Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Hiroshima

  • Obama Does Right By Meeting Hibakusha, Describing Atrocities, & Recognizing Victims in Hiroshima– Makes Epic Fail By Not Reducing Nuclear Arsenal

    A group of 30 young people from 23 countries met in Hiroshima in August 2015 to work together for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
    A group of 30 young people from 23 countries met in Hiroshima in August 2015 to work together for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

    In August, 2015, thirty youth leaders from twenty-three countries met in Hiroshima in the hopes of strengthening solidarity and making a breakthrough toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons. We held the International Youth Summit for Nuclear Abolition over three days which culminated in a Youth Pledge, and a year-long action plan to collaborate to abolish nukes. Since then, we’ve continued to collaborate under the banner of ‘Amplify: Generation of Change’, and have taken many actions globally, toward our cause.

    When we initially heard that President Obama would become the first sitting US President to visit Hiroshima, we hoped that it would signify a change or at least be a reflective experience. That it was. But the American President left out the most important part– he failed to offer any concrete plan to reduce the US nuclear arsenal, which is the largest in the world.

    Like President Obama, about 9 months ago, we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and like many before us, laid a wreath in remembrance. Like President Obama, we had the chance to meet with resilient Hibakusha (a-bomb survivors) who have dedicated the rest of their days to world peace.

    Unlike President Obama, we do not have the authority to announce a dramatic reduction in the nuclear weapons or a u-turn on the United States’ plan to invest over $1 trillion in “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades. If we could, we would, without a doubt, because we believe that actions speak louder than words on nuclear policy and securing a peaceful tomorrow.

    In the last year, we, youth activists from around the world, have witnessed first-hand the failure of international players, including the United States, to fulfill their existing nuclear disarmament obligations, despite existing mandates by international law. Many of us who were part of the International Youth Summit to Abolish Nuclear Weapons have participated directly in and around global efforts like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the First Committee meetings on Disarmament and International Security, the Marshall Islands International Court of Justice cases, and the Open Ended Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament, where the U.S. leaders clearly and repeatedly demonstrated a lack of willingness to move forward in nuclear disarmament discussions.

    Today, in Hiroshima, the President said: “[A]mong those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them… We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles.”

    But among the many important points and references he made, President Obama did not lay out any plan or proposal for disarmament. Why not?

    If one thing isn’t obvious in today’s global climate, let us be perfectly blunt: young people are beyond tired of empty promises and nice words without the action or political will to back them up. If President Obama wants to make his final months meaningful, he must immediately and unilaterally take steps to reduce the US’s nuclear arsenal, which threatens all life on earth, while encouraging other nuclear powers to do the same. Without concrete signs of progress on nuclear abolition, the President’s trip to Hiroshima seems like mere political theater, like we have seen many times before, by many different world leaders. We simply don’t have the patience for lip service or macabre legacy tour.

    We are glad that President Obama took our call to attend Peace Memorial Park, to meet with Hibakusha, and to recognize the atrocities of the past and the suffering of victims. Unfortunately, he failed to take action on what should have been the most important part of his visit and speech; to declare concrete and measurable steps that would guarantee a future where impending nuclear winter is no longer a threat. Calling for nuclear disarmament while planning to spend $1TRILLION on “upgrading” the US nuclear arsenal over the next thirty years is hypocritical and extends the danger that nuclear warheads already pose, to future generations.

    Today, the President acknowledged the horrors caused by the US-Atomic-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the learning that has come from it. But that is not enough. We will not take his calls seriously until we see that the US is working earnestly to ensure that these tragedies can never happen again. Younger and future generations are the biggest stakeholders in nuclear abolition will not stand by and allow President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima to be another missed opportunity, where lofty language casts a tall shadow of cynicism over the truth on the ground.

  • President Obama’s Speech in Hiroshima

    President ObamaSeventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.

    Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

    It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood, used these tools not just for hunting, but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold; compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.

    The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes; an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die — men, women, children no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death.

    There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war — memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species — our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

    How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth. How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause. Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

    Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds; to cure disease and understand the cosmos. But those same discoveries can be turned into ever-more efficient killing machines.

    The wars of the modern age teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well.

    That is why we come to this place. We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war, and the wars that came before, and the wars that would follow.

    Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of August 6th, 1945 must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.

    And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan forged not only an alliance, but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a Union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed peoples and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that worked to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back, and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

    Still, every act of aggression between nations; every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations – and the alliances that we’ve formed – must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them.

    We may not realize this goal in my lifetime. But persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations, and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

    And yet that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mindset about war itself – to prevent conflict through diplomacy, and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun; to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition; to define our nations not by our capacity to destroy, but by what we build.

    And perhaps above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race. For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story – one that describes a common humanity; one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.

    We see these stories in the hibakusha – the woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself; the man who sought out families of Americans killed here, because he believed their loss was equal to his own.

    My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal, and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens.

    But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for; an ideal that extends across continents, and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious; the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family -– that is the story that we all must tell.

    That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love — the first smile from our children in the morning; the gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table; the comforting embrace of a parent – we can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here seventy-one years ago. Those who died – they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life, and not eliminating it.

    When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.

    The world was forever changed here. But today, the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is the future we can choose – a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare, but as the start of our own moral awakening.

  • Over Seventy Prominent Scholars and Activists Call on Obama to Take Concrete Action in Hiroshima

    NAPF President David Krieger signed this letter, along with NAPF Advisory Council members Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Robert Jay Lifton, and NAPF Associates Martin Hellman, Peter Kuznick and Lawrence Wittner.

    May 23, 2016

    President Barack Obama
    The White House
    Washington, DC

    Dear Mr. President,

    We were happy to learn of your plans to be the first sitting president of the United States to visit Hiroshima this week, after the G-7 economic summit in Japan. Many of us have been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and found it a profound, life-changing experience, as did Secretary of State John Kerry on his recent visit.

    In particular, meeting and hearing the personal stories of A-bomb survivors, Hibakusha, has made a unique impact on our work for global peace and disarmament. Learning of the suffering of the Hibakusha, but also their wisdom, their awe-inspiring sense of humanity, and steadfast advocacy of nuclear abolition so the horror they experienced can never happen again to other human beings, is a precious gift that cannot help but strengthen anyone’s resolve to dispose of the nuclear menace.

    Your 2009 Prague speech calling for a world free of nuclear weapons inspired hope around the world, and the New START pact with Russia, historic nuclear agreement with Iran and securing and reducing stocks of nuclear weapons-grade material globally have been significant achievements.

    Yet, with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons (93% held by the U.S. and Russia) still threatening all the peoples of the planet, much more needs to be done. We believe you can still offer crucial leadership in your remaining time in office to move more boldly toward a world without nuclear weapons.

    In this light, we strongly urge you to honor your promise in Prague to work for a nuclear weapons-free world by:

    • Meeting with all Hibakusha who are able to attend;
    • Announcing the end of U.S. plans to spend $1 trillion for the new generation of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems;
    • Reinvigorating nuclear disarmament negotiations to go beyond New START by announcing the unilateral reduction of the deployed U.S. arsenal to 1,000 nuclear weapons or fewer;
    • Calling on Russia to join with the United States in convening the “good faith negotiations” required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the complete elimination of the world’s nuclear arsenals;
    • Reconsidering your refusal to apologize or discuss the history surrounding the A-bombings, which even President Eisenhower, Generals MacArthur, King, Arnold, and LeMay and Admirals Leahy and Nimitz stated were not necessary to end the war.

    Sincerely,

    Gar Alperowitz, Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland

    Christian Appy, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

    Colin Archer, Secretary-General, International Peace Bureau

    Charles K. Armstrong, Professor of History, Columbia University

    Medea Benjamin, Co-founder, CODE PINK, Women for Peace and Global Exchange

    Phyllis Bennis, Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies

    Herbert Bix, Professor of History, State University of New York, Binghamton

    Norman Birnbaum, University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center

    Reiner Braun, Co-President, International Peace Bureau

    Philip Brenner, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Graduate Program in US Foreign Policy and National Security, American University

    Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation; National Co-convener, United for Peace and Justice

    James Carroll, Author of An American Requiem

    Noam Chomsky, Professor (emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    David Cortright, Director of Policy Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame and former Executive Director, SANE

    Frank Costigliola, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, niversity of Connecticut

    Bruce Cumings, Professor of History, University of Chicago

    Alexis Dudden, Professor of History, University of Connecticut

    Carolyn Eisenberg, Professor of U.S. Diplomatic History, Hofstra University

    Daniel Ellsberg, Former State and Defense Department official

    John Feffer, Director, Foreign Policy In Focus,  Institute for Policy Studies

    Gordon Fellman,  Professor of Sociology and Peace Studies, Brandeis University.
    Bill Fletcher, Jr., Talk Show Host, Writer & Activist.

    Norma Field, professor emerita, University of Chicago

    Carolyn Forché, University Professor, Georgetown University

    Max Paul Friedman, Professor of History, American University.

    Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

    Lloyd Gardner, Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University, author Architects of Illusion and The Road to Baghdad.

    Irene Gendzier, Prof. Emeritus, Department of of History, Boston University

    Joseph Gerson, Director, American Friends Service Committee Peace & Economic Security Program, author of With Hiroshima Eyes and Empire and the Bomb

    Todd Gitlin, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

    Andrew Gordon, Professor of History, Harvard University

    John Hallam, Human Survival Project, People for Nuclear Disarmament, Australia

    Melvin Hardy, Heiwa Peace Committee, Washington, DC

    Laura Hein, Professor of History, Northwestern University

    Martin Hellman, Member, US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

    Kate Hudson, General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK)

    Paul Joseph, Professor of Sociology, Tufts University

    Louis Kampf, Professor of Humanities Emeritus MIT

    Michael Kazin, Professor of History, Georgetown University

    Asaf Kfoury, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, Boston University

    Peter King, Honorary Associate, Government & International Relations School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Sydney, NSW

    David Krieger, President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

    Peter Kuznick, Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, is author of Beyond the Laboratory

    John W. Lamperti, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, Dartmouth College

    Steven Leeper, Co-founder PEACE Institute, Former Chairman, Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation

    Robert Jay Lifton, MD, Lecturer in Psychiatry Columbia University, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, The City University of New York

    Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota, Author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

    Kevin Martin, President, Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund

    Ray McGovern, Veterans For Peace, Former Head of CIA Soviet Desk and Presidential Daily Briefer

    David McReynolds, Former Chair, War Resister International

    Zia Mian, Professor, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University

    Tetsuo Najita, Professor of Japanese History, Emeritus, University of Chicago, former  president of Association of Asian Studies

    Sophie Quinn-Judge, Retired Professor, Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society, Temple University

    Steve Rabson, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies, Brown University, Veteran, United States Army

    Betty Reardon, Founding Director Emeritus of the International Institute on Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

    Terry Rockefeller, Founding Member, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,

    David Rothauser, Filmmaker, Memory Productions, producer of “Hibakusha, Our Life to Live” and “Article 9 Comes to America

    James C. Scott, Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, ex-President of the Association of Asian Studies

    Peter Dale Scott, Professor of English Emeritus, University of California, Berkleley and author of American War Machine

    Mark Selden, Senior Research Associate Cornell University, editor, Asia-Pacific Journal, coauthor, The Atomic Bomb: Voices From Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    Martin Sherwin, Professor of History, George Mason University, Pulitzer Prize for American Prometheus

    John Steinbach, Hiroshima Nagasaki Committee

    Oliver Stone, Academy Award-winning writer and director

    David Swanson, director of World Beyond War

    Max Tegmark, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;  Founder, Future of Life Institute

    Ellen Thomas, Proposition One Campaign Executive Director, Co-Chair, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (US) Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

    Michael True, Emeritus Professor, Assumption College, is co-founder of the Center for Nonviolent Solutions

    David Vine, Professor, Department of Sociology, American University

    Alyn Ware, Global Coordinator, Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament 2009 Laureate, Right Livelihood Award

    Dave Webb, Chair, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK)

    Jon Weiner, Professor Emeritus of History, University of California Irvine

    Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus, SUNY/Albany

    Col. Ann Wright, US Army Reserved (Ret.) & former US diplomat

    Marilyn Young, Professor of History, New York University

    Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics & Coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies, University of San Francisco

  • President Obama in Hiroshima

    President Obama will be the first US president to visit Hiroshima while in office.  His visit, on May 27th, has historic potential.  It comes at a time when nuclear disarmament talks with Russia and other nuclear-armed nations are non-existent and all nuclear-armed nations, led by the US, are modernizing their nuclear arsenals.  The US alone has plans to spend $1trillion on modernizing every aspect of its nuclear arsenal, delivery systems and infrastructure over the next 30 years.

    Hiroshima is the first city ever to be attacked by a nuclear weapon.  It is a beautiful, modern city, but at the same time a city that symbolizes the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons.  The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, small by today’s standards, and it killed more than 70,000 people immediately and more than 140,000 by the end of 1945.  These statistics do not do justice to the suffering and death inflicted on Hiroshima with the bomb the US had nicknamed “Little Boy.”

    hiroshima
    The city of Hiroshima in 1945 after the U.S. atomic bombing that killed at least 140,000 people.

     

    I have visited Hiroshima many times and also the second atomic-bombed city, Nagasaki.  What I have found in these cities are survivors of the atomic bombings who are eager to assure that what happened to their cities never happens to other cities.  In these cities, there is a very different orientation toward nuclear weapons than there is in the US.

    What we learn in the US about nuclear weapons is a perspective from above the bomb.  It could be paraphrased in this way: “The bomb was a technological triumph that we used to win the war.”  In this view of the bomb there are no humans or other forms of life – only technological triumph and statistics.  The perspective on the bomb in the atomic-bombed cities is just the opposite; it is from beneath the bomb.  It is filled with stories of massive destruction, death and human suffering.

    When the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it did so with impunity.  Japan was already defeated in war and did not have atomic bombs with which to retaliate against us.  That was more than 70 years ago.  Today there are nine nuclear-armed countries capable of attacking or retaliating with nuclear weapons.  Missiles carrying nuclear weapons can travel across the globe in a half-hour.  No one is secure from the consequences of a nuclear attack – not only the blast, fire and radiation, but also those of nuclear famine and nuclear winter.

    With nuclear weapons, there is no security, even for the attacking country.  In addition, nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal.  They also undermine democracy and waste financial and scientific resources that could be used to improve life rather than destroy it.

    Shortly after assuming office, President Obama said that America seeks the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons and that the US has a responsibility to lead the way to achieve that goal.  For those reasons and for the sake of children everywhere, the president must offer a significant proposal for achieving nuclear zero while the world’s attention is focused on him in Hiroshima.

    What should he do?  I suggest that he bring three gifts to the world with him when he travels to Hiroshima: his courage, his humanity and a plan to end the nuclear insanity.  His courage and humanity surely will travel with him; they are part of who he is and will be inherent in any plan to end the nuclear insanity.  His plan must be bold, show true leadership, and move beyond rhetoric to action.

    I suggest that the plan be simple with one major element: offer to convene the nine nuclear-armed countries to begin good faith negotiations for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament, as required by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law.  For the future of all humanity, these negotiations must begin and succeed.

    If the president wants to go further and reduce the possibility of accidents or of nuclear weapons being used while negotiations are taking place, he could offer to work with the Russian Federation and the other nuclear-armed countries in reciprocally taking all nuclear weapons off high-alert and in cancelling plans to modernize nuclear arsenals.

    President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima may be humanity’s last best chance to step back from the nuclear precipice and to start down the path to nuclear zero.

    David Krieger is a founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and has served as its President since 1982.

  • Take Three Gifts on Your Journey

    Mr. President,

    The word is out.

    You will visit Hiroshima in May.

    In Hiroshima, nuclear weapons become real.

    The possibility of destroying civilization
    becomes tangible.

    Visiting Hiroshima is an opportunity to lead the way back
    from the brink.

    Take three gifts to the world on your journey: your courage,
    your humanity, and a proposal to end the insanity.

    Offer to convene the nuclear nine to negotiate a treaty
    to eliminate nuclear weapons.

    Set the world back on course.

    Do it for the survivors.

    And for children everywhere.

  • Obama at Hiroshima

    President ObamaThere are mounting hopes that Barack Obama will use the occasion of the Group of 7 meeting in Japan next month to visit Hiroshima, and become the first American president to do so. It is remarkable that it required a wait of over 70 years until John Kerry became the first high American official to make such a visit, which he termed ‘gut-wrenching,’ while at the same time purposely refraining from offering any kind of apology to the Japanese people for one of the worse acts of state terror against a defenseless population in all of human history. Let’s hope that Obama goes, and displays more remorse than Kerry who at least deserves some credit for paving the way. The contrast between the many pilgrimages of homage by Western leaders, including those of Germany, to Auschwitz and other notorious death camps, and the absence of comparable pilgrimages to Hiroshima and Nagasaki underscores the difference between winning and losing a major war. This contrast cannot be properly accounted for by insisting on a hierarchy of evils that the Holocaust dominates.

    The United States, in particular, has a more generalized aversion to revisiting its darker hours, although recent events have illuminated some of the shadows cast by the racist legacies of slavery. The decimation of native Americans has yet to be properly addressed at official levels, and recent reports of soaring suicide rates suggests that the native American narrative continues to unfold tragically.

    The New York Times in an unsigned editorial on April 12 urged President Obama to make this symbolic visit to Hiroshima, and in their words “to make it count” by doing more than making a ritual appearance. Recalling accurately that Obama “won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 largely because of his nuclear agenda” the editorial persuasively criticized Obama for failing to follow through on his Prague vision of working toward a world free of nuclear weapons. A visit to Hiroshima is, in effect, a second chance, perhaps a last chance, to satisfy the expectation created early in his presidency.

    When it came to specifics as to what Obama might do the Times offered a typical arms control set of recommendations of what it called “small but doable advances”: canceling the new air-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile and ensuring greater compliance with the prohibition on nuclear testing by its endorsement coupled with a recommendation that future compliance be monitored by the UN Security Council. The Times leaves readers with the widely shared false impression that such measures can be considered incremental steps that will lead the world over time to a nuclear-free world. Such a view is unconvincing, and diversionary. In opposition, I believe these moves serve to stabilize the nuclear status quo and have a negative effect on disarmament prospects. By making existing realities somewhat less prone to accidents and irresponsibly provocative weapons innovations, the posture of living with nuclear weapons gains credibility and the arguments for nuclear disarmament are weakened even to the extent of being irrelevant. I believe that it is a dangerous fallacy to suppose that arms control measures, even if beneficial in themselves, can be thought of as moving the world closer to nuclear disarmament.

    Instead, what such measures do, and have been doing for decades, is to reinforce nuclear complacency by making nuclear disarmament either seem unnecessary or  utopian, and to some extent even undesirably destabilizing. In other words, contrary to conventional wisdom, moving down the arms control path is a sure way to make certain that disarmament will never occur!

    As mentioned, many arms control moves are inherently worthwhile. It is only natural to favor initiatives that cancel the development of provocative weapons systems, disallow weapons testing, and cut costs. Without such measures there would occur a dangerous erosion of the de facto taboo that has prevented (so far) any use of nuclear weaponry since 1945. At the same time it is vital to understand that the taboo and the arms control regime of managing the nuclear weapons environment does not lead to the realization of disarmament and the vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

    Let me put it this way, if arms control is affirmed for its own sake or as the best way to put the world on a path of incremental steps that will lead over time to disarmament, then such an approach is nurturing the false consciousness that has unfortunately prevailed in public discourse ever since the Nonproliferation Treaty came into force in 1970. The point can be expressed in more folksy language: we have been acting for decades as if the horse of disarmament is being pulled by the cart of arms control. In fact, it is the horse of disarmament that should be pulling the cart of arms control, which would make arms control measures welcome as place holders while the primary quest for nuclear disarmament was being toward implementation. There is no reason to delay putting the horse in front of the cart, and Obama’s failure to do so at Prague was the central flaw of his otherwise justly applauded speech.

    Where Obama went off the tracks in my view was when he consigned nuclear disarmament to the remote future, and proposed in the interim reliance on the deterrent capability of the nuclear weapons arsenal and this alleged forward momentum of incremental arms control steps. What is worse, Obama uncritically endorsed the nonproliferation treaty regime, lamenting only that it is being weakened by breakout countries, especially North Korea, and this partly explains why he felt it necessary back in 2009 to consider nuclear disarmament as a practical alternative to a continued reliance on nonproliferation, although posited disarmament more as a goal beyond reach and not as a serious present political option. He expressed this futuristic outlook in these words: “I am not naïve. This goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime.” He never clarifies why such a goal is not attainable within the term of his presidency, or at least its explicit pursuit.

    In this regard, and with respect to Obama’s legacy, the visit to Hiroshima provides an overdue opportunity to disentangle nuclear disarmament from arms control. In Prague, Obama significantly noted that “..as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” [emphasis added] In the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, the judges unanimously concluded that there was a legal responsibility to seek nuclear disarmament with due diligence. The language of the 14-0 ICJ finding is authoritative: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all aspects under strict and effective international control.” In other words, there is a legal as well as a moral responsibility to eliminate nuclear weapons, and this could have made the Prague call for a world without nuclear weapons more relevant to present governmental behavior. The Prague speech while lauding the NPT never affirmed the existence of a legal responsibility to pursue  nuclear disarmament. In this respect an official visit to Hiroshima offers Obama a golden opportunity to reinvigorate his vision of a world without nuclear weapons by bringing it down to earth.

    Why is this? By acknowledging the legal obligation, as embedded in Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty, as reinforcing the moral responsibility, there arises a clear imperative to move toward implementation. There is no excuse for delay or need for preconditions. The United States Government could at this time convene a multinational commission to plan a global conference on nuclear disarmament, somewhat resembling the Paris conference that recently produced the much heralded climate change agreement. The goal of the nuclear disarmament conference could be the vetting of proposals for a nuclear disarmament process with the view toward establishing a three year deadline for the development of an agreed treaty text whose preparation was entrusted to a high level working group operating under the auspices of the United Nations, with a mandate to report to the Secretary General. After that the states of the world could gather to negotiate an agreed treaty text that would set forth a disarming process and its monitoring and compliance procedures.

    The United States, along with other nuclear weapons states, opposed in the 1990s recourse to the ICJ by the General Assembly to seek a legal interpretation on issues of legality, and then disregarded the results of its legal findings. It would a great contribution to a more sustainable and humane world order if President Obama were to take the occasion of his historic visit to Hiroshima to call respectful attention to this ICJ Advisory Opinion and go on to accept the attendant legal responsibility on behalf of the United States. This could be declared to be a partial fulfillment of the moral responsibility that was accepted at Prague. It could even be presented as the completion of the vision of Prague, and would be consistent with Obama’s frequent appeals to the governments of the world to show respect for international law, and his insistence that during his presidency U.S. foreign policy was so configured.

    Above all, there is every reason for all governments to seek nuclear disarmament without further delay. There now exists no geopolitical climate of intense rivalry, and the common endeavor of freeing the world from the dangers posed by nuclear weapons would work against the current hawkish drift in the U.S. and parts of Europe toward a second cold war and overcome the despair that now has for so long paralyzed efforts to protect the human interest. As the global approach to nuclear weapons, climate change, and neoliberal globalization should make clear, we are not likely to survive as a species very much longer if we continue to base world order on a blend of state-centric national interests and dominant actor geopolitics. Obama has this rare opportunity to choose the road not often traveled upon, and there is no better place to start such a voyage than at Hiroshima. We in civil society would then with conviction promote his nuclear legacy as ‘From Prague to Hiroshima,’ and feel comfortable that this president has finally earned the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize prematurely bestowed.

  • 2015 Evening for Peace Introduction

    Good evening and thank you for being part of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 32nd Annual Evening for Peace. A special welcome to all the students with us tonight. We hope that this evening will be a great learning experience for you – both educational and inspirational.

    Our honoree this year, the 70th anniversary year of the atomic bombings, is a hibakusha – a survivor of those bombings. She, like other hibakusha, has the truest perspective on the horrors caused by the atomic bombs, the perspective of being under a nuclear detonation.

    Before I introduce our honoree to you, I’d like to make a few comments about nuclear weapons and the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to abolish them.

    The atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively small nuclear weapons when compared with those of today.  Nonetheless, they were very effective killing devices, killing 210,000 to 220,000 persons in the two cities by blast, fire and radiation by the end of 1945.

    Nuclear weapons are not the friend of humanity or other forms of life. In fact, they are the enemy of all Creation. They are illegal, immoral, tremendously costly and undermine the security of their possessors.

    The only reasonable number of nuclear weapons on our planet is Zero, and it is our collective responsibility to go from where we are to Zero. This has been the goal of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation since our founding in 1982.

    We’ve progressed from 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world in the mid-1980s down to under 16,000 today. This is progress, but it is not sufficient. We still face the prospect of a Global Hiroshima – a nuclear war, by accident or design, which could end civilization and even the human species.

    There is far too much complacency around this issue. I worry about ACID, an acronym for key elements of complacency: Apathy, Conformity, Ignorance and Denial. We must change these acidic forms of complacency to engagement by changing Apathy to Empathy; Conformity to Critical Thinking; Ignorance to Wisdom; and Denial to Recognition of the nuclear threat.

    One important way we do this is through our work as a consultant to the Republic of the Marshall Islands in their lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed countries in the International Court of Justice and in US federal court. The Marshall Islands does not seek compensation in these lawsuits. They seek only that the nuclear-armed countries negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament as they are obligated to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law.

    The Foundation has helped establish legal teams to support these cases, and the attorneys working on the cases have given thousands of hours to this work on a pro bono basis. Two of these lawyers are here this evening and I’d like you to join me in recognizing them: Laurie Ashton and Lynn Sarko.

    I’d also like you to join me in recognizing Dan Smith, another pro bono attorney who has submitted amicus briefs on behalf of other civil society organizations in support of the Marshall Islands.

    When you support the Foundation, you are supporting the courage of the Marshall Islanders and their legal efforts to achieve a victory for all humanity.

    Another way we work to shift complacency to engagement is through our project, “Humanize Not Modernize.” This project opposes the US and other nuclear-armed countries upgrading, modernizing and generally making their nuclear arsenals more usable. The US alone plans to spend $1 trillion over the next three decades on modernizing its nuclear arsenal. It will only benefit the arms manufacturers at the expense of meeting human needs for the poor and hungry and those without health care.

    When you support the Foundation, you are supporting the shift from nuclear insanity to human security.

    Still another way we work to combat nuclear complacency is by educating a new generation of Peace Leaders. Paul Chappell, the director of our Peace Leadership Program, travels the world teaching people the values and skills needed to wage peace. We also have a great internship program at the Foundation, led by Rick Wayman, our Director of Programs. Our interns make valuable contributions to the Foundation’s work.

    When you support the Foundation, you are supporting the development and training of committed young peace leaders.

    Tonight we shine a light on courageous Peace Leadership. This is the 32nd time we have presented our Distinguished Peace Leadership Award. It has gone to some of the great Peace Leaders of our time, including the XIVth Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Carl Sagan, Yehudi Menuhin, Jody Williams, Jacques Cousteau, Helen Caldicott and Medea Benjamin.

    We are honored to be presenting our 2015 award to an exceptional woman, who is a hibakusha and child victim of war. She was just 13 years old when the US dropped an atomic bomb on her city of Hiroshima. She lost consciousness and awakened to find herself pinned beneath a collapsed building.

    She thought she would die, but she survived and has made it her life’s work to end the nuclear weapons era and to assure that her past does not become someone else’s future. She is a global leader in the fight to prevent a Global Hiroshima and assure that Nagasaki remains the last city to suffer a nuclear attack. Our honoree is a Peace Ambassador of the United Nations University of Peace in Costa Rica, a Peace Ambassador of the city of Hiroshima, and was a nominee for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

    I am very pleased to present the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2015 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award to a courageous Peace Leader and member of the human family, Setsuko Thurlow.

    David Krieger delivered these remarks at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 32nd Annual Evening for Peace on October 25, 2015.

  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki: What Now?

    This article was originally published by the Santa Fe New Mexican.

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago marked a turning point in U.S. history from which this country never recovered.

    Many wartime leaders had warned against using the bomb, and after the war the Air Force Strategic Bombing Survey found it was of no material aid in ending the war.

    But despite or because of the horror and repressed guilt, we clung to it. We embraced a policy of threatened annihilation as a core principle of policy. Had we rejected the bomb, as many prestigious voices argued, postwar U.S. development would have been quite different. With the bomb in our pocket, we did not become a people of justice and equality, or a social democracy.

    Chris Hedges quotes D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never melted.”

    I would like to tell Hiroshima survivors that we have changed, but we have not. America is as brutal and violent as ever, at home and abroad. Recently, President Barack Obama bragged about bombing seven countries.

    E.L. Doctorow described our postwar devolution: “The bomb first was our weapon. Then it became our diplomacy. Next it became our economy.
    Now it’s become our culture. We’ve become the people of the bomb.”

    When Ivan quit we became even more of an empire. There was nothing holding us back — or so it seemed. We became the Unipower, the Indispensable Nation. Just ask us.

    In 1945 as today, we sought and still seek to control as much of the world’s resources as possible, not just to feed our grotesque consumerism but also to satisfy our controlling oligarchs, while denying those declining resources to others.

    The 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine spells it out: “Our first objective is to … prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would … be sufficient to generate global power.” Since the Russian Federation is such a region all by itself, this is a formula for destabilization and war, both of which are ongoing projects. They are not going well.

    Despite, or because of, all our material and moral sacrifices, the only “victory” in 70 years for America’s vast, self-serving nuclear-military complex has been the destruction of our own democracy. As a result, our children’s prospects are nothing short of abysmal.

    Obama has budgeted a trillion dollars to operate and upgrade each and every warhead, bomb and delivery system we have, a vast expense that is itself dwarfed by the rest of our gargantuan military. But there is no plan to wean the U.S. from oil and gas, no plan to address inequality and poverty, no serious plan to forestall climate change.

    And no disarmament. Seventy years on from Hiroshima, there are far more nuclear weapons in the world than when the peace movement started in earnest in the aftermath of the disastrous 1954 Castle Bravo test in the Marshall Islands.

    Today’s U.S. stockpile of 7,100 warheads range in yield up to 80 times the Hiroshima bomb, with most in a middle range of 100 to 400 kilotons, sufficient to incinerate a large city. Peer-reviewed studies have concluded that detonation of just 2 percent of U.S. warheads alone over cities would result in global nuclear darkness and famine, civilizational collapse and the extinction of many higher life-forms and quite possibly humanity itself.

    Movements for nuclear disarmament have not been successful. Why?
    Generally citizens, on every issue, want to believe they can change history with a few hours of activist entertainment. We need instead the opposite: full-time committed organizers and revolutionaries, supported by local communities. We are well past the point where mere reform can save the country, the climate or the planet. This is the path of maturity and fulfillment today. Accept no substitutes.

    Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit policy think-tank and lobbying organization. His formal education is in engineering, environmental sciences and regional planning.

  • Our Nuclear World at Seventy

    This article was originally published by Common Dreams.

    Robert DodgeThis week the world remembers events of 70 years ago. Events that killed instantly over 100 thousand human beings as the U.S. dropped the first atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6th and 9th respectively. In the days and weeks that followed tens of thousands would also die from injuries suffered by the bomb and “A bomb disease”. From 4:15 pm PST August 5th, the exact moment the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, there will be planetary vigils remembering the events of those days. If we forget these events we run the risk of repeating them and so must educate those among us who are unaware or uniformed.

    Over the years, the aging Hibakusha survivors of the atomic bombs are a constant reminder as they speak of the horrors they experienced those August days and in the aftermath.

    Unfortunately in the seven decades that have followed, the world has done little to move away from the subsequent use of these weapons and instead moved closer to the brink of destroying civilization and possibly the extinction of our species.

    Witnessing the horrific potential of these weapons mankind had two options that remain with us to this day. The first option was to rid the planet of these weapons and the second was to build more. The world chose the latter. The insane doctrine throughout the Cold War, appropriately called MAD for Mutually Assured Destruction, guaranteed the annihilation of an adversary in the event of any use a nuclear weapon. This resulted in a mythological notion of nuclear deterrence that persists to this day, providing a false sense of security and being the major driver of the arms race resulting in 15,685 nuclear weapons on the planet!

    Following the bombings of Japan and with continued testing we have seen how destructive these weapons were. However, recently we have learned that they are much more dangerous than we had ever imagined. We now know that even a unilateral attack using the weapons of either the U.S. or Russia without retaliation would ultimately result in such catastrophic global climate change that billions would die from starvation and disease including the attacking nation. In effect the MAD doctrine of the Cold War has become the SAD doctrine of Self Assured Destruction ultimately turning any nation that would unleash its nuclear arsenals into suicide bombers and the destroyers of civilization.

    Even a limited regional nuclear war using only 100 Hiroshima size bombs possibly between India and Pakistan, felt by many defense experts to be a vulnerable nuclear hot spot on the planet, would cause death and destruction never imagined. It would kill 20 million people outright but the after effects resulting from global climate change in the days that follow would be catastrophic killing over 2 billion people around the world. These effects would last for over 10 years. Even more remarkably this scenario uses less than ½ of 1% of the global arsenals!

    On this 70th Anniversary of the nuclear age we have an opportunity and responsibility to act. Knowing what we now know, we cannot do nothing. Ultimately our luck will run out with the potential of nuclear war either by accident or intent. We must work together with the majority of nations now numbering 113 who have signed the “Humanitarian Pledge” to ban nuclear weapons by convention just as every other weapon of mass destruction has been banned. All attempts at nonproliferation and diplomacy must be supported including the nuclear deal with Iran. We must demand that our nation join the non-nuclear nations of the world whom we hold hostage and work together to abolish these weapons. We owe this to the Hibakusha, to our children and to future generations.

  • Hiroshima 2015

    On this fateful day, 70 years ago, the first of the only two atomic bombs ever used was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, with a second catastrophic detonation wreaked on Nagasaki on August 9th , killing over 220,000 people by the end of 1945, with many tens of thousands of more dying from radiation poisoning and its lethal after effects over the years.   Yet despite these horrendous cataclysms in Japan, there are still 16,000 nuclear weapons on the planet, all but 1,000 of them held by the US and Russia. Our legal structures to control and eliminate the bomb are in tatters, as the five recognized nuclear weapons states in the Non-Proliferation Treaty—the US, UK, Russia, France, China–cling to their nuclear deterrents, asserting they are needed for their “security” despite the promises they made in 1970, 45 long years ago, to make good faith efforts to eliminate their nuclear arms. This “security” in the form of nuclear “deterrence” is extended by the United States to many more countries in the NATO nuclear alliances as well as to the Pacific states of Japan, Australia, and South Korea. Non-NPT states, India, Pakistan and Israel, as well as North Korea which left the NPT, taking advantage of its Faustian bargain for “peaceful” nuclear power, to make nuclear weapons similarly claim their reliance on nuclear “deterrence” for their security.

    The rest of the world is appalled, not only at the lack of progress to fulfill promises for nuclear disarmament, but the constant modernization and “improvement” of nuclear arsenals with the US announcing a plan to spend one trillion dollars over the next 30 years for two new bomb factories, delivery systems and warheads, having just tested a dummy nuclear bunker-buster warhead last month in Nevada, its B-61-12 nuclear gravity bomb! At this last NPT Review Conference in May, which broke up when the US, UK, and Canada refused to agree to an Egyptian proposal for a conference on a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone, made to fulfill a 1995 promise as part of the commitments from the nuclear weapons states for an indefinite extension of the 25 year old NPT, the non- nuclear weapons states took a bold step.   South Africa expressed its outrage at the unacceptable nuclear apartheid apparent in the current “security” system of nuclear haves and have nots—a system holding the whole world hostage to the security doctrine of the few.

    In the past two years, after three major conferences with governments and civil society in Norway, Mexico and Austria to examine the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, over 100 nations signed up at the end of the NPT to the Austrian government’s Humanitarian Pledge to identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. There are now 113 countries willing to move forward to negotiate a prohibition and ban on nuclear weapons to stigmatize and delegitimize these weapons of horror, just at the world has done for chemical and biological weapons. See www.icanw.org It is hoped that countries harboring under their nuclear umbrellas will also be pressured by civil society to give up their alliance with the nuclear devil and join the Humanitarian Pledge. This August, as we remember and commemorate around the world the horrendous events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s long past time to ban the bomb! Let the talks begin!!