Join us for the
at
7 PM Doors open.
7:15 PM Dr. Margaret Flowers et al. will engage the audience with music.
7:30 PM Kathleen Hellen and Robin Gould will read poetry.
8 PM Dr. Art Milholland will make a presentation “
9 PM there will be more music and poetry.
NEW YORK TIMES
August 8, 2010
Abolishing Nukes: Flicker of Hope to Global Cause
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) -- In this place where a fearful age was born one fiery instant 65 years ago, the Flame of Peace still flickers on, awaiting the day when the world is rid of nuclear weapons.
Many believe that day may be approaching.
''I saw a light in a dark tunnel,'' says Emiko Okada, 73. ''President Obama said, `Yes, I can.'''
For her and other ''hibakusha,'' survivors of
Ordinary people, too, in country after country, want ''zero nukes,'' opinion polls show.
But is it achievable? Can doomsday arms be banished from the face of the Earth? Will man stop reaching for ever more powerful weapons? And, more immediately, will an American president, following his ambassador's unprecedented visit, finally walk this year among the cherry trees, the memorials, the unspeakable memories of
''The hibakusha say, `We're getting older and older and we'll soon die.' For them abolition is a kind of dream that should be achieved immediately,'' says Kazumi Mizumoto, 53, a Hiroshima-born scholar of the nuclear age. ''I understand their feelings. But feelings aren't enough.''
The strongest feelings are of obligation -- to the countless thousands whose ashes lie beneath the burial mound beside the Ota, the tidal river that ebbed and flowed with charred bodies on Aug. 6, 1945, after U.S. airmen dropped a bomb that, in a blinding orange flash, unleashed the atom's unearthly power on an unsuspecting city below.
------
In movie houses across
The first film was financed by former eBay chief Jeff Skoll, and the second by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization underwritten by two other billionaires, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner.
Such heavyweight backing points up the movement's newfound clout. It will need every ounce of it in contending with the inertia of the nuclear age.
The age unfolded slowly at first. After dropping bombs on
The ''nuclear club'' expanded in the following decades, to include
At its peak, in 1986, the global stockpile totaled more than 70,000 weapons, 96 percent in U.S. and Soviet hands -- not just aerial bombs and missile warheads, but also nuclear land mines, naval depth charges and artillery shells, equivalent to three tons of TNT for every person on Earth.
Through those years, the world teetered on the edge of a catastrophic nuclear exchange an unknown number of times, from 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis to false alarms and near-launches never publicly reported.
It wasn't until the Cold War ended in 1991, as the
In January that year, a pivotal opinion piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal, signed by Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, former secretaries of state; William Perry, a former U.S. defense secretary, and ex-U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
These four elder statesmen made two powerful arguments for abolition: Cold War-style nuclear deterrence was a long-obsolete notion, and the threat of nuclear terrorism, accident or miscalculation grew with every year that thousands of weapons and tons of weapons material existed.
Their appeal gave new hope to abolitionists. In 2008, momentum built as both U.S. presidential candidates espoused the no-nukes goal, and a new high-profile movement, Global Zero, took shape, led by Jordan's Queen Noor and former U.S. arms negotiator Richard Burt and backed by such leading figures as former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
Then, in April 2009, the new U.S. president and Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev jointly endorsed the ''zero'' goal, and Obama, in a historic address in Prague, Czech Republic, declared that the U.S. must act ''as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon'' -- a rare statement of U.S. moral responsibility.
By April this year, the American and Russian leaders were signing a new treaty taking their countries' arsenals down another notch, to 1,550 deployed warheads, with several thousand in reserve. That pact awaits U.S. Senate ratification.
The abolitionists, meanwhile, have rolled out their plans.
Global Zero's study group of former
Mayors for Peace, representing 4,037 cities worldwide and led by Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, is even more ambitious, calling for abolition by 2020.
The most detailed, step-by-step blueprint comes from the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, sponsored by the Japanese and Australian governments. That 300-page report, issued last November, foresees ''minimization'' -- a world of no more than 2,000 warheads -- by 2025, and elimination of the weapons over an undefined period to follow.
''We did not feel it was practical to set a date'' for elimination, commission co-chair Yuriko Kawaguchi, former Japanese foreign minister, said in a
She likened it to climbing a mountain and not seeing the top until halfway up, when one can better judge how to get there.
''It's not easy but we will have to do it. We will have to change the world,'' she said. ''If you go to
But ''realists'' have been quick to dismiss what a former
For starters, they say,
Abolitionists counter that progress clearly depends on political will and leadership to overcome such nationalistic concerns.
''One thing we have learned is that working just on the basis of self-interest, this does not work,'' Gorbachev said in a 2009 AP interview. If the
What about cheaters? the skeptics ask. What if the world goes to zero, but
''It's an irrelevant kind of argument,'' Shultz told the AP last year. If everyone else is dismantling their weapons and
As for detecting secret bomb programs and verifying warhead dismantlement, proponents say the science of verification -- through atmospheric sampling, satellite imaging, seismic monitoring and other tools -- has advanced to a state of high confidence. And the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, would have to be given greater powers of onsite inspection, they say.
Who would enforce a nuke-free world? The ultimate authority, the U.N. Security Council, is often paralyzed when one of its five permanent members, the major nuclear powers, wields its veto power.
Nobuyasu Abe, former U.N. disarmament chief, suggests that under a nuclear ban the five agree not to exercise the veto in the case of an illicit nuclear ''breakout.''
''If some other country is getting nuclear weapons, they're then agreed to take strong action against it,'' Abe said in
''Strong action,'' besides economic or political isolation, might take another, forceful route -- resort to a residual nuclear option, the ability to quickly reconstitute atomic weapons to counter a looming nuclear threat. In that sense, whether under control of national or international authorities, the weapons might be gone, but not forgotten.
In the end, champions and critics of ''zero nukes'' both say, the greatest obstacle lies in the regional clashes that keep the world on edge and nations building nuclear arsenals: India and Pakistan over Kashmir; Israel in its standoff with the Arabs; hostility between the U.S. and North Korea and Iran; the China-Taiwan impasse.
Easing such crises must come first, many say.
''Disarmament is important, but a safer world is more important,'' said
Abolitionists, on the other hand, hope steady progress and rising demand to eliminate nuclear weapons will in itself help move the world to resolve these disputes.
''I don't think we are sure the world will be stable enough,''
They're also unsure whether the world is aware enough.
''There are probably generations who haven't even seen the images of
------
Even 65 years later, that reality can seem unreal.
When the A-bomb exploded 600 meters (2,000 feet) above
Wind from the blast reached 440 meters per second (almost 1,000 mph), the force of five Category-5 hurricanes.
Death and devastation were instantaneous. Trees, wooden houses, people were suddenly ash, leaving a scorched, empty plain for 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in all directions.
''Just gray ash desert,'' recalled Keijiro Matsushima, 81, who survived the collapse of his school outside the worst-hit zone.
All that day, he remembered, a ''procession of ghosts'' slowly emerged from
''I want more and more people in the world to know the horrible reality of nuclear weapons,'' said Matsushima, a retired high school English teacher who leads an abolitionist group of educators.
Robert ''Bo'' Jacobs tries to give American visitors a sense of that reality as he leads them through the Peace Memorial Park, past acres of poignant monuments, past the Flame of Peace, to be extinguished only when the weapons are.
In the centerpiece museum, ''most people are stunned'' at the scale of 1945's devastation, said Jacobs, an American researcher-author at the Hiroshima Peace Institute. He then explains to them that
''I don't think anybody really can grasp that scale,'' he said.
One who might begin to grasp it, with thousands of potential Hiroshimas under his command, is the president of the
Obama told a Japanese interviewer last November he ''would be honored'' to visit
Meanwhile, Ambassador John Roos's scheduled participation in Aug. 6 anniversary events here -- first-ever official
To the hibakusha, Obama ''is the leader of the `Obamajority' abolition movement,'' said Steven L. Leeper, a longtime American resident of
November ''is an opportunity for him to do something amazing,'' Leeper said.
But the hibakusha know an Obama visit might produce a
They know, too, that attaining their ultimate goal, abolishing nuclear weapons, also won't be easy.
''Each country is selfish, after all. They want to defend themselves,'' Matsushima said. Being ''a kind of realist,'' the old teacher said, he had ''thought and thought'' about abolition, ''and I concluded it would be very, very difficult.''
Tranquil and green, crisscrossed by visiting schoolchildren, Hiroshima's peace park spreads over a point of river delta where, on that day 65 years ago, crazed and desperate parents searched in vain for thousands of children who had been brought to the city center to help clear firebreaks.
It's where for days afterward
A lifetime later, this quiet, subdued grandmother looked back.
''We have to protect our Earth, so our children and grandchildren will never suffer like that,'' she said.
And she looked ahead.
''Maybe nuclear weapons won't be abolished while I'm alive,'' she said. ''But I will never give up.''
· Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment