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4 August 2004 |
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Nearly six decades after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Justin McCurry reports on efforts to ensure that the horrors of a nuclear
strike remain etched on the collective memory
On Friday, the people of Hiroshima will come together to remember the morning of August 6th 1945, when their city became the target of the first atomic bomb unleashed on a civilian population. Gathering within sight of the burned out shell of the former industrial promotion hall near the epicentre of the blast, they will remember the 200,000 people who perished in the immediate aftermath or who died later from the effects of exposure to radiation. Remembering the A-bomb, though, is becoming an increasingly local affair. Representatives of just two of the world's seven acknowledged nuclear powers - Pakistan and Russia - will attend. Almost six decades after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective horror at their consequences is being replaced by collective amnesia. And to forget, say those who survived, is to invite the prospect of a disastrous repeat of the radioactive infernos of the summer of 1945. The hibakusha - the Japanese name for those who survived the bombings - are falling victim to the passage of time and shifts in the geopolitical environment that are concentrating minds on terrorism and regime change at the expense of more traditional threats, such as nuclear war. In Japan itself, the anti-nuclear movement has been marginalised. What was once a mass movement - a largely silent but powerful majority committed to upholding the country's pacifist constitution and non-nuclear principles - has become too closely associated with the impotent political parties of the far left. To many, the rallying cry of "No More Hiroshimas!" sounds cloying and hopelessly out of date. It is little wonder, then, that the voices of the hibakusha are being drowned out amid the din of real politik, especially in a region that is coming to terms with a North Korea emboldened by a nuclear weapons programme. Inevitably, age, too, is an obstacle. Most of the survivors are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many are in poor health. Yet they are determined not to be written off as mere unfortunates in a singularly tragic event. They still have battles to be won - for recognition and to secure their rightful place in history, lest, they say, it be repeated. "They are not forgotten, but they have been forced to exist in a historical file labelled 'A-Bomb'," said Kazumi Mizumoto, an associate professor at the Hiroshima Research Institute. "At the same time, they are the only people to have experienced the effects of the military use of nuclear bombs. Whenever the world faces the danger of nuclear weapons, they alone can tell the world what the result will be. In that sense they are still important, and I think the world understands that." The community of atomic bomb survivors is now a diaspora spread between Japan, North and South Korea, China, the United States and Brazil - separated geographically, but united in their experience of coming under nuclear attack and by fear that many are not getting the official assistance that they deserve in their old age. The subjects of numerous books, magazines and recordings, their recollections will survive long after they are gone. In one of the biggest such projects, conducted just over 40 years after the attacks, NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, and the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Centre, asked 100 survivors to talk about the day their world fell apart. Among them was Toshiko Saeki, a 26-year-old-woman who rushed to Hiroshima from her home in the suburbs on the afternoon of August 6 1945 from her home in the suburbs to search for her mother and other family members. Saeki, who lost 13 relatives in the attack, made perhaps the most eloquent case for not allowing the voices of the A-bomb survivors like her to fade into obscurity. "Our experience must not be forgotten," she said. "What we believed in during the war turned out to be worth nothing. I went through hell on earth [so that] Hiroshima should not be repeated again. That is why I keep telling the same old story over and over again. And I'll keep on repeating it." Hers is just one of countless similar experiences that Mizumoto believes will remind the region and the world of what they stand to lose should they ever be pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Simply rationalising the political consequences, he says, is not enough. "People are often motivated more by emotion than by logical discussion," he said. "That is where the meaning behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki plays a part, and will continue to play a part."
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3 August 2004 |
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NAGASAKI -- The end of the Cold War didn't end the threat of nuclear annihilation. An increasing number of experts worry that the dangers posed by those
weapons of mass destruction are increasing as the nuclear nonproliferation regime is increasingly stretched and frayed. The 2005 Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT) provides an opportunity to rethink strategies to counter nuclear proliferation and to rejuvenate efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide. That task is both daunting and pressing. Last week I attended the Second United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Sapporo, Hokkaido, and the mood there was grim. Tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and hundreds of tons of weapon-grade material (both highly enriched uranium and plutonium) are tempting targets for terrorists, yet officials in the United States and Russia don't seem to take that threat seriously. The technical know-how and the technology needed to make a bomb are now widespread. In Sapporo, one speaker after another detailed the failures of the NPT. It's a long list:
One U.S. expert, William Potter of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, warned that the world is at a crucial juncture: Decisions made in the next few months could determine whether nuclear weapons are used in his -- and our -- lifetime. These flaws have not gone unnoticed. In response, governments have embraced a number of initiatives to plug the holes. They range from the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which created a "coalition of the willing" to halt the illicit transfers of nuclear weapons and materials, to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, which calls on all member states to take action to halt the trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. Efforts have been made to secure nuclear materials and to find jobs for scientists who formerly worked in nuclear-weapons programs and who might be tempted to sell their services to the highest bidder. All those programs have shortcomings of their own. Tighter controls on the trade in nuclear components and materials require the skills, know-how and technology that allows officials to identify suspect transactions. In many cases, they are lacking. Many states are unwilling to join programs that reinforce the "nuclear apartheid" that currently exists. As Sergio Duarte, the Brazilian diplomat who is the president designate of the 2005 NPT Review Conference, explained in Sapporo, "for many the crux of the question is the acceptability of further mandatory restrictions, with intrusive verification, in the absence of corresponding deeper commitments and further steps toward nuclear disarmament which are irreversible and verifiable." This division exacerbates another problem: governments don't agree that nuclear proliferation is a shared concern. For most developing nations, nuclear proliferation is a problem for the developed world -- forgetting that they too can be threatened with such weapons and indeed, historically, terrorists have targeted the weak and made no distinction among their victims. Most nonnuclear states see their primary security challenge as related to problems of development and internal instability. When they think about nuclear weapons, their chief concern is disarmament, not proliferation: They argue that getting rid of all nuclear weapons is the most effective way to eliminate the threat of nuclear destruction. That last charge underlines a final obstacle to efforts to counter nuclear proliferation: We still don't know why governments proliferate nuclear weapons. Several explanations have been offered -- to provide security, to establish international status, or as a result of internal political and bureaucratic dynamics -- but no single explanation convinces. Until we know why governments acquire nuclear weapons, it will be difficult to stop them from doing so. That doesn't mean abandoning efforts to achieve disarmament. Divisions among governments make actions by nongovernmental organizations and other disarmament
supporters (including governments) even more important. Efforts To delegitimize nuclear weapons, disarmament advocates must make their case with unflagging energy, taking every opportunity to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Every meeting with security on the agenda, from the NPT Review Conference to the ASEAN-Plus-Three summits, should reiterate the call for a nuclear-weapons-free world. The failure to reach agreement on the best way to reach that goal doesn't mean the goal itself should be set aside. Each time the objective is repeated in an official context -- a statement, a declaration, a communique -- the norm is strengthened and advocates are reinforced as they push for a nuclear-weapons-free world. The goal is to transform the prohibition against nuclear weapons from a treaty-based rule to a preemptory norm of international relations. Most of us instinctively recoil from the idea of using such weapons of mass destruction, but the emotional appreciation of those horrors is balanced by an intellectual understanding of the security context in which those weapons are deployed. (Every participant in security discussions in Japan, and especially those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, feels that tremendous gap.) There is no such divide when it comes, say, to slavery, even though pragmatic arguments were made on behalf of that heinous practice in the past. That is the goal for advocates of a nuclear-weapons-free world. The emotional and intellectual contexts should be reconciled. Pragmatic concerns should not mitigate the horror of nuclear weapons. The 2005 NPT Review Conference will be a key battleground in that effort and disarmament advocates should be redoubling their efforts as it approaches. Brad Glosserman is director of research at Pacific Forum CSIS. He can be reached at bradg@hawaii.rr.com.
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