need for us to believe in these dreams and to keep hope alive.

Second, dedicate yourself to making your dreams become reality. Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” I urge you to act upon your dreams, act for a better, more peaceful world, free of the threat of nuclear holocaust.

Third, never give up. Here is what the Dalai Lama says about never giving up.

NEVER GIVE UP

No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country
Is spent developing the mind
Instead of the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
But to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
In your heart and in the world
Work for peace
And I say again
Never give up
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up

In concluding, I’d like to share a recent poem about Einstein, one of my heroes, a great scientist and even greater humanitarian, a man who never gave up.
EINSTEIN’S REGRET

Einstein’s regret ran deep
Like the deep pools of sorrow
That were his eyes.

His mind could see things
That others could not,
The bending of light,

The slowing of time,
Relationships of trains passing
In the night, and power,

Dormant and asleep,
That could be awakened,
But who would dare?

He saw patterns
In snowflakes and stars,
Unimaginable simplicity

To make one weep with joy.

When the shadow of Hitler
Spread across Europe.
What was Einstein to do

But what he did?
His regret ran deep, deeper
Than the deep pools of sorrow

That were his eyes.
Thank you for remembering, for being part of a community of hope, and for dreaming and working for a more peaceful and decent world without giving up — ever.

David Krieger
August 6, 2002

August 6, 2002
From Hiroshima to Hope

“I will write peace on your wings, and you will fly all over the world.”
— Sadako Sasaki

August 6th. Hiroshima Day. A time for reflection, for listening to the sounds of birds and water, the rustling leaves, for remembering who we are.

We remember Hiroshima not for the past, but for the future. We remember Hiroshima so that its past will not become our future. Hiroshima is best remembered with the plaintive sounds of the bamboo flute, the Shakuhachi. It conjures up the devastation, the destruction, the encompassing emptiness of that day. The Shakuhachi reveals the tear in the fabric of humanity that was ripped opened by the bomb. Through that tear we could all be sucked as into a black hole in the universe of decency.

Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are a symbol of an imploding human spirit. They are a fire that consumes the crisp air of decency. They are a crossroads where science joined hands with evil and apathy. They are a triumph of academic certainty wrapped in the arrogance and convoluted lies of deterrence. They are Einstein’s regret. They are many things, but not weapons — not instruments of war, but of genocide and perhaps of omnicide.

Those who gather to retell and listen to the story of Hiroshima and of Sadako are a community, a community committed to a human future. We may not know one another, but we are a community. And we are part of a greater community gathered throughout the world to commemorate this day, seeking to turn Hiroshima to Hope.

If we succeed, the child Sadako of a thousand cranes, who would have been an older woman now, will be remembered by new generations. She will be remembered long after the names and spirits of those who made and used and celebrated the bomb will have faded into the haunting sounds of the Shakuhachi.
*David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

August 2, 2002
The History of My Peace Activities with an A-bomb Survivor and Student Peace Fellows

I have dreamed of participating in Sadako Peace Day ever since I learned that the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation commemorates August 6th every year. The reason why I have not been able to attend this ceremony is that I have always been in Hiroshima on the same day. After my first meeting with an atomic bomb survivor of Hiroshima, Miyoko Matsubara, I organized a college student volunteer group and visited Hiroshima for three days including on August 6th to study peace. This encounter with one Hibakusha, or an A-bomb survivor, changed my life dramatically. I would like to share with you a brief history of my peace activities with a Hibakusha and Japanese students, my fellow peace companions.

It was the winter of 1996 that Miyoko came to my university, Soka University in Tokyo, Japan, to share her life story. I was a senior at that time. Even though I had learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school, I had little knowledge about the issue; I knew that thousands of innocent people were killed instantly and that still many survivors suffer from radiation exposure. But I didn’t know why it really happed and how survivors have struggled to live. So, it was the first time for me to hear a first hand experience from a Hibakusha. I was so furious about the brutality of nuclear weapons and felt the urgent need to do something so that the same mistake will not be repeated. Then, I decided to take action by supporting her peace activities. I decided to go to Hiroshima, believing that I should visit the very place where the atomic bomb was dropped to know what really happened.

The next year, in spring of 1997, 9 students, including myself, and one American professor went to Hiroshima. We called this trip “Peace Trip to Hiroshima.” We visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Peace Memorial Park and Okuno Island, where the Japanese army developed poison gas during World War II. We thought that visiting Okuno Island was important in order to know that Japan was an aggressor, not only a victim in terms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also met several Hibakushas and heard their testimonies. Through this trip, we deepened our conviction that nuclear weapons are totally against humanity, and we have to abolish them before all living beings will be exterminated.

Soon after coming back from Hiroshima, I graduated from university and remained in contact with Miyoko to help her peace activities, including translating Miyoko’s letters both into English and Japanese, helping write drafts of Miyoko’s letters and speeches, traveling overseas with her as an assistant/ translator several times, and so forth. What has amazed me most is Miyoko’s power of spirit. Physically, she is very sick; she had breast cancer caused by radiation. Now there are two polyps in her stomach that might turn into another cancer someday. So, she has “bombs” inside her body. However, since she has a strong sense of mission that telling her experience will help abolish nuclear weapons, she continuously talks to people both in Japanese and English, and in Japan and overseas.

In fall of 1997, the same year that I went to Hiroshima for the first time, Miyoko offered me a chance to travel to the US with her. One of the destinations of our trip was the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Greatly impressed by Dr. David Krieger, president of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s personality, his passion for peace, and the Foundation’s dedication for peace activities, I decided to establish a student peace advocate group, which would support the Foundation’s activities, at Soka University from which I graduated. Then, in the following year, in 1998, I established the Friends of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation with students. Since the establishment, as an advisor, I have coordinated several activities with students: conducting “Peace Trip to Hiroshima” in every August, translating the Foundation’s information into Japanese and putting it on our web site, and holding study groups. One of the biggest accomplishments was when our student government passed “The Abolition 2000 Soka University Campus Resolution” last year. This is our pledge that we oppose nuclear weapons, the evil weapons of mass destruction. In order to pass the resolution, we organized several seminars, aiming for students’ conscious rising, invited Miyoko to share her experience, and collected signatures to support passing the resolution.

Through these activities, I have learned that students possess a profound potential to become a strong source for social change. My mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, the founder of Soka University and the recipient of the World Citizenship Award in 1999 by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says that “[Mahatma] Gandhi proclaimed that the ‘power of the spirit’ is stronger than any atomic bomb. To transform this century of war into a century of peace, we must cultivate the limitless inherent power of human life. This is the ‘human revolution’.” I found that this “human revolution”, namely the inner transformation or strengthening life condition, which never succumbs to injustice, in the level of each individual is the assured way that will lead to create a world without nuclear weapons. In order to cultivate our strong self, we need to carry on hope, a hope that we can change the world. This is what Sadako had done until the very moment of her death. With hope that folding 1000 cranes would bring her longer life, Sadako continued folding cranes on her sickbed. Even though she died young, her hope and her “power of spirit” have been passed on from generation to generation.

Finally, I would like to end my speech with one of my favorite poems written by Dr. Krieger. This is a poem dedicated to young people worldwide.

You are a miracle, entirely unique. There has never been another With your combination of talents, dreams, and hopes. You can create. You are capable of love and compassion. You are a miracle. You are a gift of creation to itself. You are here for a purpose which you must find. Your presence here is sacred-and you will Change the world.

Thank you very much!

August 12, 2001