OMNI
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Remembrance, AUGUST 9, 2015
Written and Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Newsletters
Index:
Blog
What’s at stake: Again, after some 45 years of our Remembrances, we respond to those atrocious bombings with the intention of true and accurate memory. It is OMNI's most solemn event. There has never been nor could there be anything upbeat about it, but only sorrow—until the weapons are totally banned. With Thomas Hardy we say: "if way to a Better there be/it exacts a full look at the Worst." The nuclear nations have expanded from one to nine. The 2015 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference failed to reach agreement. The USA has budgeted a trillion dollars for nuclear weapons maintenance and innovation during the next decade. But now with the international Abolition Movement and the Marshallese suits against the nuclear nations, we can at least engage in actions that, whatever their immediate outcome, transcend revenge and promise some repair, some meaning, for the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the global catastrophe of air war. --Dick
Contents Hiroshima-Nagasaki Remembrance August 9, 2015
2015 Remembrance Program
Seeking Historical Truth As the Foundation for Action
Dick, Discovering the Truth and Not Forgetting
Johan Galtung: Japanese v. Western Colonialism
Joseph Gerson, Myths and Lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Tomgram: Christian Appy and “The ‘Merciful’ Ending to the ‘Good War’”
Mickey Z, Lies About Hiroshima
Google Search 8-3-15: Hiroshima Nagasaki names of victims
Poems about Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Take Action
Dick’s 2015 Essay for the Free Weekly
Union of Concerned Scientists, Tell President Obama to Go to Hiroshima
NAPF: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Nuclear Abolition Movement
ICAN: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Lazare on Zarif: Nuclear Nations Disarm
Nuclear Zero, Republic of Marshall Islands’ Nuclear Weapons Suits
Aubrey Shepherd’s Film of Remembrance 2014
OMNI Nuclear Weapons Newsletters
The OMNI Center 2015 Remembrance:
From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Nuclear Zero: 2015 Abolition Movement /Marshallese Nuclear Suits
Sunday, August 9th, 7PM
Fulbright Peace Fountain
University of Arkansas
Maple, Ave., Fayetteville
PLENTY OF FREE PARKING ON ARKANSAS AVENUE AND FACULTY YELLOW PARKING AND STUDENT GREEN NORTH OF OLD MAIN/MAPLE STREET.
2015 PROGRAM
Hiroshima Nagasaki: Shadows, Nuclear Abolition, Nuclear Zero 2015
MC: Kelly Mulhollan
1. Opening Prayer: “May Peace Prevail on Earth” Still on the Hill
2. Proclamation: Mayor Lioneld Jordan
3. “The Fulbright Legacy”: Ashlie Hilbun, Director of Development, Fulbright College UA
4. “Nagasaki”: Dan Dean performs David Rovics’ somber classic
5. Names of the Dead: Readers David Edwards UUFF, Matt Miller, OMNI UA President
6. The Marshall Islands Suit v. Nuclear Nations: Carmen Chong Gum, Consul General for the RMI Consulate, Springdale
7. Poem: Burnetta Hintertheur, biologist poet
8. “The Value of Remembrance”: speaker Bill Williams, disabled Marine combat veteran and peace advocate
9. “Maitri: May You Know Peace”: Dan Dean
WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY
TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PAST, Michael Atkinson’s film review, “Jan Palach: Prague’s Human Torch,” rewritten and condensed by Dick Bennett
In August 1968, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague Spring. In protest, September, 1968, Ryszard Siwiec, Polish accountant, set himself aflame in Warsaw. On January 16, 1969, Czech university student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square. These self-immolations galvanized protests throughout the Warsaw Pact, particularly in Czechoslovakia.
The Polish government successfully buried Siwiec’s death for many decades. But although the Czech leadership tried to discredit and disappear Palach, his suicide was followed by other “torches.” And they were not forgotten; their sacrifices were kept alive in public memory by the many methods of resistance available to an occupied populace .
Recently a mini-series for Czech television, Burning Bush, created by Agnieszka Holland, reminded the nation of what had been at stake. The plot follows the slanders about Palach by a high government official, the lawsuit for libel brought by Palach’s mother, who will pay a severe price, a detective whose career will be destroyed, and especially the lawyer she hired to plead the case, who struggles to make the justice system work against a wall of power, secrecy, corruption, and threats.
But this was not all. Under the surface of this dark film of loss appears affirmation and hope: the fog of deception and lies essential to totalitarian states can be resisted and eventually revealed. A half-million Czechs joined Palach’s funeral procession despite military violence against them. And opposition continued underground unceasingly. In 1989 the Czechs celebrated “Palach Week,” again despite military violence. That yearthe Czech “Velvet Revolution” began, and the Soviet army soon departed.
The struggle to resist an occupying foreign military regime is in some ways easier than to resist the tyranny of one’s own government. The foreign enemy, their harms, are clear, and the occupied are united in opposition. When one’s own government acts to destroy the constitution, however, by starting wars without true cause, as against Vietnam or Iraq and many other countries, or by universal surveillance of the populace, and using its immense propaganda power to frighten the public about foreign enemies, the people are uncertain and divided, and resistance is enfeebled.
Even more difficult to resist are the myths employed to justify past wars or particular actions in past wars. How refute the old, deeply entrenched conviction that the Japanese were more vicious in their wars than were the Western powers, or the iterated claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and fire-devastated Tokyo and other cities) and all their residents had to be destroyed in order to avoid an invasion and the loss, some US leaders exaggerated, of a million or our soldiers?
But reply we must. Despite the holocaust against the civilian cities of Germany and Japan, the United States has glorified its victory, and its soldiers have become the “Great Generation.” Consequently, more US wars became accepted in virtually permanent war, modeled on the “Good War”—over forty invasions and interventions. Also since 1945, atomic bombs have proliferated, at first by the US with thousands of ever more powerful bombs, then by the Soviets, and by Britain and France, China, Israel, and now Pakistan and India.
Tell the truth, then, we must, to stop the wars; tell the truth to expose the injustices, racism, the war crimes, from the civilian city annihilations as a mode of war to the invasions of Grenada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq --to open the way to the abolition of nuclear weapons. We must call on employees in the nuclear industry to become whistleblowers and on investigative journalists to expose the danger and the waste. We citizens must no longer avert our eyes and minds. And, as the Czech people never forgot Jan Palach and resisted the tyranny’s lies, we must remember the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and refuse to accept our government’s rationalizations for slaughter that continue today.
PEACE JOURNALISM PERSPECTIVE
War, colonialism, atrocities were seen as the essence of Japan, as accidental in Germany. Western racism at work: impunity for white people-not for yellow. Judged by Western colonial powers whose colonial crimes cry to the heavens relative to what Japan did. Including me, attributing Western colonialism to Japan. Sorry. Read more...
Our 70th Anniversary Homework: Confronting the Myths and Learning the Lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by
In March of 1946, eight months after the atomic bomb was dropped, the city of Hiroshima stood in ruins. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Seventy years ago, two nuclear weapons targeted against cities which met the criteria of having “densely packed workers’ homes,” killed more than 200,000 people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the years that have followed, many more have suffered and died from cancers, radiation disease, genetic damage and other fallout from the atom bombings.
The myths that the A-bombings were necessary to end the war against Japan and that they saved the lives of half a million US troops remain widely believed. The myths serve as the ideological foundation for continuing U.S. preparations for nuclear war, which in turn has served as the primary driver of nuclear weapons proliferation and the creation of deterrent nuclear arsenals
It is no accident that this wartime propaganda took on a life of its own. Japanese and other journalists’ film footage and photos of the devastation wrought by the A-bombs taken within days of the A-bombings, were seized by U.S. Occupation forces and were locked away in Pentagon vaults for more than two decades. In 1995, the Smithsonian Museum’s initially excellent 50th anniversary exhibition was censored beyond recognition to prevent people from seeing what the A-bombs inflicted on human beings. Also removed were the facts that U.S. Secretary of War Stimson had advised Truman that Japan’s surrender “could be arranged on terms acceptable to the United States” without the atom bombings. (That arrangement was later deemed acceptable – even necessary – by U.S. military occupation authorities.) Indeed, before it was sterilized, the exhibit included quotations from senior US wartime military leaders including Admiral Leahy and General (later President) Eisenhower who thought, “It wasn’t necessary to hit [Japanese] with that awful thing.”
Scholars now know that numerous factors contributed to Truman’s decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their civilian populations. These include Truman’s political calculations as he looked to the 1948 presidential election, vengeance, racism, institutional inertia, and the callousness that came with already having burned more than sixty Japanese cities to the ground.
But, as General Leslie Groves, the commander of the Manhattan Project, told senior scientist Joseph Rotblat, the bombs came to be designed for the Soviet Union. The determinative reasons for the A-bombings were to bring the war to an immediate end so that the US could avoid sharing influence with the USSR in Northern China, Manchuria and Korea and to intimidate Stalin and other Soviet leaders by demonstrating the apocalyptic power of nuclear weapons and Washington’s willingness to use them – even against civilians. Little Boy and Fat Man, as the bombs were named, announced the beginning of the Cold War.
Americans also continue to suffer from the misconception that nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing on August 9, 1945. In fact, the US, and to a lesser degree the other nuclear powers, have repeatedly used their nuclear arsenals. Long ago, Daniel Ellsberg, a senior Pentagon nuclear war planner for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, explained that the US has repeatedly used nuclear weapons “in the way that you use a gun when you point it at someone’s head in a confrontation….whether or not you pull the trigger...[and] You’re also using it when you have it on your hip ostentatiously.” During wars and international crises, the US has prepared and/or threatened to initiate nuclear war on at least thirty occasions - at least 15 times during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and crises with China, and at least 10 times to reinforce US Middle East hegemony. And each of the other eight nuclear powers has made such threats or preparations at least once.
Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control, reported last December to the International Conference on the Consequences of Nuclear Weapons, attended by representatives of 158 governments that luck, not state policies and regulations, best explains why humanity has survived nuclear blackmail, reckless dependence on deterrence, miscalculations and nuclear accidents.
Still more sobering are the recent scientific studies demonstrating that even a “small” exchange of 50-100 nuclear weapons targeted against cities would result in fires, smoke that would cause global cooling, and up to two billion deaths from famine.
All of which lead to a series of existential questions: As we race against time to save our civilizations from the impending ravages of climate change, why are our governments preparing to inflict nuclear annihilation? Why do we tolerate the continued deployment and stockpiling of nearly 16,000 nuclear weapons, 90% of them in U.S. and Russian arsenals? Why have the P-5 nuclear powers (US, Russia, Britain, France and China) refused to implement their 45 year-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligation to begin negotiations for the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals? And why did the US condemn this past spring’s NPT Review Conference to failure by refusing to honor its long-standing commitment to co-convene a conference to lay the foundations for a nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East?
There are high costs to denying history and reality. In a worst case scenario, the failure of the US and the other nuclear powers to heed the warning of A-bomb survivors that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist is the end to life on earth as we know it.
The majority of the world’s governments are not in similar denial. The NPT Review Conference’s one achievement was the commitment of the vast majority of the world’s governments the Humanitarian Pledge. Initiated by Austria, 113 governments pledged “to cooperate with all relevant stakeholders, states, international organizations, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, parliamentarians and civil society, in efforts to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences and associated risks.” The gulf between the non-nuclear weapons states and the nuclear powers has widened, and in time the former may use their economic, political and other power in the struggle to secure humanity’s future.
On August 6, many in Japan will appreciate the silent presence of U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy at Hiroshima’s official 70th anniversary commemoration, but there will be no apology. And, even as we celebrate and work for the implementation of the nuclear deal with Iran, the sorry truth is that the US is now on track to spend one trillion dollars to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal and delivery systems, with the other nuclear powers following the U.S. lead. And, despite his pledge in Prague, President Obama has retired fewer nuclear weapons that any other US post-Cold War President.
As the US-Russian confrontation, marked by implicit and explicit nuclear threats reminds us, we are living on borrowed time. Seventy years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings, human survival still hanging in the balance. Midst the carnival of the 2016 presidential election, let us insist that those who seek to rule us and the world finally learn the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Never again to anyone! No more Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! No more nuclear weapons!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Dr. Joseph Gerson is Director of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England. His most recent book is Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World. His previous books include The Sun Never Sets and With Hiroshima Eyes.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: When you read today’s piece, remember that you can get a signed, personalized copy of Christian Appy’s masterful new book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, in return for a $100 donation to this site. I think I know a reasonable amount about the Vietnam War and yet I found myself surprised again and again by his highly original account of how its aftermath played out in American society. Check out our donation page for the details and know that, in the dog days of summer, we couldn’t be more appreciative of whatever you offer. It helps us keep chugging along! Tom] So many decades later, it’s hard to remember the kind of nuclear thinking top American officials engaged in during the Cold War. In secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, for instance, the country’s top strategists descended willingly into the charnel house of futuristic history, imagining life on this planet as an eternal potential holocaust. They wrote in those documents of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans and of a "blow" that might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union. And they weren’t just whistling Dixie. After all, in 1960, the top military brass found themselves arguing about the country’s first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war. In it, a scenario was laid out for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world. Targets included at least 130 cities, which, if all went well, would cease to exist. Classified estimates of possible casualties from such an attack ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured. That’s what “the complete destruction” of the Soviet Union and Communist China meant then and, until Dr. Strangelove hit the screens in 1964, those figures were simply part of the sort of “rational” war planning that led to perfectly serious debate about launching a “preemptive strike” -- what, if another country were considering it, would have been a “war of aggression” -- to eradicate that enemy. To give credit where it’s due, Army and Navy officials did worry"about the lethal impact of downwind fallout, with the Army explicitly concerned about limiting exposure of 'friendly forces and people' to radioactive fallout. By contrast, the Air Force saw no need for additional constraints [on surface nuclear blasts]." It's this world that we “celebrate,” having now reached the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Today, we know that delivering so many nuclear weapons (or, in fact, many less) would have done a lot more than wipe out the “Communist world.” It would have plunged the planet into nuclear winter and undoubtedly eradicated humanity as definitively as the dinosaurs were wiped out by that asteroid 65 million years ago. Apocalypse was -- and remains -- us. After all, despite the recent nuclear agreement that will stop a country without nuclear weapons from building them, this planet is still loaded with a world-ending arsenal that is constantly being expanded, updated, andmodernized. Call us lucky, but don’t call us particularly thoughtful. Today, Christian Appy, author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, considers the way in which -- except in rare moments when antinuclear movements gained brief strength here -- Americans managed to ignore how this country’s leaders ushered us into the nuclear age by annihilating not one but two cities and killing hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians. Tom Our “Merciful” Ending to the “Good War” Or How Patriotism Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry By Christian Appy “Never, never waste a minute on regret. It's a waste of time.” -- President Harry Truman Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I'm wondering if we've come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world's only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people -- slowly and painfully -- leading in the end to a death toll for the two citiesconservatively estimated at more than 250,000? Given the last seven decades of perpetual militarization andnuclear “modernization” in this country, the answer may seem like an obvious no. Still, as a historian, I've been trying to dig a little deeper into our lack of national contrition. As I have, an odd fragment of Americana kept coming to mind, a line from the popular 1970 tearjerker Love Story: “Love,” says the female lead when her boyfriend begins to apologize, “means never having to say you're sorry.” It has to be one of the dumbest definitions ever to lodge in American memory, since real love often requires the strength to apologize and make amends. |  | Visit our sister sites:     Recent Posts 2 days ago... Tomgram: Karen J. Greenberg, The Mass Killer and the National Security State 5 days ago... Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, Fire at World's End 1 week ago... Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Washington and Tehran Come in From the Cold 9 days ago... Tomgram: Eduardo Galeano, The Previous Sole Superpower Recent Highlights 1 month ago... Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Theology of American National Security 1 month ago... Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares |
 |
MICKEY Z, LIES ABOUT HIROSHIMA
Hiroshima: 70 Years of Lies and Propaganda by Mickey Z.
July 24, 2015 . Via Cindy Shehan’s Soapbox, July 26, 2015
“It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history.”
- President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)
July 24, 2015 . Via Cindy Shehan’s Soapbox, July 26, 2015
“It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history.”
- President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)
One of the seemingly endless Good (sic) War myths goes a little something like this:
The U.S. had no choice but to drop atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had they not done so, the fanatical Japanese never would have surrendered and millions of brave American soldiers would have perished in the ensuing invasion of the Japanese islands.
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I’ll try (yet again) to answer the question: Why was the bomb used?
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST
HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI NAMES OF VICTIMS, GOOGLE SEARCH, AUGUST 3, 2015
Atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) ... Little Boy exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of ...... The dark portions of the garments this victim wore during the flash caused ...
Wikipedia
The surviving victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ...names of more than 450,000 hibakusha; 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in ...
Since it was located just under thehypocenter, blast pressure was vertically ... was the longest one in Hiroshima at that time, were filled with A-bomb victims.
abcnews.go.com › International
Aug 6, 2010 - VIDEO: Hiroshima victims share stories of survival 65 years after the ... "I saw a bright blast, and I saw yellow and silver and orange and all sorts ...
Feb 5, 2007 - Although the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incised into our memories, ... Shocking images of the ruins, but where were the victims?
myemail.constantcontact.com/Lists-of-Hiroshima--Nagasaki-A-bomb-vic...
Nagasaki City employees take part in an annual airing out of the books listing thenames of the victims of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of the southwestern ...
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a reminder of what horrors nuclear weapons can inflict. CTBTO ... The blast created shock waves faster than the speed of sound. ... A victim of the Hiroshima bomb (AP Photo/The Association of the ...
ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/.../AJ201205160089
Asahi Shimbun
May 16, 2012 - In addition, there is a volume containing the names of nine people who lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later and ...
time.com/3879427/hiroshima-portraits-of-survivors/ Time
Mar 20, 2014 - Photographs -- most of them never published in LIFE magazine -- made in Hiroshima after the end of the Second World War.
At the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Memorial Halls for the Atomic Bombing Victims we collect, preserve and display memoirs of the atomic bombing written by ...
POEMS ABOUT HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
Bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki How can you do this? Let people die for no reason! Those innocent faces and innocent lives that you have taken away ...
The intense heat and light of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts ... The following is one of the best poems about Hiroshima that I have read to date.
Aug 9, 2010 - NAGASAKI 1945 (After an eyewitness account by Dr Tatsuichiro Akizuki) At 10.30 the siren sounded, at 11 o'clock the all-clear. Sticking a ...
Jul 29, 2010 - Black Rain: From Hiroshima To Nagasaki by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light). .We dropped the Bomb though ...
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Boom! Is the sound that never leaves? For peoples skin catch fire like sleeves,. The city is covered in ash,. Now the flash of light so ...
Atomic Skies Falling With Hiroshima eyes I weep for a world self-destructing, never learning lessons from the atomic apocalypse of skies falling. With Nagasaki ...
Feb 6, 2013 - HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI Poetry Competitions at the Deep Underground Poetry forums. Discuss poems and creative writing.
Poems of the Atomic Bomb, 3. - Dedicated to those stripped of their lives by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki on ...
As an invocation, I'd like to begin with a poem by Hiromu Morishita. Hiroshima ... bombing of Hiroshima—overcome the powerful urge of silence; they are, in the ..... the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came at the end of World War II, they.
Aug 6, 2012 - Kia Ora folks Sometimes we are too wrapped up in our own mishaps and self created micro discomforts that we forget the macro pains of others ...
TAKE ACTION
TO THE EDITOR, THE FREE WEEKLY, by Dick Bennett
To Mourn and Resist
The OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology invites you to attend their annual Remembrance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sunday, August 9, 7pm, at the Fulbright Peace Fountain, University of Arkansas.
The Bombings’ Direct Consequences
During World War II, the United States decimated many Japanese civilian cities in that mutually merciless war. Two of the cities were obliterated by just one bomb for each city—the new nuclear bombs. These were mainly civilian cities. According to one source, of the 200,000 deaths in Hiroshima and the 140,000 deaths in Nagasaki, over 95 per cent of the combined casualties of the two cities were civilian. The deaths directly attributable to the bombings are estimated conservatively at 300,000.
Mourning These Deaths
The Hebrew religion has a word for their ceremony of mourning: it’s called “Kaddish.” One form of this prayer is recited by mourners. Annually we express our sorrow for those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for all Japanese civilians killed by indiscriminate bombings from the air. Each year we grieve for those civilian dead, who are, to some of us, murdered innocents. The Remembrance is our Kaddish of lamentation.
The Long-Range Consequences
But the consequences of the bombs did not end with the bombings themselves. A nuclear bombs race ensued. To keep ahead the US tested over 60 hydrogen bombs on some atolls of the Marshall Islands. Today nine nations have the bombs. Today the US has budgeted over a trillion dollars for nuclear weapons innovations in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Yet most people are silent. Perhaps they think we are no longer endangered by the existence of thousands of nuclear bombs in the possession of 9 nations some of them in conflict. Or perhaps the people cannot think or feel what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, numbed by the constant fear-mongering by our government: Cold War, War on Drugs, War against Terrorism, War on Islamic State….Permanent War.
Resistance
But you who are reading this article in this newspaper today, you are not numb or dumb. Together we remember for a purpose.
Each year at the Remembrance we mourn, but we also resolve to resist. Great union organizer Mother Jones’ motto was “Don’t Mourn, Organize.” The magnitude of the two bombings, the callousness and racism they represent, the lack of remorse and apology by our leaders (when the Japanese leaders have travelled the globe apologizing to the countries where they had plundered and killed), require a response filled both with mourning and resolve to abolish nuclear weapons.
In 2015 an international nonviolent movement exists to end nuclear weapons. Here are three mainstays of this resistance, one of them close to us: the international network of antinuclear organizations, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and the Marshall Islands Nuclear Zero Law Suits.
Anti-Nuclear Organizations
Pressure has been sustained around the world by devoted groups working for nuclear disarmament. Here are some of those in the US.
In Arkansas:
WAND, Women Acting for New Directions, coordinated by Jean Gordon in Little Rock, a branch of the original Women Against Nuclear Destruction started by the Australian Dr. Helen Caldicott.
Arkansas Center for Peace and Justice, also in Little Rock, Bob Estes director.
St. Scholastica Catholic Center in Fort Smith. Sisters have attended our Remembrance ever since OMNI began.
And OMNI. The Remembrance is one of our earliest activities, and we publish newsletters and demonstrate against wars and nuclear dangers.
In the USA
These organizations oppose nuclear weapons full-time:
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) in California. Founder and president, David Krieger. Offers many opportunities, including a speaker’s bureau, The Sunflowermonthly e-newsletter providing information on nuclear weapons abolition, and assists the Marshall Islands lawsuits.
Ground Zero Organization and Magazine to End Trident Submarines. Ground Zero has a permanent residence and protest at Bangor, Wash., the Trident submarines base; one submarine is extraordinarily lethal.
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, in Maine, headed by the indefatigable Bruce Gagnon. Publishes Space Alert!
Nukewatch and Nukewatch Quarterly. Located in Wisconsin, dedicated in their newspaper and by direct action to abolish nuclear weapons and power.
Nevada Desert Experience, annual walk to the nuclear bomb test sites. Check their newsletter. Another of the many Catholic-founded oppositions.
The Nuclear Resister sustained by a couple who keep track of all individuals resisting nuclear weapons, including all on trial and in jail. See their newspaper.
Look them up your search engine and assist them. Just a letter or call of thanks will help, but they have no big donors, especially the first five. Help them, get involved.
These organizations include nuclear opposition as a main purpose:
FCNL, the Friends Committee for National Legislation, the lobbying wing of the Quakers, has advocate regulation and abolition of nuclear weapons ever since the bombings.
The Catholic Worker. For example, the Jan-Feb 2015 number of their magazine included an extensive eulogy of the great anti-nuclear writer, Jonathan Schell, and a quotation from Pope Francis advocating banning nuclear weapons “once and for all.”
Pax Christi, Catholic Peace organization expressing the best in Catholic nonviolence.
Peace Action. For example, their magazine Action Report (Fall 2010) includes a report on an encampment in New Mexico between Peace Action and the youth of Think Outside the Bomb (TOTB) and an article on the New START agreement to cut US and Russian arsenals.
Veterans for Peace challenges war, “exposing the true costs of war and militarism since 1985.”
War Resisters League“affirms that all war is a crime against humanity.”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sponsors the minutes before midnight doomsday clock and reports on all topics of nuclear opposition.
Peace & Planet Mobilization for a nuclear free and sustainable world, to strengthen the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and related activities.
Global Zero is the international movement for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. GLOBAL ZERO | 1436 U Street NW, Suite 401 | Washington, DC 20009 USA.
International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA). Located at the UN.
|
ACTION ALERT Urge President Obama to Go to Hiroshima Dear James, Seventy years ago this August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—with devastating consequences. Today, nuclear weapons continue to represent a real and urgent threat to humanity—and they should never again be used. President Obama understands this, as he made clear in his April 2009 speech in Prague when he called for ending Cold War thinking, reducing the role of nuclear weapons, and ultimately achieving the peace and security of a world free of these weapons. But these efforts have stalled. Today the risks remain unacceptably high, particularly the threat of an accidental, mistaken, or unauthorized launch or use of nuclear weapons. It's time to get the president to take action to make everybody safer. Urge President Obama to visit Japan in early August to commemorate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, highlight the continuing threat of nuclear weapons, and announce nuclear risk reduction steps he will take before leaving office. Sincerely,  Sean Meyer Manager of Strategic Campaigns Global Security Program Union of Concerned Scientists |
 |
· Perspectives o Reflections on the 70th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings by David Krieger o Hibakusha Thoughts on the 70th Anniversary by Shigeko Sasamori and Setsuko Thurlow · Nuclear Zero Lawsuits o Marshall Islands Files Appeal in Ninth Circuit o Numerous Amicus Curiae Briefs in Support of the Marshall Islands · U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy o Misuse of Taxpayer Funds at Sandia National Laboratory · Non-Proliferation o Iran and P5+1 Reach Nuclear Deal · Nuclear Testing o U.S. Conducts Flight Test of New B61-12 Nuclear Bomb · War and Peace o Japanese Government Seeks to Reinterpret Peace Article in Constitution · Nuclear Waste o Companies Responsible for Contamination at Rocky Flats · Resources o August's Featured Blog o This Month in Nuclear Threat History · Foundation Activities o Sadako Peace Day is August 6 o Paul Chappell in Sojourner's Magazine o NAPF President David Krieger to Speak in Maui o Evening for Peace Honoring Setsuko Thurlow o International Youth Summit for Nuclear Abolition · Quotes · For details go to: |
NUCLEAR ABOLITION MOVEMENT
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a global campaign coalition working to mobilize people in all countries to inspire, persuade, and pressure their governments to initiate negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons. They call on states, international organizations, civil society organizations and other actors to:
§ Acknowledge that any use of nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic humanitarian and environmental harm.
§ Acknowledge that there is a universal humanitarian imperative to ban nuclear weapons, even for states that do not possess them.
§ Acknowledge that the nuclear-armed states have an obligation to eliminate their nuclear weapons completely.
§ Take immediate action to support a multilateral process of negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons.
Their campaign brings together humanitarian, environmental, human rights, peace and development organizations in more than 90 countries to seize the historic opportunity that exists to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons. Prominent individuals such as anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Yoko Ono, and Martin Sheen support the campaign.
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons: ICAN
www.icanw.org/
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ... in association with the Cultural Youth Initiative Movement of Nigeria, hosted an interfaith roundtable on ...
Iranian Foreign Minister: Time for US, Other Nuclear Powers to Disarm by Sarah Lazare. Common Dreams, August 1, 2015.
Mohammad Javad Zarif calls on US, Israel, and other atomic weapons nations to begin 'new era' of non-proliferation
MARSHALL ISLANDS LAWSUITS AGAINST THE NUCLEAR NATIONS
The Republic of the Marshall Islands, a former hydrogen-bomb testing ground for the United States, is challenging the nine nuclear-armed nations with lawsuits, claiming that the countries have failed to move towards a world without nuclear weapons as required by treaty. The lawsuit claims the nuclear nations have failed to comply with the 44-year-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, which seeks to eliminate nuclear weapons, and promote the peaceful use of nuclear power. Filed on April 24, 2014, it adopts the line: If not us, who? If not now, when?
The Marshall Islands lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. Federal Court in San Francisco and in the International Court of Justice, claims that the U.S. has failed its duties under Article VI of the Treaty because it continues to modernize its weapons with no intention of disarmament and is failing to pursue good faith negotiations, as set out in the treaty.
NAPF is the administrator for the Marshall Islands Nuclear Zero lawsuits.
You and I are not alone; we have much support for action against nuclear weapons. And they need public pressure behind them. Contact these organizations. Get involved with as many as you have time for. You know what nuclear bombs can do: help the people who are trying to ensure our children’s future.
A global network of determined world nonviolent organizations, a new international umbrella organization, and lawsuits seeking application of international law—all determined to bring world pressure on the nuclear nations. An intransigent US that, however, under pressure of facts and public demand is at last recognizing the global threat of Climate Change; we can also make it change its nuclear policy. This is no time for celebration, but it is a time when people who understand the dangers of nuclear weapons can find strength around the world in their opposition.
Here are three accounts of the Republic of Marshall Islands Nuclear Zero Suits
www.greenpeace.org › ... › News › Blogs › Making Waves Greenpeace
Nov 19, 2014 - The Republic of the Marshall Islands recently launched a bold legal action ... The 'Nuclear Zero law suits' highlight that, in the interest of all ...
Dec 27, 2014 - The Marshall Islands' suit asks that the nuclear powers begin negotiations on a disarmament treaty one year after the court's ruling. But, as ...
2014-06: Marshall Islands Lawsuit Against Nuclear Nations ... of California, San Francisco Division (both suits known collectively as Nuclear Zero lawsuits).
2014 REMEMBRANCE
Aubrey Shepherd’s Film of Remembrance 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIDtlxvlBZo&list=UUwcZunxqSV3zcgvRJqBn-Qw
RECENT NEWSLETTER ON ABOLITION AND RMI LAWSUITS
RECENT NEWSLETTER ON NUCLEAR VICTIMS, PACIFIC, AND RMI
FOLLOW-UP: UN International Day Against Nuclear Tests August 26 Newsletter
END HIROSHIMA-NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE 2015 NEWSLETTER, AUGUST 9, 2015