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nuclear disarmament
Nihon Hidankyo's Nobel Peace Prize Win Could Not Have Come at a More Important Moment
With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year's Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy.
Oct 12, 2024
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo is long overdue and could not come at a more important time.
The Hibakusha (A-bomb witness/survivors) of Nihon Hidankyo have been among the world’s most courageous and steadfast advocates of nuclear disarmament. The organization has focused on three core demands: preventing nuclear war, eliminating nuclear weapons, and obtaining essential medical care for A-bomb victims.
Hidankyo was founded in 1956, in the wake of the Bravo H-Bomb test 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, which poisoned Japanese fishermen and Marshall Islanders.
As Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later reported, despite their excruciating physical and emotional suffering, the Hibakusha became the world’s most powerful and influential force for the abolition. With the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the voices of the Hibakusha, their tortured testimonies, and their truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist will now ring out more powerfully around the world.
Nihon Hidankyo was repeatedly nominated for its now well-earned Peace Prize, and the Nobel Committee is now to be celebrated for finally making this year’s decision. With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy. In addition to Russian nuclear threats related to the continuing Ukraine war, an accident, incident, or miscalculation growing out of provocative U.S., allied, and Chinese military operations in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China/West could ignite escalation to a nuclear cataclysm.
With uncertainties about a possible Trump election victory, there are growing demands among Japanese and South Korean elites for their nations to become nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia have lowered their official operational thresholds for launching their nuclear weapons. All of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, with the U.S. committing an estimated two trillion dollars to “modernize” its systems when that money could be spent to stanch and reverse the climate emergency and to address other urgent human needs.
"The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs."
Let us marvel and learn from the reality that Hibakusha, who were literally the last people on Earth, once seen by U.S. leaders and media as “vermin” to be eliminated, have awakened the conscience of the world after suffering what was probably the world’s worst war crime. And contrary to the myth propagated by President Truman, the A-bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan. Senior U.S. military officials from Eisenhower to LeMay and Leahy advised the president that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing” Secretary of War Stimson had already advised that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated.”
Hibakusha’s friends, families, and neighbors were incinerated, irradiated, and physically ripped apart by the radiation’s heat and blast waves of the world’s first A-bombs. An entire city was destroyed and burned to the ground. Amidst their own agonies, many Hibakusha were unable to save their families in their shattered and burning homes. They witnessed ghostlike figures, no longer recognizable as human beings, some holding their eyeballs or intestines in their hands marching to their deaths, often in cisterns or the city’s rivers.
In the months and years that followed, many died from radiation-inflicted cancers and other diseases. Memories remain of the birthing of mutant babies and of other young children whose lives were cut short by radiation diseases. With initial fears that the radiation diseases might be contagious and about genetic damages, Hibakusha’s suffering was compounded by marginalization and discrimination.
As a result of the U.S. military occupation which continued until 1952 and subsequently with Japan functioning as the United States’ subservient ally, essential medical and other support services were long denied to Hibakusha. Among the achievements of Nihon Hidankyo and its allies are the collaborations they have built with other “global hibakusha.” These included forced laborers who were brought from Japanese-occupied Korea who also suffered the A-bombings. Compassionately and strategically they supported and joined with nuclear weapons test victims from the Marshall Islands, the United States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tahiti, the Christmas Islands, and other Pacific Islands. Together with their testimonies in communities across the world and in the United Nations they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. With their testimonies at the U.N. and elsewhere they have won the majority of the world’s governments to the understanding that for the human species to survive, priority must be given to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests.
Hibakusha testimonies were essential to the successful negotiation of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.
That nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing was an unfortunate misstatement in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s award announcement. As Daniel Ellsberg, a principal author of the United States’ nuclear war planning in the Kennedy administration, taught during many international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used.
Tragically, this is a playbook from which the Russian government has been working with its Ukraine-war nuclear threats. It is worth noting that in response to the announcement of the award, Hidankyo referenced the terrible assaults on the people of Gaza. The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs.
They then warned of the danger that the U.S. might resort to a nuclear attack (which the U.S. prepared and threatened in 1954, 1957, and with President Nixon's 1969 "madman" nuclear mobilization. Numerous popular initiatives are at work in the world which will be boosted by the Peace Prize award to Nihon Hibakusha.
In the U.S., the Back from the Brink campaign, initiated by Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been at the cutting edge. Its call for negotiation of a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, renunciation of first-use policies, ending the president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons has been endorsed by 43 members of Congress and numerous U.S. cities and states.
The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security works to prevent nuclear war and achieve a nuclear weapons-free world via its advocacy of Common Security. This is the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rival. As with the INF Treaty that ended the Cold War before the fall of the Cold War, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals.
In the face of the horrors of nuclear weapons and drawing on the courage of Hibakusha, this is the paradigm on which the Hibakusha's vision of a nuclear weapons-free world can be achieved.
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Oppenheimer: the Movie and the Moment to Prevent the Next Nuclear War
Unless this Hollywood film sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.
Jul 26, 2023
This piece contains spoilers for the movie Oppenheimer directed by Christopher Nolan.
The ground-breaking movie
Oppenheimer, despite its unsympathetic protagonist, packs a powerful anti-nuclear punch that makes it hard, if not impossible, to sleep after watching the film.
For this reason alone, the movie should be shown on the floor of Congress and in the White House as required viewing by all in D.C. bent on spending $1.7 trillion over the next decades to build new nuclear weapons to kill us all.
Only those with a global death wish or on the payroll of Northrop Grumman, the military contractor with the nuclear “modernization” contract, could watch this film and still root for U.S. nuclear rearmament, a horror show now underway with the blessings of D.C. politicians. Unless people rise up in fury, unless this Hollywood movie sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, a repeat on steroids of the 80s nuclear weapons freeze, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.
The White House and a majority of Congress want to rush us, a sleepwalking populace, into WWIII with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities, and 6,000 nuclear weapons.
On the agenda is a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, a gravity bomb with two-stage radiation implosion, a long range strike bomber, and the replacement of 400 underground nuclear missiles in the Midwest with 600 new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMS). These new ICBMS—The Sentinel—could each carry up to three warheads 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to incinerate 200,000 people in a span of three days.
Irish actor Cillian Murphy plays the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a hand-wringing scientist, an unfaithful lackluster womanizer, a man with few convictions but lots of demons, who traverses an emotional landscape of ambition, doubt, remorse, and surrender.
Oppenheimer oversees the Manhattan Project, the team of scientists hunkering down in the beautiful desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build the hideous atomic bomb before the Germans or Russians crack the code.
In a scene reminiscent of the absurd 1950s, when pig-tailed school children scrambled under desks in mock nuclear drills, scientists don sunscreen and goggles to protect themselves during the blinding Trinity Test. This was the first atomic test conducted with no warning to the downwinders—the nearby Indigenous people of the Southwest who developed cancer as a result of radioactive fall out. This was the test before President Harry Truman ordered a 9,000 pound uranium bomb named “Little Boy” loaded onto a B-29 bomber. This was the trial performance before the same president, depicted in the movie as unctuous and arrogant, orders “Fat Boy,” a second plutonium bomb—prototype for today’s nuclear weapon—dropped on Nagasaki.
Though the movie can be slow, a three-hour endurance test, its historical insights and gut-churning imagery compensate for its lack of likable characters, save for Lt. General Leslie Groves, played by a fun-to-watch Matt Damon as Oppenheimer’s Pentagon handler.
One of the most haunting moments juxtaposes in living color celebrations of the bombings, applause and accolades for Oppenheimer standing at the podium, with the guilt-consumed scientist’s black and white visions of irradiated souls, skeletal remains, flesh turned to ash—all amid a cacophony of explosions and pounding feet, the death march.
Even more disturbing are the questions that tug at the moviegoer, who wonders, “Where are the Japanese victims in this film? Why are they missing from this picture? Why are they never shown writhing in pain, their lives and cities destroyed?” Instead, the human targets are seen only through the lens of Oppenheimer who imagines faceless x-rayed ghosts torn asunder in the burning wreckage, their skin, their flesh falling off their bones, their bodies disappearing into nothingness.
The omission of the real victims in the interest of maintaining a consistent point of view may make sense from a filmmaker’s perspective, but not from the standpoint of historians and truth tellers. Writer-director Christopher Nolan could have shown us photos, authentic aerial footage of the Japanese, blinded and burned, before the final credits rolled to remind us the horror is real, not just a Hollywood movie bound for several Oscar nominations.
In the name of truth the movie does, however, smash the persistent myth that the U.S. had no other choice but to drop the atomic bombs to end WWII. Through dialogue, we learn Japan was about to surrender, the Emperor simply needed to save face; the point of irradiating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targeting civilians in far off cities, was not to save the world but to show the Soviets the U.S. possessed the technology to destroy the world, so better not cross the aspiring empire.
In closed door sessions, all filmed in black and white, we watch as crusading anti-communist politicians—determined to stop Oppenheimer from advocating for arms control talks with the Soviets—crucify their atomic hero for his association with members of the Communist Party, leftist trade unions, and a long ago anti-capitalist lover who threw his bourgeois flowers in the trash.
When the McCarthyites strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, it’s a big “who cares” shrug for a movie audience weary of Oppenheimer’s internal conflicts over whether science can be divorced from politics, from the consequences of a scientist’s research. How can anyone with a heart want to continue this line of work? To hell with the security clearance.
The movie Oppenheimer is compelling and powerful in its timeliness, though one can’t help but think it would have been exponentially more powerful had it been told from a different point of view, from the point of view of a scientist who opposed the death-march mission.
We see glimpses of a pond-staring, fate-warning Albert Einstein, who in real life lobbied to fund the atomic bomb research only to later oppose the project. It could have been his story—or the story of one of the 70 scientists who signed a “Truman, don’t drop the bomb” petition that Oppenheimer squelched, persuading Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” not to present Truman with the petition drafted by Leo Szilard, the chief physicist at the Manhattan Project’s Chicago laboratory. The movie’s reference to the petition was so fast, so quiet, so mumbled, the audience could have missed it.
If we are not careful, more mindful, more awake, we might miss our moment to avert another nuclear holocaust, this one a far worse nightmare in which 5 billion of the Earth’s 8 billion people perish, either immediately from radiation burns and fire or in the months that follow during a famine in which soot blocks the sun.
The White House and a majority of Congress want to rush us, a sleepwalking populace, into WWIII with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities, and 6,000 nuclear weapons. For those, like the shameful editors of The Washington Post, who insist we continue to forever fund the proxy war, for those in high places who refuse calls for a ceasefire, this movie reminds us of the existential danger we confront in a sea of denial, complicity, and exceptionalism.
Despite campaigning on a platform of no first use of nuclear weapons, President Joe Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review echoes his predecessor Donald Trump’s approval of first use should our allies’ interests be threatened.
CODEPINK activists are distributing flyers outside showings of Oppenheimer to invite stunned movie goers leaving the theater in a daze to take action; to join our organization; and to amplify our peace-building campaigns to ground the nuclear-capable F-35, to declare China is Not our Enemy, and to partner with the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.
This is the movie, this is the moment, this is the time to challenge the euphemistic nuclear modernization program, to expose the madness of militarism that abandons urgent needs at home to line the pockets of military contractors gorging at the Pentagon trough.This is the time to demand a ceasefire and peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, to stop preparations for war with China, to finally pass legislation to ban first use, to take our ICBM’s off hair trigger alert, to abide by our disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to campaign for the U.S. to become a signatory to the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
Opposed by NATO—a huckster for nuclear proliferation—the TPNW has been signed by 95 state parties wishing to outlaw the development, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons.
Unlike Oppenheimer, we can make the right choice; the choice that saves the human race from immediate extinction.
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Nuclear Winter Won’t Solve Global Heating
The increase in nuclear weapons does not make our world safer and cannot address today’s challenges.
Jun 19, 2023
Bombing a home to pieces is not the path to a peaceful or green world. Yet right now, there are 3,844 nuclear warheads deployed worldwide with missiles and aircraft. That’s 10 nuclear warheads for every day of the year. Two thousand of these are ready for immediate launch, and, if that weren’t enough, an additional 10,000 are stacked high in military stockpiles waiting to be used. Most of today’s modern warheads are at least five times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My home town of Copenhagen is well within range of many of these missiles, like most other places. Casualties would be staggering.
Missiles of particular note and concern stem from Russia, which has started deploying tactical nuclear warheads a step closer to Europe and into Belarus, its close military ally ruled by “Europe’s last dictator.” This is especially alarming as it is the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 for such weapons to be moved outside of Russia. This has led to the U.N. Disarmament chief warning that the threat of nuclear weapons use is higher than at any time since the Cold War.
\u201cStates invest in nuclear arsenals as geopolitical relations deteriorate\u2014New #SIPRIYearbook out now.\n\nRead the Press Release \u27a1\ufe0f https://t.co/OX8Eubunzu\nDownload the Summary \u27a1\ufe0f https://t.co/aidzRARdk6\u201d— SIPRI (@SIPRI) 1686520807
Echoing this dismay is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Releasing its annual assessment of the state of international security a few days ago, the independent institute stated, “We are drifting into one of the most dangerous periods in human history.” Their research shows that the world’s nine nuclear armed states—the U.S., Russia, the U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), and Israel—are continuing to grow and modernize their arsenals.
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the nuclear nine spent $157,664 per minute on nuclear weapons in 2022. That’s a total of $82.9 billion. Overall, all military expenditure saw a big increase worldwide, reaching a new high of $2240 billion. This is more than 20 times the annual financial goal agreed at the 2009 Copenhagen U.N. climate talks for adaptation and mitigation, which has never been met. What drove this boost in military spending? Largely, Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.
While the impacts of Russia’s war in Ukraine are deep, tragic, and far-reaching, it is not the only major crisis taking place. 2022 saw the sharpest rise in the number of people forcibly displaced due to social and climate crises worldwide. As of mid-2022, an estimated one in every 77 people—108.4 million—had to flee their homes, more than twice as many as a decade ago. The United Nations’ refugee agency says this is the greatest number of forcibly displaced people ever recorded. Many of those people are in or from Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Yet conflict is not the only cause, as climate disasters led to 32.6 million internal displacements last year.
Global solutions to borderless problems abound, but too many political and business leaders are pushing for dirty profits and hateful division over peace, prosperity, and, frankly, the planet’s future.
In the face of so much suffering and injustice, as usual there are those who stand to profit at any cost. Arms sales have gone up by 50% leaving manufacturers with blossoming balance sheets. But they are not the only vultures. Big Oil continues to make record war profits, the latest figures being to the tune of more than $200 billion. Added to this brutal bounty, and despite their promises and pledges to transition to renewable energy, governments are doubling spending on fossil fuel subsidies and approving new oil and gas projects. And, as exposed by Greenpeace’s Unearthed and Lighthouse Reports, on the back of a global food crisis that’s pushing millions more people into hunger, the world’s top 10 hedge funds made an estimated $1.9-billion profit from the food price spike triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Global solutions to borderless problems abound, but too many political and business leaders are pushing for dirty profits and hateful division over peace, prosperity, and, frankly, the planet’s future. We are at a critical junction where the focus should be on strengthening multilateralism for peace and climate, rather than promoting false solutions and profit mongering. The increase in nuclear weapons does not make our world safer and cannot address today’s challenges, quite the contrary. The Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons made history by declaring nuclear weapons illegal under international law, but nuclear armed states have not only failed to ratify it, they are deterring other countries from doing so.
Instead of this race to spend big on destruction, more time and resources could and should go to addressing the root causes of our interconnected environmental and social crises. Climate change is transforming our understanding of security, and beefing up arsenals is a folly against the reality of increasing economic disruption; flooding; disease; famine; drought and crop-failure; migration; and intensified competition for food, water, and energy in regions where resources are already hugely stretched. The smarter approach would be for the current system’s power brokers to focus on the root causes of today’s discontent alongside diplomacy and sustainable development, instead of cozying up to warmongers and disaster capitalists.
Take action and support the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons here.
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