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j robert oppenheimer
The Commemoration of the Criminal Bravo H-Bomb Test Is a Cry for a Nuclear Free World
We will be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
Feb 11, 2024
Later this month I will return to Japan for the annual Bikini commemoration and the Gensuikyō, or Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, annual conference. There won’t be a bikini fashion show.
The commemoration of what can only be called the criminal U.S. Bravo H-bomb test on March 1, 1954, is one of two annual anchor events of the Japanese peace movement. Although Covid-19 is still with us, these events will play important roles in revitalizing the Japanese peace movement; one of the most effective in the world.
Over the years, this movement has played a major role in preventing Japan from becoming a nuclear weapons state, and the testimonies of Hibakusha (victims and witnesses of the A-bombings) have played critical roles in inspiring the nuclear disarmament diplomacy and the international negotiations that resulted in the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Although I initially met several Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors as early as the 1978 U.N. Second Session of Nuclear Disarmament, it wasn’t until I first traveled to Hiroshima in 1984 that I began what became a 40-year engagement with Hibakusha and the Japanese movement.
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism.
In an effort to compensate for his earlier support for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and to bring nonexistent jobs bacon to Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and, following him, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and the city’s business establishment were suckered into Reagan-administration planning to transform Boston Harbor into a nuclear weapons base. Knowing the Navy’s record of nuclear weapons accidents, the ways that the base would ratchet up tensions with Moscow and violate the freeze, and with knowledge of better economic and social uses for the waterfront property, several of us organized at the grassroots level to prevent construction of the base. We prevailed, and I was invited to give a brief inspirational speech at the World Conference against A- and H- Bombs. Needless to say, my first trip to Hiroshima was a transformative experience.
Not long thereafter, I returned to Japan for the Bikini Day commemorations and was shocked by what I learned from the testimonies of Rongelap and Japanese survivors of the March 1, 1954, Bravo “test.” Bravo was by far the most devastating of the United States’ nuclear weapons explosions that pulverized Bikini between 1946 and 1958. It was detonated a year after the Soviets tested their first H-bomb and two years before a culturally explosive women’s two-piece swimsuit was first marketed in Paris.
Washington responded to the Soviet Union’s first H-bomb with a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb that destroyed an entire city, initially killed 100,000 people—almost all civilians—and poisoned survivors, the environment, and future generations. Ninety-eight miles away from the Bikini H-bomb test site, inhabitants of tropical Rongelap Atoll were showered by and played with radioactive ash that they first thought was snow. Just 500 miles from the equator, they had never seen snow. Japanese fishing boats hundreds of miles from Bikini Atoll and fish that comprised a major portion of Japan’s ocean-based food supply were also irradiated.
Before the year was out, natives of Rongelap and Japanese fishermen began to die from radiation diseases and cancer. Still births and numerous birth defects including jellyfish babies (transparent skin and no bones), anencephaly (infants born without portions of their brain or skull), and other mutations followed.
Secrecy was immediately imposed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments. But as word got out following the return of the Lucky Dragon V tuna fishing boat’s sickened crew to Yaizu City, women with memories of Hiroshima launched a petition campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It garnered 25 million Japanese signatures, leading to the convening of the first World Conference against A- and H- Bombs, which attracted delegates from across Japan and around the world.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims, many of whom had hidden themselves from the world due to their disfigurements, excruciating physical and emotional pains, and popular fears that their radiation diseases were contagious began to tell their stories. What became the world’s most powerful and long enduring nuclear disarmament social movement was born.
Two years after Bravo, in 1956, the first Godzilla film was released. Unlike the deracinated version shown across the United States, it was not the compelling story of a love triangle. It was a powerful expression of rage against the A-and H- bombs, a cry for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Watching it now, the desperate fear of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini bombs—fears blunted over the decades—remains palpable.
Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese Hibakusha and Rongelap claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.
This outrageous charge was difficult and painful to believe, bringing to mind as it did Dr. Joseph Mengele’s murderous experiments at the Auschwitz death camp. But in 2000, in the course of hosting a “Global Hibakusha delegation” for a conference at the United Nations, several of us met with the senior Department of Energy (DOE) official who was responsible for studies of the impacts of radiation on people. I explained that in Japan I had heard Hibakusha cry out that they had been used as “guinea pigs” in experiments conducted by the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission. I said that I could understand victims thinking the worst of their tormentors, but expressed some doubt and asked if he could say it wasn’t so.
“No,” he responded. The experiments had indeed been conducted. And a Utah downwinder who was with us raged in response that the same was secretly being done across the western United States. She was a woman who had lost her father and father-in-law to uranium mining, her sister and daughter to Nevada test fallout, and who consumed a daily meal of pills simply to stay alive
Some years later I experienced an equally sobering reverberation from the Bikini H-bomb. It came during a lunch break in a well-appointed conference site during another annual Bikini commemoration. A descendant of Rongelap Hibakusha was given a book about the Bikini H-bomb and its devastations. It included a list of the names of each of Rongelap’s inhabitants on that 1954 March 1 morning. One by one this young man placed a check mark next to the name of each person who had died of cancer and other radiation diseases from the Bravo “test.” I watched amidst very painful silence as he methodically checked off the names of nearly every person on the list. Some were women and men I had met along our ways.
This is not simply history. In preparation for the Bikini commemoration, this year I came across two recent articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by Robert Alverez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the DOE. Coincident with the release of Oppenheimer, Alvarez reported that Oppie and Lawrence (for whom the Lawrence Livermore lab is named) performed a “vaudeville” on themselves and others. To keep up their teams’ morale, they drank glasses of water with radioactive sodium and in some cases had lower level workers consume plutonium. More than a few, including Oppenheimer—who was also a smoker—subsequently died of cancer.
In his article “Seeking Justice for Radiation Victims of the U.S. Nuclear Program,” Alverez reviewed the campaigns of downwinders and tribal uranium miners for compensation via the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). He reports that, ostensibly to limit federal spending (at the same time that the U.S. has embarked on a nearly $2 trillion nuclear weapons “modernization” campaign) Congress recently refused to extend support for “victims not accounted for in earlier legislation.”
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
The hands of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock are now set at 90 second to midnight. We face the risks of possible nuclear escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over Taiwan tensions. With the post-Cold War order in free fall, all nine nuclear weapons states are escalating their arms racing, “modernizing” or expanding their nuclear arsenals. In these critical movements the messages from the Marshall Islands, Yaizu City, and nearby Shizuoka will be clear: The U.N. Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must be universally signed and ratified to make way for a nuclear weapons-free world. And here in the United States, campaigns like Back from the Brink provide paths and hope for human survival.
What must be found is the will!
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We Still Have Far to Go to Put the Brakes on the Nuclear Arms Race
What passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon.
Feb 09, 2024
Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking—it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.
Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.
Under the buzzword “modernization,” the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come. “Modernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046,” the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) pointed out, “while the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028.”
Such bloated sums might prove a good argument against specific weapons systems, but Uncle Sam has incredibly deep pockets for nuclear weaponry and a vast array of other military boondoggles. In fact, compared to the costs of deploying large numbers of troops, nuclear weapons can seem almost frugal. And consider the staggering price of a single aircraft carrier that went into service in 2017, the Gerald R. Ford: $13.3 billion.
Militarism’s overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower made clear in a 1953 speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
The Nuclear Complex and “Crackpot Realism”
In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are—in the most absolute sense imaginable—markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species. Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.
Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed Sentinel land-based missile system, on the drawing boards to replace the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 400 underground silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Northrop Grumman has already pocketed a $13.3 billion contract to begin moving the project forward. But the costs have been zooming upward so fast as to set off alarm bells in Congress, forcing a reassessment.
“The U.S. Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile program is at risk of blowing past its initial $96 billion cost estimate by so much that the overruns may trigger a review on whether to terminate the project,” Bloomberg Newsreported in mid-December. Since then, the estimated overruns have only continued to soar. Last month, Northrop Grumman disclosed that the per-missile cost of the program had climbed by “at least 37%,” reaching $162 million—and, as Breaking Defense noted, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would need to “certify the program to stave off its cancellation.”
The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.”
At one level, cancellation would vindicate the approach taken by disarmament-oriented groups a couple of years ago when they tried to stop the creation of the Sentinel by arguing that it would be a “money pit missile.” But at a deeper level, the cost argument—while potentially a winner for blocking the Sentinel—is a loser when it comes to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, which ICBMs uniquely boost as the land-based part of this nation’s nuclear triad.
As Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote in The Nation in 2021, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg—not modernize it.” Eliminating ICBMs would be a crucial step when it comes to decreasing those dangers, because “unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.” That’s why ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and why defeating just the Sentinel would be a truly Pyrrhic victory if the purported need for such land-based missiles is reaffirmed in the process.
In theory, blocking the Sentinel by decrying it as too expensive could be a step toward shutting down ICBMs entirely. In practice, unfortunately, the cost argument has routinely led to an insistence that the current Minuteman III ICBMs could simply be upgraded and continue to serve just as well—only reinforcing the assumption that ICBMs are needed in the first place.
The author of the pathbreaking 2022 study “The Real Cost of ICBMs,” Emma Claire Foley, is now a colleague of mine at RootsAction.org, where she coordinates the Defuse Nuclear War coalition’s new campaign to eliminate ICBMs. “News of dramatic cost overruns on the Sentinel program is unsurprising, but I don’t think that in itself should encourage disarmament advocates,” she told me recently. “Cancellation of the Sentinel program does not equal a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, or the risk of nuclear war. It will take an organized mass movement to make good on this opportunity to meaningfully reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.” On the other hand, when it comes to nuclear issues, accommodating to “crackpot realism” is a precondition for being taken seriously by the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.
Such accommodation involves adjusting to a magnitude of systemic insanity almost beyond comprehension. Disarmament advocates are often confronted with a tacit choice between seeming unserious to the nuclear priesthood and its adherents or pushing for fairly minor adjustments in what Daniel Ellsberg, in the title of his final landmark book, dubbed all too accurately The Doomsday Machine.
This country’s anti-nuclear and disarmament groups have scant presence in the mainstream media. And the more forthright they are in directly challenging the government’s nonstop nuclear recklessness—with results that could include billions of deaths from “nuclear winter”—the less media access they’re apt to get. When President Biden reneged on his 2020 campaign pledge to adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, for instance, critical blowback in the media was meager and fleeting. Little news coverage occurred when a small number of members of Congress went out of their way to object.
“Unfortunately,” Markey said in a speech on the Senate floor two years ago, “our American democracy and Russia’s autocracy do share one major thing in common: Both our systems give the United States and Russian presidents the godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it by ordering a nuclear first strike.”
Nuclear Madness and Psychic Numbing
Any nuclear first strike would likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war. And the science is clear that a “nuclear winter” would indeed follow—in Ellsberg’s words, “killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98% or 99% would not.”
Such a steep plunge in planetary temperatures would exceed the worst prognoses for the effects of climate change, even if in the other direction, temperature-wise. But leaders of the climate movement rarely even mention the capacity of nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet’s climate in a different way from global warming. That omission reflects the ongoing triumph of nuclear madness and the “psychic numbing” that accompanies it.
During the more than three-quarters of a century since August 1945, when the U.S. government dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear genie has escaped from the bottle to eight other countries—Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea—all now brandishing their own ultimate weapons of mass destruction. And the biggest nuclear powers have continuously undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Key dynamics have scarcely changed since, in 2006, the Center for International Governance Innovation published a cogent analysis that concluded: “Europe and North America are busy championing nuclear weapons as the ultimate security trump card and the preeminent emblem of political gravitas, thereby building a political/security context that is increasingly hostile to non-proliferation.”
Like Barack Obama before him, Joe Biden promised some much-needed changes in nuclear policies during his successful quest to win the White House, but once in office—as with Obama’s pledges—those encouraging vows turned out to be so much smoke. The administration’s long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), issued in October 2022, was largely the usual dose of nuclear madness. “Although Joe Biden during his presidential election campaign spoke strongly in favor of adopting no-first-use and sole-purpose policies, the NPR explicitly rejects both for now,” the Federation of American Scientists lamented. “From an arms control and risk reduction perspective, the NPR is a disappointment. Previous efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.”
Stymied by the Biden administration and Congress, many organizations and activists working on nuclear-weapons issues were heartened by the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, promoted from the outset as an epic thriller about “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.” For several months before the film’s release last July, activists prepared to use it as a springboard for wider public discussion of nuclear weapons. The film did indeed make a big splash and sparked more public discussion of nukes in the United States than had occurred in perhaps decades. The movie had notably stunning production values. Unfortunately, its human values were less impressive, especially since people on the receiving end of the scientific brilliance at Los Alamos in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and even downwinders in New Mexico) remained off-screen.
Watching the movie, I thought of my visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory about 60 years after the triumphant Trinity atomic test. During an interview, one of the public relations specialists there explained that the legal entity managing the Los Alamos lab was “a limited liability corporation.” That seemed to sum up our government’s brazen lack of accountability for the nuclearization of our planet.
Six months after Oppenheimer arrived at multiplexes, its political impact appears to be close to zero. The film’s disturbing aspects plowed the ground, but—in the absence of a strong disarmament movement or effective leadership among officials in Washington on nuclear weapons issues—little seeding has taken place.
At the end of January, supporters marked the first anniversary of H. Res. 77, a bill sponsored by Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and cosponsored by 42 other members of the House, “embracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” The nonbinding measure aptly summarizes the world’s nuclear peril and offers valuable recommendations, beginning with a call for the United States to actively pursue and conclude “negotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation” as well as purposeful talks “with China and other nuclear-armed states.”
Specific recommendations in the bill include: “renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the President’s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack; taking the nuclear weapons of the United States off hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons.”
The fact that only 10% of House members have even chosen to sponsor the resolution shows just how far we have to go to begin putting the brakes on a nuclear arms race that threatens to destroy—all too literally—everything.
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Why One 3rd Generation Hiroshima Survivor Won’t Watch Oppenheimer
Yet again in the film we see the erasure of the hibakusha and their experiences, the supremacy of war and national power over the people harmed by that supremacy.
Aug 20, 2023
As we approached August 6 this year, the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, my mind kept going back to the basement of Chugoku Electric Power Company, 800 meters (half a mile) from the hypocenter, where my grandfather was that day. I witness how the force of the nuclear bomb can destroy the human body, how the vacuum of a nuclear explosion can gouge out a child’s eyeballs, how the atomic burns peel the skin, swell and corrode the face in ways humanity had never seen. According to one review, the filmmaker focuses on the face of Oppenheimer rather than showing the carnage of his bomb.
From a few minutes of an interview with the filmmaker, I can see that spectators of his movie will safely assume that the characters have all the possible means to escape to minimize their exposure to radiation. Such a space was never offered to people at ground level in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those critical days. The mushroom-shaped cloud created by the explosion was depicted over and over again in the trailer for the film. But this is a symbol of ashes to the people of my community. That cloud contained the flesh and bones of our grandparents.
The G7 Summit
This past May, I was in Hiroshima, the city where I was born and raised, and witnessed the G7 summit from ground level. Six Western nations—Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who had survived a murder attempt by a fisherman one month prior, gathered to strengthen their ties. The city was paralyzed. Police from all over Japan were there, schools were closed for five days, and there were so many road closures that people stayed home and watched it on TV.
President Joe Biden entered Japan through Iwakuni, a U.S. military base, while others used Japanese airport/gate of the independent nation. Other leaders also stayed in a Japanese hotel in Ujina near the Setouchi seashore where they had the summit. Biden headed straight to an American-owned hotel (Hilton) in the city center, stopping all the traffic at the center of the city near Ground Zero. Local TV camera persons were trying to capture a presidential aide who carried the “nuclear football,” which is always with the U.S. President and enables him to launch a nuclear strike anywhere in the world.
People watched as Kishida spoke of progress in nuclear disarmament talks. Leaders promised the president of Ukraine to provide weapons, including depleted uranium munitions, “for as long as it takes” said Biden, to win the war. This was said in the city of Hiroshima—where people have shared a common understanding for 78 years that they must never betray the hibakushas (atomic bomb sufferers) who pray for world peace, and live with the fear of radiation illness and dying of cancer with excruciating pain.
“Death didn’t fall from the sky. The death was brought by the United States dropping of the bomb… over human beings.”
During the summit, Biden paid a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, known to locals as Atomic Bomb Park, a memorial to those who experienced the massive force of the atomic explosion. It is a landmark of human tragedy and our entering of the nuclear age. Kazumi Matsui, the Mayor of Hiroshima, visited the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo soon after the summit to sign a Sister Parks Agreement between the Atomic Bomb Park and Pearl Harbor National Memorial Park.
Pearl Harbor Memorial Park commemorates the battle between the United States and Japan that began with the attack by Japanese forces on Pearl Harbor. It commemorates the deaths of over 2,000 U.S. sailors and soldiers, as well as 68 civilians caught in the crossfire. The Sister Park Agreement indicates an official consensus between the City of Hiroshima and the United States that the war began with an (unjustified) attack on Pearl Harbor and ended with the (justified) dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Hiroshima Alliance for Nuclear Weapons Abolition (HANWA) is a local group formed by descendants of hibakushas and allies. They warned citizens of Hiroshima, in the midst of the festive G7 Summit, that agreements like this put the city on the fast track to being transformed beyond recognition, with a narrative that lacks historical accuracy and obliterates the past.
Ms. Haruko Moritaki, a descendant of hibakusha and Executive Director of HANWA facing the final stages of cancer, sat in a HANWA meeting on May 17, 2023. She commented on former President Barack Obama’s remarks during his brief visit to the Atomic Bomb Park in 2016, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the war. Obama delivered a brief speech, saying: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.”
Ms. Moritaki said, “Death didn’t fall from the sky. The death was brought by the United States dropping of the bomb… over human beings.”
President Biden didn’t deliver a speech when he visited the Atomic Bomb Park. He had nothing to say to the people of Hiroshima.
My Role as an Artist
As a visual artist, educator, and a third-generation hibakusha who now lives in the United States, I have visited many nuclear sites in the country over the years to grasp the American nuclear narrative. I have witnessed how development of nuclear technology forever changed the land and continues to divide communities and oppress the vulnerable.
As an artist in the year 2023, I am part of a community asked constantly to address ethical questions regarding what is at stake in a work of art: Who is telling the story? Who is silenced in the process? Who is assumed to be the viewer in a given context? I wonder, was the filmmaker asked, or did he ask himself these same questions?
We have heard enough from those benefiting from the current power structure who can relate to the man responsible for leveling two cities but not to the more than 200,000 people who were killed, along with the rest of the city’s inhabitants who were left injured, facing slow and horrible deaths from radiation exposure.
So again, I ask: What is the framework around the production of a film that constitutes historical suffering? How do you address the issue while being respectful of the difficult and often painful feelings triggered by the film? It is a filmmaker’s moral duty to decide how these images are purveyed without reinstating trauma.
In Solidarity With Those Not Pictured
In an article titled “The Racial Underpinnings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings,” Elaine Scarry notes that on September 18, 1944, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Roosevelt’s Hudson Valley estate. A written recording reveals that Japan had been designated as the target for the bombings nearly seven months before Germany surrendered on May 7,1945. The training taking place in the Pacific for the mission to drop the bomb on Japan was initiated in that same month, which further supports the content of the meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill. The historical records indicate yet again the way nuclear development prevents white nations from becoming victims of nuclear atrocities.
Scarry quotes Langston Hughes, who commented in 1953: (Until racial injustice ceases in the United States), “it is going to be very hard for some Americans not to think the easiest way to settle the problems of Asia is simply dropping an atom bomb on colored heads there.”
Scarry goes on:
The cruelty daily inflicted on people of color in our own city streets acts as a mental rehearsal for carrying out large-scale slayings abroad. It keeps our capacity for cruelty limber; it dulls the mind and gives us practice in pronouncing the word “expendable.”
My friend Petuuche Gilbert of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, who works tirelessly to draw attention to the ongoing contamination of his people from uranium mining, said to me, “I want to see the film acknowledges [sic] the entire story of the nuclear bomb’s impact not only upon its first victims but upon the lives of Indigenous peoples also living with its legacy of development and application. I want the film to mention Indigenous peoples whose land was taken to build and test the bomb. I want it to tell and comprehend the tragedies of the nuclear fuel chain.”
He added “Manifest destiny was necessary to build America and have what it is today—American power and supremacy.”
At the G7, in Obama’s speech, in the Sister Park Agreement, and now yet again in Oppenheimer, we see the erasure of the hibakusha and their experiences, the supremacy of war and national power over the people harmed by that supremacy.
No, I do not need to watch the film and be retraumatized.
My solidarity is with the people not pictured, those who continue to suffer.
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