Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear weapons

  • Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    We’ve all heard about the inspections that took place in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and programs to make them.  As we know, none were found in Iraq.

    That would not be the case if the inspectors were to come to the University of California.  They would find that programs to research, design, develop, improve, test, and maintain nuclear weapons have been going on under the auspices of this University for more than 60 years and that they are going on today.  They would find that the University of California provides management and oversight to the nation’s two principal nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  They would find that today these weapons laboratories are engaged in attempting to make new and more usable and reliable nuclear weapons.

    For a fee, the University of California has provided a fig leaf of respectability to the research and development of the most horrendous weapons known to humankind.  It is ironic that our government cannot tolerate the possibility of Iraqi scientists creating such weapons, but at the University of California such a horrid use of science is called “a service to the nation.”

    Two of the weapons developed at Los Alamos were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These were relatively small weapons, and they caused the deaths of over 200,000 persons, mostly innocent civilians, by incineration, blast and radiation.  There are no guarantees that the nuclear weapons being developed today under UC auspices will not be used again.  In fact, the odds are that if we continue as we are, they will be used again, by accident or design.

    There are three important reasons the UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business.  First, the UC is a great University, and no great University should lend its talents to making weapons capable of destroying cities, civilizations and most life on Earth.  The function of a University is to examine the amazing wonders of our world, to collect and categorize knowledge, to expand the knowledge base, and to pass important knowledge from the past on to new generations.  How can a great University allow itself to be co-opted into becoming complicit in creating weapons of mass destruction?  How can the UC Board of Regents justify this as “a service to the nation”?

    Second, there is no moral ground on which nuclear weapons can rest.  These are weapons of mass murder.  They cannot discriminate between combatants and civilians.  They kill indiscriminately – men, women and children.  By continuing to develop and improve these weapons, the United States, economically and militarily the strongest country in the world, is signaling to other nations that these weapons would be useful for them as well.

    Third, the International Court of Justice has stated that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law.  It allowed only one possible exception in which the “very survival of a state” was at stake.  In such a situation, it said that the law was unclear, but under any circumstance the use of nuclear weapons would not be legal if it violated international humanitarian law by failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants or causing unnecessary suffering.  There is virtually no possibility that nuclear weapons could be used in warfare without violating these precepts of international humanitarian law.

    Sir Joseph Rotblat, the only Manhattan Project scientist to leave the project on moral grounds and the 1995 Nobel Peace Laureate, asked: “If the use of a given type of weapon is illegal under international law, should not research on such weapons also be illegal, and should not scientists also be culpable?  And if there is doubt even about the legal side, should not the ethical aspect become more compelling?”

    In 1995, Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, a senior physicist on the Manhattan Project, issued this plea: “I call on all scientists in all countries to desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter – other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”

    If we are ever to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity, we must heed the words of words of wise individuals such as professors Rotblat and Bethe.  Even if for personal reasons the scientists and engineers at the nuclear weapons laboratories are unwilling to give up their role in creating and improving nuclear weapons, then at least the larger UC community could send a message to the rest of the country and the world that it is no longer willing to participate in the management and oversight of laboratories making weapons of mass murder.

    The motto of the University of California is Fiat Lux, meaning “let there be light.”  It is unlikely that the light the founders of the University had in mind was the flash “brighter than a thousand suns” from the explosion of a nuclear weapon.  I think they meant the light of knowledge, truth and beauty.  Unfortunately, the University of California’s relationship to the nuclear weapons laboratories, renewed at Los Alamos in 2005, casts a dark shadow over the higher values that a university is charged with passing on to future generations.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).  He is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age, including Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

  • The Two Sides of the Nuclear Coin

    Despite George W. Bush’s repeated warnings about nuclear proliferation, he and his fellow Republicans deserve much of the blame for it. Ever since the advent of the Bush administration, it has charged that other nations are acquiring nuclear weapons. Justifying war with Iraq, the administration hammered away at that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. It has also assailed North Korea and Iran for their nuclear programs. On Feb. 11, in a major policy address, President Bush called for new steps to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The world must act, he said, to “confront these dangers and to end them.”

    At the same time, the administration has virtually scrapped the longstanding U.S. policy of nuclear disarmament — exactly the policy that, over the decades, has provided the key to halting nuclear proliferation.

    In 1965, when the U.S. and Soviet governments worried about the prospect of nuclear weapons spreading to dozens of nations, they teamed up to submit nonproliferation treaties to the UN General Assembly. Non-nuclear nations immediately objected to these proposals, arguing that they would merely restrict the nuclear club to its current members (then the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s disarmament minister, insisted that “disarmament measures should be a matter of mutual renunciation.” Willy Brandt, West Germany’s foreign minister, argued that a nonproliferation treaty was justified “only if the nuclear states regard it as a step toward restrictions of their own armaments and toward disarmament.”

    Unlike the Bush administration, U.S. and Soviet leaders of the time recognized that nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament were two sides of the same coin. As a result, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that emerged from the United Nations was substantially broadened. Non-nuclear states pledged “not to make or acquire nuclear weapons.” And nuclear nations agreed to take “effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Further, when it signed and ratified this treaty, the U.S. government pledged not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that had endorsed the NPT and that were not allied with a nation possessing nuclear weapons.

    With this bargain struck between the nuclear haves and have-nots, nearly all nations signed the NPT. Over the next 30 years, only one additional nation (Israel) developed nuclear weapons. To some degree, the success of this nonproliferation policy reflected citizens’ campaigns for nuclear disarmament that stigmatized nuclear weapons and encouraged the signing of nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. But it also resulted from the mutual renunciation features of the NPT, which paired abstention from building nuclear weapons by most nations with nuclear disarmament and non-threatening behavior by the others.

    Unfortunately, the NPT began unraveling in the late 1990s. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a landmark measure negotiated and signed by President Clinton. Given their control of Congress, the Republicans also managed to advance plans for a national missile defense system, a venture that contravened a key arms control measure, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Meanwhile, India, pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons, became a nuclear nation in 1998. This act provoked Pakistan to do the same.

    After the presidential election of 2000, U.S. policy tilted sharply against nuclear disarmament and other pledges made in the NPT. Ignoring the commitments made by his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Bush pulled the United States out of the ABM treaty, ordered the deployment of a missile defense system and rejected the test ban treaty. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review called for sustaining and modernizing nuclear weapons for at least the next half-century. The review also included contingency plans for U.S. nuclear attacks upon non-nuclear nations, among them North Korea. In the fall of 2003, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress to authorize the development of new, “usable” nuclear weapons.

    Given this repudiation of NPT commitments, it’s not surprising that North Korea has pulled out of the NPT and, perhaps, has begun building nuclear weapons. Nor is it surprising that a number of other nations might be working to develop a nuclear weapons capability. If the nuclear powers cling to their nuclear weapons and threaten their use, then other nations will inevitably try to join the nuclear club.

    As Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has observed: “We all have to be moving away from nuclear weapons. It can’t be just a mandate from the United States that everybody goes in one direction while we go in another.” But this is exactly what the Bush administration — in yet another example of its go-it-alone foreign policy — is pressing for.

    Nuclear proliferation cannot be halted without nuclear disarmament. As the old song goes: “You can’t have one without the other!”
    *Mr. Wittner teaches history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He is a writer for the History News Service.

  • Nuclear Weapons ‘Immoral,’ Say Religious, Scientific Leaders

    WASHINGTON — An international group of religious and scientific leaders Monday launched an appeal to the United States and all other nuclear states to pledge never to use nuclear weapons and re-affirm their commitments to achieving total nuclear disarmament.

    The appeal, signed by the head of the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC) and the president of the international Catholic peace group, Pax Christi, and 74 others–including four Nobel laureates–declared such weapons to be “inherently immoral” and expressed particular concern over U.S. plans to develop of a new generation of nuclear bombs.

    ” Even so-called ‘mini-nukes’ and ‘bunker-busters’ would have disastrous effects,” the statement declared. “Threatened use of nuclear weapons in the name of deterrence is morally wrong because it holds innocent people hostage for political and military purposes.”

    ” Why do we continue to construct weapons that have the power to destroy us,” asked Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the NCC, which represents some 140,000 Protestant congregations in the U.S., “rather than build systems and structures that will save lives and help all persons reach the potential for which God created them?”

    Edgar said the appeal was being made with a “sense of real urgency,” in light of new nuclear planning by the Bush administration and the failure to date of any of the declared nuclear powers to substantially reduce their stockpiles.
    More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia retain a total of about 10,000 tactical and strategic nuclear weapons each. Together, they account for more than 95 percent of the world’s total arsenal.

    According to recent estimates by the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, China is next with an estimated 400 warheads, followed by France, with 350; Israel, with perhaps 200; Britain, with 185; India, with 60 or more; and Pakistan, with as many as 48. The Central Intelligence Agency says it believes North Korea has had as many as two devices for several years.

    Under the 1968 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), nuclear countries must not only halt the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear countries, but also agree to reduce their own arsenals to zero. In 1996, the International Court of justice at The Hague ruled that the NPT required eventual disarmament, a position that was formally reaffirmed in 2000 by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

    Sign the Moral Appeal for a Safer World without Nuclear Weapons

    This article was originally published by OneWorld.net.

  • Another World is Possible: Report from the 2004 World Social Forum

    Introduction

    The third annual World Social Forum was held in Mumbai, India January 16-21, 2004. Previous Forums were held in Porto Alegre, Brasil. The move to Mumbai acknowledges the significant percentage of the world’s population that lives in Asia, seeking to increase their access to the event. As a gathering to strategize effective means toward transforming global society with an emphasis on human rights, the Forum drew an estimated 75,000 world citizens. A series of over 1,200 workshops explored the numerous perspectives through which to view globalization: war, imperialism, water, labor, discrimination, and many, many more. The larger panels and events with 4,000 people and more were organized by Forum coordinators while the remaining workshops were self-directed and given space by Forum coordinators. English and Hindi were the main languages spoken, while translation was available in French and Spanish. A tremendous energy was palpable from the smallest to the largest Forum event. Beyond the workshops, cultural performances, street theater, and political protests merged into a loud and colorful sea of humanity.

    Nuclear Weapons-Related Workshops

    The disarmament community was well-represented at the Forum. Our input was crucial given the recent developments in nuclear proliferation issues and increased visibility among the general public. Many experts view Asia as a “hot spot” with regard to nuclear weapons, given the number of nuclear powers within close proximity and their historical rivalries. Consequently, India proved an ideal location to strategize steps toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

    There were a series of workshops that explicitly addressed nuclear weapons as well as many others in which speakers linked the abolition of nuclear weapons with other social justice issues. Workshop themes included, but were not limited to, civilian weapons inspections, global hibakusha, uranium mining, US militarism, and campus organizing. For my part, I spoke on two panels, one in the International Youth Camp (IYC), titled “Youth Organizing in the Second Nuclear Age,” and another in the main venue, titled “The Threat of Nuclear Weapons: The Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.” The IYC session was by far my favorite. Approximately, 35-40 young people, mostly from India and the US, joined in the dialogue. Two of my closest colleagues joined me on the facilitation team: Tara Dorabji, Outreach Coordinator with Tri-Valley CARES in Livermore, California, and Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, an independent education consultant specializing in disarmament issues. We divided the 3-hour session into an introduction to nuclear weapons issues, US nuclear weapons policy, small group discussions, and closing thoughts. The exchange was critical of both US foreign policy and the Indian nuclear establishment. Conversational topics ranged from nuclear weapons to racism to poverty. In closing, one participant shared that Kathleen’s encouragement was more of a factor in his participation than the workshop title. He went on to say that he had not thought much about nuclear weapons issues, but now was interested in learning more.

    The structure of the second workshop differed greatly. “The Threat of Nuclear Weapons: The Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons” featured 13 speakers from 7 countries: Belgium, Greece, India, Japan, New Zealand, USA, and Vietnam. The panel, convened by Abolition 2000 and the World Peace Council, drew an even more diverse audience of approximately 200 people. In greeting participants as they arrived, I soon realized that the audience held as much expertise and experience as the panel. Allotted ten minutes each, speakers concentrated on three topics: assessing the nuclear threat, the global campaign, and the local campaign. Time passed quickly as each presenter delivered a passionate and informative talk. As my time approached and being the last speaker, I grew disappointed in realizing that there would be little time for discussion. This sense of disappointment lasted only briefly though, for the World Social Forum is less of a finish line and more of a starting point. The conversations that I had with workshop participants immediately following the workshop confirmed this understanding as will our collaborative efforts in the months to come.

    Coalition-Building*

    The Forum was a tremendous networking opportunity, reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. It was comforting to stay in the same hotel as the Abolition 2000 group (an international network of anti-nuclear organizations), most of whom spent part of the journey to Mumbai aboard the Peace Boat. It was my pleasure to help United for Peace and Justice (a coalition of over 650 US peace groups that oppose the Iraqi war and empire-building) promote March 20th as a day of action by passing out promotional pins, stickers, and t-shirts. As an alum of the New Voices Fellowship Program, I was proud to know that the current fellows participated in the Forum with many leading workshops. As a representative of a new member organization in the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, I encouraged the many youth group representatives and educators that I met to organize an activity on March 4th as a day of action opposing the militarization of schools. Similarly, I experienced two chance encounters with magazine publishers who are clear allies in the struggle to counter corporate media by providing accurate information to the masses: ColorLines & YES!. Lastly, philanthropists were in attendance at the Forum, particularly the Global Fund for Women and the New World Foundation. Their presence reminded me that successful social justice movements require various stakeholders, who must all challenge ourselves through relentless self-critique and education.

    *This is just a small sampling of the dynamic people and organizations that I came in contact with in Mumbai.

    Mumbai

    Formerly known as Bombay, the bustling Mumbai (population, 13 million) seemed unfazed by the tens of thousands of guests. The contradictions in wealth and poverty were extreme. The buildings expressed India’s rich past. The sights were many, unique, and often shocking. In being somewhat overwhelmed and after having missed many opportune picture-taking moments, I resorted to writing down the most memorable sights in my journal. Here’s a sampling: a cow walking in the middle of the highway, an elephant walking along the side of the road, a truck full of live chickens, the Arabian Sea, a man pulling a cart with a washer and dryer on it up a hill, every third car being a black and gold taxi, an ox drawn cart, the diversity of Indian people, a snake charmer with two cobras, organized groups of children begging, Nike Town, a cricket game, and the many billboards promoting movies (Mumbai has earned the nickname “Bollywood,” being the capital of India’s entertainment industry).

    Brazil vs. India

    As a participant in the 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, I began comparing the two events almost upon arrival in Mumbai. The difference in global context was significant. Various phases of the US-led aggression against Iraq dominated the news headlines leading into both Forums. In January of 2003, claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction were used as grounds for the attack. By January of 2004, Hussein had been captured and these claims had been replaced by claims of bringing “freedom” to the Iraqi people and thoroughly refuted by high-level experts in the Bush administration. A harsh critique of US foreign policy and a strong anti-imperialist sentiment characterized both Forums.
    The evolution from participant to workshop facilitator was a major factor influencing my experience. Whereas in Brazil, I could pick and choose my daily schedule. In Mumbai, my schedule was set in large part given my responsibilities to prepare for and promote my workshops. Similarly, my network had expanded in the year since Brasil and it was important for me to support my friends’ workshops. In all, my time in India was more focused and productive in terms of representing the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
    Oppressed and marginalized peoples found a voice through both Forums. In Brazil, members of the landless people’s movement had a strong showing, speaking to the need for land reform and identifying allies through workshops, street theatre, and social receptions. In India, the Dalits (more commonly known as “untouchables”) used similar tactics to draw attention to their plight. It is interesting to note that even though the Forum is viewed as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, which is largely a meeting of economic powers and corporate leaders, a group of Indian and Filipino activists organized an alternative to the Forum. These activists claimed that Forum organizers accepted funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and in so doing became puppets of imperial powers. Even though I later learned that Forum organizers did not receive such funding, this alternative to the alternative raised interesting questions regarding philanthropy, grassroots organizing, and social change.

    Follow-Up

    There were numerous tactics that groups used to maximize their Forum experience and promote their cause. I will list a few here in the hope that the disarmament community builds on the success of the 2004 Forum by having an even stronger presence in 2005.

    • Unified promotion – Given that groups plan ahead and secure their workshop times and places, it would be an excellent showing of solidarity to have an email, flyer, poster, brochure, and/or booklet that lists all of the workshops with a disarmament theme. If a Forum participant is interested in a big picture “War, Militarism, and Peace” workshop, he or she may also be interested in a local action “How to Conduct a Civilian Weapons Inspection” workshop.
    • Interactive workshops – Disarmament issues are new to many even at a massive gathering of activists such as the World Social Forum. It would be ideal to strike a balance between relaying a lot of information and catering to individuals’ questions and concerns. Developing engaging, dynamic, and colorful presentations and workshops are key to expanding the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons.
    • Shared booth/tabling – The 2004 Forum featured large exhibition halls where organizations could distribute materials, sell goods, and maintain a consistent, accessible presence. The care and attention that went into the planning of these displays varied greatly. The best of these displays had friendly, knowledgeable people fluent in multiple languages; colorful posters and/or projected images; and free informational materials.
    • Coordinated media – Issuing press releases before, during, and after the Forum may peak interest among journalists (local, national, and international) and raise the visibility of disarmament issues as a whole.
    • Host a reception – Social events are great opportunities for Forum participants to engage in conversations initiated in workshops, to network, and to unwind. There is far less competition among social receptions than there is for workshops and, at times, a much better turnout.

    This is a brief summary of my trip to the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. I sincerely thank those who made the trip possible and you for your interest in reading my thoughts! I welcome comments, questions, and all feedback with the hope of relaying the spirit of Mumbai through my work with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and beyond.

    Michael Coffey is the Youth Outreach Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Contact him at  youth@napf.org or (805) 965-3443.

  • Imagining Martin Luther King, Jr. At 75: A Day For Reflection

    Imagining Martin Luther King, Jr. At 75: A Day For Reflection

    Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 75 years old today had he lived to grow older. At 75, he certainly would have been a wise man. He was already wise well beyond his years at 39 when he was assassinated. How valuable it would have been for our country and the world to have had him here to speak and take action on the issues of the day.

    Above all else, Dr. King was a man of justice and peace. One can imagine how, were he able to see us today, he would have recoiled at the increasing gap between rich and poor in our country and the world; at the tax cuts for the rich and the deceptions by political leaders to achieve them; at the abuses of corporate leaders who cheated both their shareholders and their employees; and, most of all, at the lies of political leaders to take the country to war yet again.

    He certainly would have remembered the Vietnam War that he spoke out against so eloquently, and he would have been struck by the similarities between that war and the war in Iraq. He would have been deeply saddened to see that America had built its military on the backs of the poor, and that US soldiers were still coming home in body bags.

    Dr. King’s 75th birthday is a time for reflection about who we are as a people and who we want to be. It is a time to strengthen our resolve to work, as he did, for justice, peace and human dignity. It is a time to strengthen our resolve to create a just and decent country that upholds civil and human rights for all. It is a time to recognize our responsibilities to lead by example, not by force. It is a time to work to end the double standards of “do as I say, not as I do” policies that shame our country and tarnish it in the eyes of the world.

    What would he have said about our Congress giving away its Constitutional authority to make war to the President? What would he have said about the President leading the country to war against Iraq illegally and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council?

    What would he have said about our continued reliance on nuclear weapons long after the end of the Cold War, and our plans to conduct research on mini-nukes and “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons? What would he have said about the allocation of nearly half of our discretionary income as a society to prepare for and engage in war? What would he have said about our lack of universal health care, the breakdown of our educational system and the growing number of homeless in the streets?

    Dr. King is not here to speak out and take action, but I can imagine that he would have been angered and deeply saddened by the state of our country and the world. He likely would have been disgusted by the poor quality of leadership and the continued prevalence of greed in our nation. He would have wanted us to do more and give more of ourselves. He would have called upon us to strengthen our efforts to build a peaceful and just world. Although he is not here to inspire us, that should not stop us from hearing the echoes of his deep, resonant voice. Although he is not here to lead, that should not stop us from acting.

    The best birthday present we could give to Martin Luther King, Jr. is our commitment to his dream the dream of a more just and decent America, a country that could lead in justice and decency rather than military expenditures and number of billionaires. Remembering him helps us to realize how far we have strayed from our course and far we have to go.

    YOU ARE NOT ONE BUT MANY

    Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Your deep voice still hangs in the air,
    Melting the cowardly silence.
    You are the one standing solidly there
    Looking straight in the face of violence.

    You are the one who dreams
    That this nation will honor its creed.
    You are the one who steps forward.
    You are the one to bleed.

    You are not one but many
    Unwilling to cower or crawl.
    You are the one who will take no less
    Than a world that is just for all.

    David Krieger

     

    *David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author of Choose Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age and Peace: 100 Ideas. For more information on Martin Luther King’s 75th birthday click here.

  • A Letter to UC President Robert Dynes

    A Letter to UC President Robert Dynes

    The following is the text of David Krieger’s letter to the University of California’s President Robert Dynes opposing the UC’s management of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which research and develop nuclear weapons.

     

    Dear President Dynes,

    I am writing on Human Rights Day to urge you to oppose further collaboration between the University of California and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Laboratories. It is highly inappropriate for a great university like the University of California to involve itself in the research and development of weapons of mass destruction. By providing oversight and management to the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories, the University of California places itself in the position of researching and developing weapons capable of causing massive suffering and slaughter, such as occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    The International Court of Justice has stated, “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.” Rather than contributing toward the elimination of nuclear weapons, the University of California is providing support for continued U.S. reliance on and development of nuclear weapons. Policies of the current administration include research on more usable nuclear weapons, such as mini-nukes and “bunker-busters,” research being carried out at the UC-managed labs.

    A great university should provide not only knowledge but a moral compass to the students it educates and to the larger society. The University of California cannot fulfill this function so long as it remains an accomplice in the U.S. effort to base its security on the ongoing threat of mass annihilation. The University of California should be a leader in working to end the nuclear weapons era; not a leader in contributing to new nuclear arms races that extend the nuclear weapons era.

    I encourage you to take a strong and principled stand against a continued relationship between the University of California and the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories, a stand that will contribute to nuclear sanity and the security of all Americans.

    Sincerely,

    David Krieger
    President

    *David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time (Capra Press, 2003).

  • Armageddon Back on the Table

    U.S. ratchets up debate on `usable’ nuclear weapons
    Critics fear fallout from Bush cadre’s pro-nuke strategy

    Originally Published by the Toronto Star

    Since nuclear bombs exploded on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the possibility of an atomic Armageddon has made the use of such cataclysmic weapons unthinkable.

    But after the election of President George W. Bush, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the word “nuclear” has been creeping back into the vocabulary of American policy, reaching for a respectability that until recently was thought gone for good.

    Lobbying Congress for funds to research and develop new nuclear weapons, Bush has opened the back door to the doctrine of a “fightable” nuclear war, one in which the use of small or limited nuclear weapons would be possible or even desirable to defeat ruthless and unconventional enemies.

    “Nuclear programs are a cornerstone of U.S. national security posture,” said Congress’ Armed Services Committee, which recently backed the allocation of $400 billion (all figures U.S.) for national defence in the coming year.

    Both critics and supporters of developing “usable” nuclear weapons agree that the path from the laboratory to the launching pad is a long and difficult one.

    But since the Bush administration presented its radical “Nuclear Posture Review” in March, 2002, pro-nuclear officials have been pushing steadily ahead toward developing weapons that will cross the line that separates conventional from unconventional warfare, threatening half a century of disarmament negotiations, treaties and taboos.

    This month, the Senate endorsed an Energy and Water Appropriations Bill allocating $7.5 million to research on nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs and $10.8 million to plans for nuclear “pit” facilities to produce triggers for new nuclear bombs. Both sums were reduced from totals originally requested by Bush officials.

    A final environmental study is being prepared to determine how and where the pits should be manufactured.

    Crucial to the administration’s hopes for developing a new generation of nukes was the repeal in May of a 1993 ban on research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons — those with a force of less than 5 kilotons, or 5,000 tonnes of TNT.

    The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, by comparison, was approximately 15 kilotons.

    “A one-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would dig a crater the size of Ground Zero in New York and eject one million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air,” says California Senator Diane Feinstein, an opponent of usable nuclear weapons.

    The development of any new nuclear arms would require testing. And as early as June, 2001, Bush also signalled that he might consider ending an 11-year moratorium on underground nuclear blasts.

    He called for a scientific review of the Nevada test site that resulted in shortening the time it would take to restart nuclear test explosions from 36 months to no more than 18 months from the time an order to resume nuclear testing is given.

    And although the Bush administration has so far made little progress in promoting the development of “mini nukes” that could be used against enemy forces, the influential Defence Science Board that advises the Pentagon has thrown its weight behind them.

    In a leaked report, due to be tabled in the next few months, the board urges the development of lower-yield weapons that would have more battlefield “credibility” than the more powerful current nuclear bombs.

    The rationale of the pro-nuclear supporters is clear: After Sept. 11, America is fighting an unpredictable enemy that must be attacked and eradicated by any possible means.

    “As seen in Afghanistan, conventional weapons are not always able to destroy underground targets,” said the Armed Services Committee, which backed the new nuclear policy.

    “The United States may need nuclear earth penetrators (bunker-busters) to destroy underground facilities where rogue nations have stored chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.”

    Keith Payne, the Pentagon’s civilian liaison with the U.S. Strategic Command, which plans how a nuclear war could be fought, has for a decade promoted the idea of usable nukes.

    Payne believes the lessons of the 1991 Gulf War included the discovery that Scud missiles might elude attack. In a 1999 paper on the future of American nuclear weapons, he wrote: “If the locations of dispersed mobile launchers cannot be determined with enough precision to permit pinpoint strikes, suspected deployment areas might be subjected to multiple nuclear strikes.”

    Other pro-nuclear theorists say a new generation of fightable nukes might have a deterrent effect on the kind of enemies America now faces: guerrilla groups and unpredictable terrorists.

    “All we have left is nuclear use and pre-emption, so that something a little bigger, with a little more bite, does not emerge as the next threat against our security and values,” says Barry Zellen, publisher of the electronic security bulletin, SecureFrontiers.com.

    “Our willingness to go beyond deterrence to a more pro-active strategy of nuclear use might just end up achieving what we wanted in the beginning: successful deterrence of further aggression and terror against us, now and in the future.”

    Opponents of nuclear weapons fiercely disagree. They shudder at the thought of crossing the line between fighting a conventional and nuclear war, once considered unthinkable. And they argue that such a move would promote, rather than deter terrorism.

    One of the most troubling aspects, critics say, is the “creeping respectability” of arms that have been considered beyond the pale of defence policy.

    “It creates the image of `clean’ nuclear weapons,” says Brice Smith of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

    “We can use them without all the old Cold War anxieties about total destruction. A lot of psychology is involved here and it includes the very powerful idea of being able to defeat attempts to use chemical and biological weapons against us.”

    However, experts say, usable nukes would be far from environmentally safe. Bunker-busting bombs would explode close to the surface of their targets, spreading radioactivity through an explosion of dust and causing the death of tens of thousands of people if dropped on urban areas.

    It is also likely, says Smith, that the explosions would spread deadly chemicals or bioagents, rather than destroying them.

    And, critics argue, the political fallout from threatening to use, let alone using, such weapons would be dangerous to the United States and its Western allies.

    Apart from inciting terrorism, such a policy would create deeper cynicism about Washington’s disregard for international treaties on nuclear weapons, convincing countries like Iran and North Korea that Washington is applying double standards when it insists they halt efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

    The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, which monitors nuclear peril worldwide, last year moved its Doomsday Clock forward two minutes, to seven minutes to midnight, citing the Bush administration’s failure to change its Cold War nuclear-alert practices while authorizing its weapons labs to work on the design of new nuclear arms.

    “Terrorist efforts to acquire and use nuclear and biological weapons present a great danger,” concluded George Lopez, the Bulletin’s board chairman.

    “But the U.S. preference for the use of pre-emptive force rather than diplomacy could be equally dangerous.”

    Historian and Kennedy-era political adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr., put it more flamboyantly.

    “Looking back over the 40 years of the Cold War,” he wrote in The New York Review Of Books, “we can be everlastingly grateful that the loonies on both sides were powerless. In 2003, however, they run the Pentagon, and preventive war — the Bush doctrine — is now official policy.”

    Those who follow the progress of the new nuclear doctrine say its resurgence signals the comeback of its backers, a pro-nuclear cadre that has for years urged a more aggressive approach to both domestic and military nuclear policy.

    The cadre includes Vice-President Dick Cheney, who urged planning for nuclear strikes against Third World “enemy” countries as secretary of defence in the first Bush administration; Payne, who wrote a doctrine of fightable nuclear war; and Pentagon threat-reduction chief Stephen Younger, a director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory and one of the first scientists to promote the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.

    With an influential group of lobbyists working closely with the White House, it appears highly likely that plans to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons would go forward if Bush wins a second term.

    However, there is trepidation in the ranks of both Republican and Democratic parties about such a development.

    Congress has so far made sure that funding is limited to the exploratory stages of the project and that millions rather than billions of dollars have been allocated

    “By seeking to develop new nuclear weapons,” says Senator Feinstein, “the United States sends the message that nuclear weapons have a future battlefield role and utility. That is the wrong direction and, in my view, will only cause America to be placed in greater jeopardy in the future.”

    The opposition is unlikely to weaken the pro-nuclear cadre’s resolve, however.

    “What you’re seeing is a thoughtless strategy being pursued under cover of the war on terrorism, by people who always wanted to do this,” says arms-control expert William Arkin of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Advanced International Studies.

    “Now, they’re in a position to seize their chance.”

    Critics say a new arms race is on the horizon and they predict the effect on global security to be gloomy, as resentment escalates toward the United States for its double standard of developing nuclear weapons, while insisting that others desist.

    In the United States, says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, “there is a creeping respectability of nuclear weapons.”What Bush has done is emphasize that there are not only bad weapons out there, but bad people with bad weapons.

    “Then, the line becomes blurred, because he’s implying that responsible states are entitled to possess and even use the same kinds of weapons.

    “In fact, these are all weapons of mass terror, and we should never forget that.”

    Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

  • Remembering Hiroshima & Nagasaki

    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.

  • 10 Reasons Environmentalists Oppose an Attack on Iraq

    Environmentalists Against the War

    As organizations and individuals working for the environment and environmental justice, we have watched with increasing concern as the US government moves closer to an all-out attack on Iraq. We raise our voices in opposition to this war and invite others to join us in support of peace. We oppose an attack on Iraq for the following reasons:

    1. An attack on Iraq could kill nearly 500,000 people. Most of the people killed would be innocent civilians.

    In November 2002, Medact, the British health professional organization, warned that as many as 260,000 Iraqis could die immediately from a US attack, while another 200,000 deaths would result from famine and disease. The UN fears that an attack would create a flood of 900,000 refugees.

    2. War destroys human settlements and native habitats. War destroys wildlife and contaminates the land, air and water. The damage can last for generations.

    The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) has documented lasting damage from the 1991 Gulf War. Oil, chemical and radiological pollution still contaminates the region. More than 60 million gallons of crude oil spilled from pipes. Some 1,500 miles of coast were tarnished with oil and cancer-causing chemicals. The deserts were scarred with 246 “lakes” of congealed oil. More than 700 oil wells burned for nine months, producing toxic clouds that blocked the sun and circled the Earth.

    In the aftermath of the Gulf War, more than a dozen countries submitted environmental claims to the United Nations totaling $48 billion.

    3. US clusterbombs, thermobaric explosions, electromagnetic bursts and weapons made with depleted uranium are indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction.

    In the 1991 Gulf War, US forces reportedly fired nearly a million rounds of depleted uranium (DU) bullets and shells, leaving 300 tons of DU scattered across Kuwait and southern Iraq. According to the Army Environmental Policy Institute, ingesting DU “has the potential to generate significant medical consequences.” The World Health Organization (WHO) warns “children could receive greater exposure to DU when playing in or near DU impact sites. Typical hand-to-mouth activity could lead to high DU ingestion from contaminated soil.” In the aftermath of the profound chemical and radiological contamination released during the 1991 war, cancer and leukemia rates in southern Iraq have increased six-fold.

    4. Bombs pollute, poisoning the land with unexploded shells and toxic chemicals. Bombs can’t locate or neatly destroy hidden chemical or biological weapons (CBW), but they can cause the uncontrolled spread of deadly CBW agents.

    According to Saudi Foreign Policy Advisor Adel al-Jubeir, the 1991 US attack on Iraq destroyed “not a single chemical or biological weapon.” That may have been fortunate. On March 10, 1991, after the Gulf War had ended, US troops destroyed several weapons bunkers at Khamisiyah in southern Iraq. Five years later, the Pentagon admitted that the explosion released a cloud of CBW agents, exposing 100,000 US soldiers to mustard gas and sarin nerve gas.

    5. Fighting a war for oil is ultimately self-defeating.

    Our fossil-fuel-based economy pollutes our air, fouls our lungs and contributes to global climate change. The world needs to burn less oil, not more. Earth’s remaining recoverable oil reserves are expected to peak soon and decline well before the end of the century. Waging wars to control an energy source that is finite will never achieve long-term national security. Oil-based economies must be replaced by technologies powered by clean, sustainable, renewable fuels.

    6. Pre-emptive attacks are acts of aggression.

    A “pre-emptive attack” would constitute an attack on the rule of international law, the dream of world peace embodied in the United Nations Charter, and the promise of environmental security enshrined in a host of global treaties. Attacking a city of 5 million people with hundreds of cruise missiles would constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity.

    7. Aggression invites retaliation.

    The CIA has concluded that Saddam Hussein would only be provoked to use chemical or biological weapons in self-defense – if the US launched an invasion bent on replacing him. Attacking Iraq would increase the probability of chemical, biological, and radiological attacks directed against US cities.

    8. Increased military spending (to control access to the fuel that powers our oil-based economy) drains funds from critical social, educational, medical and environmental needs.

    The war (and subsequent occupation of Iraq) is projected to cost as much as $200 billion. Meanwhile the economy teeters and unemployment soars while the administration cuts funding for environmental stewardship and basic human needs.

    9. Militarization and the war on terrorism are eroding America’s freedoms at home.

    The US PATRIOT Act has been used to persecute immigrants and fuels an atmosphere of racism and fear. The terrorist threat has been used to justify removal of public information databases that provided communities with critical data on industrial hazards. There has been a clampdown on the Freedom of Information Act, a valuable tool that had been used to hold polluting corporations accountable for their actions. The PATRIOT Act criminalizes legal forms of political opposition to controversial government policies, thereby threatening legitimate political and environmental activism.

    10. The US has threatened to strike Iraq with nuclear weapons – the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.

    In December 2002, a US strategy report claimed that the US “reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force – including through resort to all out options – to the use of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) against the US, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.” Bush administration officials stated that the threat of a nuclear first-strike did not constitute a policy change.

    Bush’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review called for development of new nuclear weapons including earth-penetrating “bunker busters” and five-kiloton “mini-nukes” (four “mini-nukes” would contain the explosive force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima).

    If nuclear weapons are used in Iraq, Medact fears that 3.9 million people would die. The radioactive fallout would eventually circle the planet, dooming even more people to an early death.

    Environmentalists Against the War – (650) 223-3306,pdrekmeier@earthlink.net.

    Endorsers (As of February 20, 2003)

    Abalone Alliance Safe Energy Clearinghouse
    Acterra
    Arc Ecology
    Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters
    Bay Area Earth Day
    Bay Area Nuclear (BAN) Waste Coalition
    Bay Area Wilderness Training
    Bluewater Network
    Boreal Footprint Project
    Butte Environmental Council
    California Communities Against Toxics
    California League of Conservation Voters
    Californians for Radioactive Safeguards
    CorpWatch
    Destination Conservation
    Earth First!, Bay Area
    Earth House
    Earth Island Institute
    The Ecology Center
    Environment & Health Committee Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility Environmental Law Foundation Foundation for Global Community Global Exchange Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice Greenpeace INOCHI/Plutonium Free Future International Rivers Network Mid-Peninsula Action for Tomorrow People for Livable and Affordable Neighborhoods People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights Project Underground Rainforest Action Network Redwood Action Team at Stanford Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment Ruckus Society Sacramento Area Earth Day Network Sacred Land Film Project Safe Food and Fertilizer San Bruno Mountain Watch San Francisco Green Party SAVE International Save Open Space Gilroy Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Southern Rockies Watershed Network Stanford Open Space Alliance Sustainable Mill Valley Tri-Valley CAREs West County Toxics Coalition Working Assets World Sustainability Hearing Project WorldWise

  • Study shows Military Attack Against Iraq Not Justified

    A thorough report released last week by the London based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) confirmed that Iraq does not possess any nuclear weapons and is years away from being able to produce the fissile material necessary to make a nuclear weapon.

    Some commentators have portrayed the report entitled “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net Assessment,” as providing justification for the Bush administration’s call for an invasion of Iraq. In actuality, however, the report provides no evidence that Iraq’s nuclear weapons program warrants a military attack.

    The study did conclude that the pursuit and retention of weapons of mass destruction is the core objective of the Hussein regime, and that the regime has persistently resisted unfettered U.N. inspections. The authors noted that even if Iraq was to allow inspectors to return, it would require time and experience for the U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) to develop and refine the successful inspection techniques. These conclusions, though disconcerting, fall far short of the support that the Bush administration has been seeking to justify invading Iraq.

    Several nonmilitary options exist through which the administration could derail Iraq’s proliferation attempts without the severe costs of a direct invasion. Such efforts include reducing and securing fissile materials, working towards a fissile material cut off treaty, and providing Iraq with clear commitments to lifting sanctions if Iraq allows inspectors to return.

    Even if such nonproliferation efforts were to fail and Iraq was to obtain nuclear weapons in the future, pre-emptive strikes based on the premise of such possession would still violate international legal norms and US policy precedent. To be in line with international law the administration would have to be able to prove that an attack by Iraq was imminent, such as in July 1991 when Iraq moved their troops to the border with Kuwait and made diplomatic moves indicating the likelihood of attack. Also, the United States would have to receive UN approval for any use of force.

    The IISS has made it clear that the international community must develop a strategy to deal with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and to prevent further proliferation. However, the recent report should not be interpreted as adding any substantive support to the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq.

    Visit the IISS website at: http://www.iiss.org.