Hiroshima Day 2007 – Remarks by Francis Chiappa, Ph.D., President, Cleveland Peace Action
No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Never Again!
Sixty-two years ago – on August 6, Hiroshima was the scene of just the second nuclear explosion ever detonated. The third followed three days later, in Nagasaki. In a sense they were nuclear tests. I mean that in the scientific sense – testing collects data, and if we ignore that data, we put ourselves in peril.
Those who developed nuclear weapons envisioned a brave new world where war would be unthinkable, and nuclear energy would provide an endless source of safe peacetime power. They did recognize the terrible, apocalyptic power of nuclear weapons. I’m not sure the politicians had the same awareness. In hindsight one can almost understand the decision to use two nuclear weapons to bring a quick end to WWII, a horrific war on a scale previously unknown. I don’t think they fully understood the destructive potential of these weapons before they were actually used on a city, on people. They didn’t understand that more people would be killed by the short and long-term effects of radiation than by the actual explosions. Its one thing to project casualties as numbers, as a body count. It’s quite another thing to witness the destruction as one Japanese photographer did – in a 360 degree panorama of shots, from near ground zero, with total destruction stretching to the horizon all around, imagining the lives that were obliterated, literally in a flash. It takes images like this to break though denial.
No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Never Again!
But denial is powerful. Once the politicians got a hold of nuclear weapons, there was no doubt that they would be used for domination, with the mere threat of their use, a powerful force. Thus the Cold War was born, giving us over 50,000 nuclear weapons, mostly in the US and Soviet Union, most of these much more powerful that the puny bombs that killed a quarter of a million people in Japan. Cold Warriors on both sides planned for actual nuclear war, envisioning scenarios that would result in the devastation of most life on the planet. They built fallout shelters, imagining that some would survive, and that we could somehow win the war if some of us did survive and the other side all died. In grade school in the 50’s, we participated in duck and cover exercises, in denial with rest of the world, or at least with the war planners, that we could somehow survive nuclear holocaust.
Fortunately, in the 1980’s, the world broke out of its collective denial about nuclear war. Ronald Reagan was talking about “winnable nuclear war.” His appointees proposed giving shovels to all Americans, to dig survival holes. We learned that even a “small nuclear war” – perhaps a dozen cities bombed – could lead to nuclear winter, as the dust particles from these explosions would obscure sunlight and cause catastrophic climate change. Ironically, that would be the opposite of global warming. There was finally too much information and awareness broke though denial. People demanded a nuclear freeze. Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Cold War cooled down. While Reagan and the Right like to take credit for ending the Cold War, for outspending the USSR militarily, I believe credit goes to us ordinary people on all continents, who stood up and demanded an end to the insanity of “mutually assured destruction.” The real victory in the Cold War was not that the Soviet Union crumbled. It’s that we managed to survive, to not blow ourselves all to Hell. We did that!! We pushed President Clinton to unilaterally halt nuclear testing, which effectively led to a test ban among the big five nuclear states. While the nuclear freeze was never enacted by Congress, we now have, essentially, a nuclear freeze – no testing, no production, no deployment of nuclear weapons. Of course, it will take our ongoing vigilance to maintain that nuclear freeze. New nuclear weapons were proposed by the Bush Administration, but Congress – including the Republican Congress last year, said no.
No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Never Again!
Sadly, it seems like every generation has to learn the lesson all over again. Denial creeps back. Power-addicted politicians again seek to use nuclear weapons to intimidate. At the end of his Presidency, Ronald Reagan – who I admit, I detested when he was in office – reportedly came to the conviction that the abolition of nuclear weapons would be best for humanity. But abolition apparently boggles the military mind. Bush and Cheney have rejected Reagan’s idea. They’ve abandoned the ABM Treaty, sought to resume nuclear testing, to build a new generation of small, bunker-busting nukes and to refurbish the nuclear arsenal in case we might want to use it. Perhaps worst of all, they have refused to take the nuclear option off the table. Plans for attacking Iran, which Bush and Cheney have been cooking up, include the possibility of using nuclear weapons on that country. Arguably, Bush has done and is still doing more that anyone, perhaps in history, to encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons to more and more nations.
Make no mistake, proliferation is today’s gravest danger. Nuclear weapons confer both protection and prestige on a nation. But as more nations acquire or even seek to acquire nuclear weapons, the world will become a far more dangerous place. Pakistan sought nuclear weapons to counter India’s. Now Pakistan has them, along with a heavy-handed government. What would happen if Pakistan should fall to radical Islamicists? Iran feels the need for nukes because it borders Pakistan and because its arch-enemy, Israel, has them. Israel got them to have an advantage in any battle, but having them seems only to provoke its neighbors to acquire them. A world where no country considers itself safe unless it has nukes will be a very dangerous world indeed. Add to this the possibility of terrorist groups getting their hands on them.
What can we do? We need leaders who will be courageous enough to take the nuclear option off the table. We seem to be, for now, the world’s only superpower, so it is incumbent on the USA to provide the leadership to stop nuclear weapons proliferation. If we won’t renounce the nuclear option, why should anyone else?
We must break though our own denial. Threatening with nuclear weapons won’t make us safer. Abandoning arms control treaties won’t make us safer. Building more weapons, testing them, refurbishing them, at staggering costs, when we should be refurbishing bridges, won’t make us safer.
No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Never Again!
How might a nuclear war start? It seems obvious that bellicose foreign policy, angry words and posturing and conventional military battles would start us on the slippery slope towards nuclear attack. It is with some shame that we must recognize that the US has long practiced the art of war and intimidation. From the Philippines, a Century ago, to Iran in 1953 to Chile in 1972 – among many overt and covert adventures – the US has distinguished itself as the world’s pre-eminent imperialist power. Check out Addicted to War at our literature table. The US Government – no matter what party is in power – has come to the rescue of narrow economic and corporate interests time and time again. And military action is always justified as a fight against evil – communism, terrorism, whatever it is fashionable to hate at the time. It’s no different in Iraq today. The American people remain in deep denial about this and it’s up to us to break through it.
No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Never Again!
As always, this starts with us. We must demand that our elected officials break through their denial. Nuclear war is both un-winnable and unthinkable. Use the post cards at the Advocacy table. Write letters to the editor. Contact Presidential candidates, especially the Democrats, and ask them why they haven’t renounced the use of nuclear weapons. The cure for denial is repeated confrontation with reality. Confront them. Make them stand up and lead us on the path to peace.
No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Never Again!
