Zero Nuclear Weapons
Blog Post | Scott Ludlam
Wednesday 6th August 2008, 7:59pm
by ScottLudlam in
August 6th is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima. I've just spent four days in a city where the memories are not only fresh, but engraved in stone, protected in world heritage-listed monuments, and taught urgently to young and old, local and foreign alike.
The Japanese have a word for the survivors of the twin atomic attacks on August 6 and 9, 1945. They call them Hibakusha, those for whom nuclear weapons signify something other than peace marches.
An elderly gentleman stood at the front of the workshop room yesterday and took us back there, smiling, exquisitely polite. A warm morning in 1945. A brilliant white flash. Thunderous darkness, moments of blind unconsciousness. Waking in bewilderment in the remains of a building thrown sideways. He describes columns of silent ghost people, streaming out of the ruined city with skin and clothing hanging in shreds, a firestorm rising behind them.
One bomb, a whole city erased with 16 kilograms of highly enriched uranium stolen from Native American lands. 90,000 people murdered in an instant; incinerated or pulverised in the blast wave of a single weapon detonated 600 metres above the domed roof of the Industrial Promotion Hall. Three days later, with Imperial Japan still reeling in confusion, another nuclear weapon opens up the sky above the city of Nagasaki. All told, perhaps a quarter of a million people are felled in the blasts or succumb in the coming days and months to the unknown horrors of radiation sickness.
Much of the world has forgotten August 1945. Buried beneath our collective consciousness in the shallowest of graves, lies the uncomprehending knowledge that humanity now shares the planet with 26,000 nuclear weapons, most of them vastly more powerful than the devices of the 1940s. It is bad enough that they are in the hands of at least nine states, but unknown quantities of potential weapons-grade materials are also seeping through the porous borders of the world's black economy. The crucial bomb fuel, uranium, is being sold freely by Australia, Canada and others to nuclear weapons states under a fictional safeguards regime.
It is time we took a proper look at the reality that confronts us. Unless they are formally abolished, one day, nuclear weapons will be upon us again; either in the tip of a cruise missile or in the back of a truck parked in some familiar city. The correct number of nuclear weapons on a small planet facing big challenges, is exactly zero.
The May 2005 review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was perhaps the lowest point in the history of the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons before they rid the world of us. The Bush Administration crashed a thirty year dialogue to the dismay of the tight knit community of officials, diplomats and activists who have made it their lives' work to wrench some progress from these tortured negotiations.
The Bush presidency is now little more than a cruel joke, and the global abolition community is re-emerging with a new determination. There is a change in the air.
Senator Barack Obama has put the abolition of nuclear weapons on the agenda of a US Presidential race for the first time. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has put Australia into the frame with a proposed new Commission on nuclear weapons. Japanese campaigners are particularly interested in how the collaboration between their government and ours will work. Announced after Rudd’s visit to Hiroshima, the Commission will be chaired by former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and co-chaired by former Foreign Minister of Japan, Yoriko Kawaguchi. The Australian peace movement has a crucial role to play as watchdog and adviser as this commission unfolds.
The 7000 participants in the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs here in Hiroshima are focussed on the next opportunity for decisive action: the April 2010 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York. We have a twenty month deadline to disarmament, which will be characterised by a new wave of peace efforts, petitions, demonstrations, fundraisers and planning all around the world. In Australia our job is to ensure that our delegation to New York is given a crystal-clear mandate to bring the age of nuclear weapons to a close.
Today we witnessed the memorial ceremony in the Hiroshima peace park. We watched as the names of 5,100 additional people who died in the last 12 months were added to the cenotaph. The total number of dead: 258, 310 officially recognised Hibakusha.
It is hard to describe the sense of unswerving determination that the dignified elderly Hibakusha have instilled in the representatives of the global peace movement this week. There are now three generations of Hibakusha speaking up: those who witnessed the blast first-hand, their children and now their grand children. The subtle permanence of the damage wrought by radiation on the human genome mean that the impact of atomic warfare is cross-generational. And so it is with the campaign to abolish these weapons.
Spurred on by dedicated local campaigners, the international community has had the foresight to ban chemical and biological weapons. The abolition of landmines and cluster munitions are advanced works in progress. Nuclear weapons are next.
A Nuclear Weapons Convention – already drafted by expert non-government organisations – shows us how. Until the job is done, the Hibakusha will be here to remind us why.
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Hi Scott, Will you be
Hi Scott,
Will you be visiting Nagasaki as well? The focus has always been on Hiroshima, but I'm sure the horrors Nagasaki's population experienced on 9 August were no less than those of Hiroshima.
It's disturbing to think that thousands of people are still dying each year as a result - what are the radiation levels in the city these days?
I wish I could be less cynical about Obama's position on nuclear weapons, though. Given his spate of backflips recently, culminating with the trashing of the NPT the other day by supporting the proposed US-India nuclear deal, who knows what he'll say next?
Thanks for keeping us up to date :)
This memo has caused me a
This memo has caused me a minor epiphany.
Exactly right. The cake was stolen from the treaty, right or wrong that has to be awknawledged.
The problem in 32'sville Campbelltown is gungho lazy strategists, greedy operators and a whole shebang whisky game that just will not admit to self delusion. IF YOU DIG IT UP, THERE IS MORE, IF THERE IS MORE, SOME OF IT WILL BE USED TO HURT PEOPLE, BECOUSE THERE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH ALLREADY,allready. Intentionally or not.
I suppose its Albert that begs the question, who will end up with the last head?
I disagree with terms such
I disagree with terms such as "stolen from Native American lands" (opinion not fact) and "murdered in an instant" (another opinion - remember that many people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were involved in the Japanese war effort and both cities contained military targets).
The people of Dresden largely supported the Nazis and were quite happy to cheer when it was Paris and Warsaw getting bombed
You come across as sympathising with the government of Imperial Japan despite its' crimes just so you can be anti-American
Jean... "Stolen from Native
Jean...
"Stolen from Native american lands."
This is true, Uranium has been taken from native american lands, from:
http://www.american.edu/academic.depts/cas/hist/nsi/syl_field.cfm..
"Japanese have often been criticized for a "victim consciousness" because of the bombings, but Japanese peace and antinuclear activists have also acted on their knowledge of that history to concern themselves with the victims of Chernobyl, the impact of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, of Indian and Pakistani testing, of uranium mining on Native American populations in the southwest"
I think the point Scott is
I think the point Scott is making is that the entire process of nuclear weapons is a disgrace, from mining it out of the ground, and the localised environmental damage that causes, to their construction and deployment, it must be stopped.
It's no small secret that America has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and it is that very stockpile that engenders fear in other nation state to arm themselves equally.
Because of this, the U.S. should lead the charge in destroying nuclear weapons, and until they do, on this issue at least, I would proudly say I am anti American government.
I think this subject,is the
I think this subject,is the reason why I always feel very tired and teary when all the other dramas and just living seem to be overcome to a certain degree.I protested in Melbourne in the 70's against nuke matters,and the bores of the Earth have won,while they go about finding reasons that suggest something good about the nuke cycle.Hawke the wanderlust kid of another decades still gets the urge for the peaceful atom,and sounds more like the moron no-one recognised him as.With people like him around I will remain tired for the rest of my life. He couldn't even handle the factual content of mustard gas still hanging around in deposits. All I can say of anyone taking on this issue recognise the possibility of clinical boredom states..and be real kind to yourself.
I also think "murdered" is
I also think "murdered" is the wrong term. You have to look at the nuclear bombings in the context of "what was the alternative?" The alternative was a land invasion of Japan. Both sides planned to use chemical weapons during the invasion. The Japanese planned to use suicide bombers, training old women to roll under tanks with explosives strapped to them. Soldiers were all expected to fight to the death regardless of odds or being cut off.
Would the Japanese have fought so fanatically? Who knows - but the question is, did the Allies reasonably expect they would? Well, at the Battle of Iwo Jima, with the Japanese knowing the fight was hopeless as no reinforcements were coming, of 21,000 Japanese soldiers defending, only 216 surrendered, the rest dying in battle.
At the Battle of Okinawa, of 130,000 Japanese defenders only about 10,000 surrendered, the rest fighting to the death. Something like a third the civilian population of Okinawa, some 140,000 people, died in the battle, large numbers of them due to suicide - often at the orders of the Japanese Army - and 90% of the buildings on the island were destroyed.
So the Allies had very good reasons to believe that, even without nuclear weapons, an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have led to five to ten million civilian deaths.
The Allies didn't know it, but [as related in Robert Jungk's Brighter than Thousand Suns] after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese Army Air Force sent an officer to one of Japan's leading atomic scientists, Yoshio Nishina. He was sent to Hiroshima to investigate and see what had happened, if it really was an atomic weapon as American news stories had said. He went there and found in a hospital some X-ray film which even though sitting in storage had been exposed. This showing a radiation burst confirmed to him that the bomb had been a nuclear weapon.
He was taken to see Kawabe, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, who asked him, "Could you build an atom bomb in six months? In favourable circumstances we might be able to hold out that long." He replied no, of course - but it shows the psychology of the leadership at that time, that they were willing to fight on under atomic bombardment. Whether the civilian population would have gone along with the leadership no-one can know, but they always had in the past, as had the civilians of Germany, the USSR and so on in their own countries. So I think the Allies' assumption that the fight would be very bloody indeed was a reasonable one, and very likely true.
Given that context, you can only call the atomic bombings "murder" if you call all war "murder". That would be a reasonable and self-consistent philosophy, but it is not one I think many people share. Once a war is being fought, there will be deaths, and civilian deaths, too. The only question is how many.
When the Germans were dropping V-2 bombs on London, their only means of adjusting their aim was the BBC reports of where they landed. So Churchill had the BBC misreport the bomb sites somewhat southerly, so that the Germans gradually adjusted their aim towards the north, and the V-2 bombs landed in the less densely-populated suburbs instead of the inner city, and eventually in farmed areas instead of suburbs. He noted that deciding that 10 suburbanites should suffer death instead of 100 city-dwellers was a hard decision, but that war is full of such decisions; there is no good in war, only lesser evils. In terms of civilian casualties, the atomic bombings were the lesser evil.
Of course the Allies had other alternatives. But if the only choice was between atomic bombing and immediate invasion, it was worth trying the atomic bombing.
Then we can consider events like the Rape of Nanking - not to excuse our own atrocities by saying, "but you did it first!" but to show that atomic weapons are not required for mass killings of civilians. The events in Rwanda in the 90s demonstrate that - they used public radio stations and transistor radios to co-ordinate themselves, and rifles and machetes to kill people.
All this is not to say that atomic weapons are a good thing. They are vile and should be banned. But in focusing on atomic (or even chemical and biological) weapons we should not forget the horrific destructiveness possible without them. There was a book a while back arguing that the greatest weapon of mass destruction has been the AK-47. No other weapon, it said, has killed so many people in so many different conflicts worldwide.
There have been some
There have been some powerful words provoked by my piece from Hiroshima. I welcome the debate and discussion, and I also want to respond to several points.
As an individual and as a representative of the Australian Greens, I abhor war, militarism and violence, and regret all lives lost in these wasteful and ugly human acts and choices. I hold that war and armed conflict are not inevitable, but rather, preventable. Human nature is not inevitaby warlike or violent; it is human choices, investment in war and preparation for war that creates war and violence.
I was in Hiroshima last week, and it affected me profoundly, so I spoke, wrote and thought about that act of war, the use of that indiscriminate, expensive and horrific weapon. The horrors of war of course are not limited to that place. The use of Agent Orange on Vietnam, of the machette in Rwanda, of rape in the Congo and Bosnia – weapons and wars – I feel strongly about them all. And while there is no competition here, I do believe that nuclear weapons are unique. No other weapon can wreak the sheer scale of damage that they can in an instant. Nor can other weapons reach quite so far into the future, by distorting the genetic material that makes up DNA. The immediate incineration and total destruction becomes even clearer in Hiroshima when you are litterally standing where there was nothing, and when you hear the words of civilians who have been scarred and haunted by the decision to use that weapon 63 years ago.
If you invest in conflict and weapons, you get conflict and weapons. If we want to make poverty history, we need to make war history. Global military spending in 2007 was the outrageous equivalent of 600 years of the UN's budget. We can buy one littoral aircraft carrier or put 6.8 million children through school in Afghanistan for 9 years. The investment in the Manhattan Project that created the bomb was enormous, unprecedented, and the financial and toxic waste has been enormous ever since, but so too has the intellectual investment.
There has also been great intellectual and political investment made into the idea that using nuclear weapons on Japan ended the war and saved millions of lives. The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. In the words of General, later President, Eisenhower, "We did not need to hit them with that awful thing."
At first the use of nuclear weapons was justified on the basis of Pearl Harbor and the refusal by Japan to accept the demand for unconditional surrender. But from decoded Japanese telegrams we know now what decision makers knew then: the Japanese were militarily defeated and very likely to surrender without the need for an invasion. New studies and analysis derived from the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives show that Truman was more motivated about limiting Soviet expansion in Asia than an allied invasion. See papers presented by Mark Selden and Peter Kuznick from Cornell University and American Universities: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/peace/hiroshima-reinterpreted-interview-wit...
I am extremely concerned about the continued investment – financial, human and intellectual – in these weapons, which I believe can be outlawed and abolished, closely followed by war itself.
I agree with most of what
I agree with most of what you've written. In retrospect the atomic bombings of the country were probably, though not certainly, not necessary - as I said, a senior Japanese military figure seriously contemplated continuing under atomic bombardment for six months. Of course he was not the only one making the decisions, nonetheless it shows that a continuation of the war under atomic bombardment, let alone without it, was a serious possibility.
This should not surprise us too much, given that more people died immediately from the US firebombings of Tokyo in Feb-Mar 1945, and more of the cities were destroyed, than from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 - and they didn't surrender then, either.
The Allies also had the example of Germany, where the Germans had fought to the bitter end, with very bloody fighting for Berlin. Everything they'd seen of Japanese fighting in the war indicated they were more fanatical than the Germans.
Nonetheless, it does seem probable in retrospect that the Japanese were ready to surrender before being invaded.
But from what the leaders knew at the time, it seemed not a better, but a least worse choice than a full-scale land invasion. We can only fairly judge people on their actions based on the knowledge they had, or reasonably could have had, at the time.
If it takes years of study of Japanese documents to figure out that the Japanese were ready to surrender, and if that conclusion is in doubt among historians today, then it seems unreasonable to expect the Allies to have figured that out in mere days.
If a police officer charges into my home armed and threatening and I kill them, whether we call it "murder" or not depends on whether I knew it was a police officer. And part of that consideration is time; a court examining the events over weeks or months may conclude it was obvious it was a police officer, but I had only seconds to make my decision. Likewise, whether we can call the atomic bombings "murder" depends on whether the leadership of the time knew that Japan was about to surrender anyway, and what is obvious is hindsight with careful study may not have been to them at the time.
So we cannot call those bombings "murder" unless we call the firebombings, the high explosive bombings, the bullets and bayonettes in battle, and so on - all of them "murder". That is unless you consider all war to be murder. That is a respectable philosophical position, but not one I agree with, since we cannot then distinguish between a Hutu hacking a Tutsi child to bits with a machete and a soldier shooting another who's shooting at them on a battlefield. It's all "murder", we say.
I see the world more in shades of grey than in those black and white terms. After all, if it's all murder, we have no reason to single out atomic bombs, they're neither better nor worse than any other weapon. And I think they are worse.
With what the decision-makers knew in August 1945, it seemed that Japan needed some drastic shock to ensure surrender, and that the atomic bombs could provide this shock - and while killing many people, they would kill less than continued firebombing, or a land invasion.
Of course there are those who believe that the Soviet invasion of Japanese Manchuria and the quick collapse of their army there was actually more of a shock to the leadership than the atomic bombs, and I have much sympathy with that historical view. But in the end it's difficult to decide, to see into people's minds about what motivated them, this more than that, and so on.
Once you enter into war at all, you are faced with these horrendous choices. Which is why I have every sympathy with your pacifism. While I agree that there is no justification for nuclear weapons today, and that they ought to be banned instantly, I do want to emphasise that they are a tool, and what matters more is the person wielding the tool. Had you visited Nanking or Phnom Penh or Auschwitz or Kigali you might have had a different response.
The real issue is the decision to resort to violence. I am not a pacifist, I believe there are times when you have to fight. However, those times are far fewer than is commonly supposed. Our little invasion of Iraq, for example... it was certainly a war of aggression in the Nuremberg Tribunals sense.
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