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nuclear tests
The Climate Reckoning That the Nuclear Arms Control Can’t Ignore
Climate change and nuclear weapons reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
May 07, 2026
At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a 9,000-pound atomic bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing another 40,000.
The sheer scale of destruction—that humans could annihilate each other by means as violent as a nuclear blast—ensured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would become the defining images of nuclear weapons in the American imagination. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 83% of Americans reported knowing at least something about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. However, increasingly large numbers of younger Americans don’t know enough about nuclear weapons today to give an opinion on their role in national security.
What is often remembered as the only detonation of nuclear weapons in history remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in warfare. While Americans looked overseas at the devastation in Japan, fewer recognized that nuclear weapons were also transforming the American environment at home.
For decades after World War II, nuclear weapons reshaped landscapes and communities across the United States. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, while producing tens of thousands of warheads during the Cold War. At its height, the US nuclear stockpile comprised 31,255 warheads, with the last fully functional nuclear weapon being produced in 1989. The environmental and human consequences of this effort extended far beyond test sites and production facilities. Yet, the US government kept the public in the dark, leaving a generation born in the 21st century to bear the consequences of its obfuscated proliferation campaign.
The Nuclear Transformation of Marginalized America
Consider that the plutonium used in the first nuclear test in New Mexico and in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Between 1945 and 1970, Hanford’s reactors discharged roughly 444 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Columbia River basin, a watershed that today supports over 8 million residents.
Other sites tell similar stories. In South Carolina and Georgia, rural communities were displaced to make way for the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste were stored in underground tanks.
Make no mistake, the United States federal government was calculated in its targeting of marginalized communities to isolate radioactive material from the general population. These facilities were often located in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, where political resistance was limited and land was cheaper.
Nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Currently the only permanent waste site for nuclear material in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, collects plutonium-contaminated waste to be buried over 2,000 feet underground a salt flat formation. Framed as a barren wasteland far from major population centers, WIPP is in Eddy County, New Mexico—home to a population of over 61,000 people, of which 64% identify as people of color. Many communities face contaminated water supplies and elevated rates of respiratory illness, kidney disease, and cancer: a pattern sometimes described as “radioactive colonialism.”
Despite the government’s efforts to isolate nuclear activities and waste disposal, radioactive contamination did not respect geographic boundaries. Research released in 2023 found that nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962 distributed radioactive fallout across 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states in the United States, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. As a result of nuclear tests conducted by both the United States and other nuclear-armed powers, radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere spread throughout the world in communities far from test sites. By the 1960s, “there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice.” Radioactive isotopes entered the food chain through plants and animals, creating pathways of exposure far from any test site.
For most people living far from testing areas, these exposures were small. But they illustrate a fundamental reality of nuclear weapons: Even carefully controlled programs produce global environmental consequences. Even when the government attempted to isolate radioactivity and testing in supposedly remote communities, contamination from weapons production, testing, and disposal still spread far beyond those sites, affecting environments across the world.
The Renewed Nuclear Arms Race
While the United States has not conducted a full-scale nuclear test since 1992, nuclear competition is accelerating again.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with estimates suggesting that its stockpile could exceed 1,000 warheads by the early 2030s. At the same time, arms control agreements that once constrained the world’s largest nuclear powers are eroding. The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 removed the last formal limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear forces.
Even if informal limits remain in place, the collapse of binding agreements signals a shift toward a less regulated nuclear environment. Some policymakers have suggested that renewed nuclear testing may be necessary in response to foreign advances, which would risk repeating many of the mistakes of the Cold War.
Consider that for the first time in history, the new nuclear proliferation environment includes a three-way standoff between three major armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia.
Mutually Assured Climate Destruction
A global nuclear war alone would be enough to trigger catastrophic climatic effects. Even a limited nuclear exchange could inject vast quantities of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering global temperatures. The use of a mere 2% of the world’s current arsenal could trigger severe cooling and agricultural disruption, leaving 2 billion people at risk of starvation in just the following two years. If nuclear winter renders any use of nuclear weapons as unsurvivable, then deterrence may be an inadequate strategy, since the consequences of a miscalculation or accidental launch would increase dramatically.
This erosion of international nonproliferation channels comes as climate change fuels geopolitical instability by intensifying resource competition, migration pressures, and regional conflicts, increasing the risk of confrontation among nuclear-armed states. Climate change and nuclear weapons therefore reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
Bridging the Gap: Building the Next Generation of Advocates
Despite these connections, environmental and social justice concerns remain peripheral in most nuclear policy debates. Discussions of deterrence and arms control typically focus on military balance and strategic stability, while the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons receives far less attention.
This gap may help explain why nuclear policy often struggles to engage younger generations.
Surveys consistently show that climate change is one of the defining concerns of younger voters. Roughly 70% of young people report deep anxiety about environmental degradation and say they are likely to support candidates who prioritize climate policy. Nuclear weapons policy rarely speaks to these concerns directly. Yet nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Reframing nuclear policy to include environmental and social justice considerations would not only reflect historical reality, but also make nuclear policy more relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.
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Trump: A Symptom of the End of the World?
The president of the United States is deeply involved in dealing with the two ways we human beings have figured out how to destroy ourselves (and potentially so much else on this planet): nuclear war and climate change.
Nov 18, 2025
When I began TomDispatch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, believe me, the world did not look good. But I guarantee you one thing: If you had told me then that, almost a quarter of a century later, the president of the United States would be Donald J. Trump (and had explained to me just who he was), I would have thought you an idiot first class or totally mad! Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, not just once, but twice? In what century? On what planet? You must be kidding! (And what a dreadful joke at that!)
Now, of course, I would have to put all of that in the past tense (and probably add yet more exclamation points)!!
Once upon a time, you could never have convinced me (or just about anyone else) that we would find ourselves in such a world. Living in it now, however, it’s all too easy to see—yes!—President Donald Trump as a (if not the) crucial actor (making up his lines as he goes along) in a potentially devastating planetary drama still distinctly in development. (And I’m not even thinking about the possibility that, in the not-too-distant future, he might actually order some kind of invasion of, or assault on, Venezuela!) What’s rarer is to imagine him as a genuine symptom of this world’s end (at least as we human beings once knew it).
(And yes, there are indeed a lot of parentheses in this piece so far, perhaps because, at almost 81 and a half, I feel increasingly parenthetical to this eerily strange world of ours.)
He’s clearly right that heaven will indeed be a problem for him, since he’s so intent on sending us all, himself included, to hell in a handbasket.
Okay, I know, I know, all of that couldn’t sound more extreme. And unfortunately, that’s not even the half of it. After all, at this very moment, the president of the United States is deeply involved in dealing—in a fashion that would once have seemed as unimaginable as Donald Trump himself—with the two ways we human beings have figured out how to destroy ourselves (and potentially so much else on this planet): nuclear war and climate change.
Think of “President” Trump, in short, as a twofer when it comes to potential planetary destruction. And once upon a time (twice upon a time?), who would have imagined that possible when it came to a president of the United States? I’ll say it again: the “president” (and given the strange circumstances of this world of ours, that word does seem to me to need quotation marks!) of—nowhere else but—the United States of America! (And yes, we do seem to be on a planet where exclamation points can’t be used too often!! In fact, we may truly need some new symbol for the extremity of this world of ours!!!)
Okay, let me calm down a bit. After all, so many years after he first entered the White House, it’s true that, if you check statistician Nate Silver’s website, the president’s approval figures are indeed dropping significantly. But that may not, in the end (and “end” is anything but an inappropriate word here), truly matter to the man who clearly thinks better of himself than anyone else on this planet and possibly any other planet, even if he does now worry about whether or not, in the next life, he’ll actually make it to heaven. (“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he said recently. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”)
Nonetheless, I’d advise Saint Peter, if he’s still holding the keys to that kingdom’s gateway, to watch out. For his own safety, I’d urge him to consider burying those keys and stepping aside. (Oh, and let me use parentheses—and dashes—again here to suggest, sadly enough, that Donald J. Trump couldn’t be less dashingly parenthetical in this all too strange world of ours and, for all we know, the next one, too.) In fact, should he indeed surprise himself and the rest of us by making it to heaven, count on something else—and yes, I’ll need a colon here (lots of punctuation being necessary to deal with You Know Who): Expect him to tear down those ancient pearly gates and begin building a heavenly—or do I mean hellish?—version of Mar-a-Lago up there; in short, a new East Wing of heaven.
Living in a Sci-Fi World
In the 1950s and 1960s, from Brave New World and 1984 to Fahrenheit 451, I grew up on dystopian fiction and sci-fi, but honestly, there wasn’t a shot in hell of a chance that Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or Ray Bradbury, amazing as each of them was, could ever have imagined Donald Trump. (Think of him, in fact, not as Big Brother but perhaps as Humongous Brother.) If any of them had done so back then, rest assured that they wouldn’t have sold a copy of a book with such a ludicrous, unrealistic character and plot line. It tells you something that former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died recently, the fellow who became “the Darth Vader” of the administration of George W. Bush and helped launch the disastrous post-9/11 American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, by opposing Trump, now seems almost like a positive figure by comparison.
After all, today, Donald J. Trump has his hands on (all over, in fact) the two distinctly apocalyptic and all too science-fictional ways we humans have discovered to do in ourselves and much of the rest of the planet. Only recently, he demanded that the US military start testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992. In fact, on Truth Social, just minutes before he met with China’s President Xi Jinping, he stated that he had ordered “the Department of War” to resume such tests. “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes,” he recently told CBS’ Norah O’Donnell. “Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it.”
Hmm, not only don’t they talk about it, but as far as anyone on this planet other than Donald Trump can tell, like the United States, neither of those countries has tested a nuclear weapon since the 1990s. But no matter. If President Trump wants to set off new nuclear explosions on Planet Earth, why shouldn’t he? What harm could he possibly do? (Admittedly, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is talking about responding in kind and is indeed already testing nuclear delivery systems.). And if it led to a future nuclear confrontation with either Russia or China, honestly, how bad could that possibly be? Well, yes, if such testing were indeed to lead to an actual nuclear conflict, there is the possibility of creating what’s come to be known as “nuclear winter” on Planet Earth, but let’s not go there. (Brrr…) And mind you, that’s the less likely of the two possible ways President Trump could bring end-of-the-world possibilities into the everyday lives of us all.
With Donald Trump in the White House, consider us lucky (after a fashion) that we haven’t yet come up with a third or fourth way to do this planet and ourselves in, because count on this: He’d be on it instantly.
The other way—what might be thought of as a future climate-change summer—would be a slow-motion version of atomic hell, thanks to the pouring of endless amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, and so potentially heating this planet to the boiling point. Sadly enough, that possibility seems to fit Donald Trump’s skill set to a T. After all, though few may remember this anymore, he won his presidency the second time around on the stunningly blunt slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill,” which really couldn’t have been a more forthright promise about what he planned to do if reelected. Yes, let me say it one more time—pour greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels into our atmosphere in a distinctly hellish fashion. And give him credit, when it comes to campaign promises made in 2024, he’s proven (at least on this one issue) to be a man of his word.
After all, his record after only one term in office was impressive enough, although, on this strange planet of ours, he was anything but alone. (Good job, Vlad!) Just consider the fact that the last three summers have been the three hottest in recorded history, while 2024 was the warmest year on record (and 2025 is likely to come in second or third). In fact, a recent report found that a person somewhere on Earth is now dying every minute from rising global heat, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. And none of that is faintly stopping Donald Trump from acting to ensure that the future will be so much worse. After all, barring a total surprise, he’ll have three more years to continue what he’s been doing from the first day of his second term in office: “unleashing” oil, natural gas, and coal in any way he can. (Mind you, to put things in even grimmer perspective, under Joe Biden, a president who claimed to be determined to decarbonize our world, US oil production hit a record high in 2024.)
Only recently, for instance, President Trump opened the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which is estimated to hold billions of barrels of crude oil, to fossil-fuel drilling. And that’s just one—let me put this as mildly as I can, though I’m already sweating—modest act of his. Meanwhile, he’s been going out of his way to discourage the production of clean energy, especially wind power, in any way he can. As the British Guardian reported recently, a total of nine offshore wind projects set to provide electricity to nearly 5 million American households and create about 9,000 jobs in this country are already under investigation or have been paused by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, approvals of oil and gas drilling permits are—I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn—distinctly on the rise.
And give him credit for accuracy: He’s clearly right that heaven will indeed be a problem for him, since he’s so intent on sending us all, himself included, to hell in a handbasket. But here’s the thing when it comes to climate change: None of this should faintly be a surprise. All of it was apparent enough in his first term in office and yet Donald (“drill, baby, drill”) Trump was indeed reelected in 2024, despite what everyone should have known about his plans for this planet and the rest of us.
A Slow-Motion Version of a Global Nuclear Catastrophe
With Donald Trump in the White House, consider us lucky (after a fashion) that we haven’t yet come up with a third or fourth way to do this planet and ourselves in, because count on this: He’d be on it instantly. And yet, sadly enough, two ways are undoubtedly going to be plenty. Or even one way, since I must admit that I find it hard to believe that even Donald Trump is going to get us into an actual nuclear war. Unfortunately, with him, I certainly wouldn’t rule anything out, but somehow it doesn’t seem likely.
And yet, if you think about it, in some sense, we’re already in the equivalent of a nuclear war, since climate change just happens to be a slow-motion version of a global nuclear catastrophe. Think of the release of all those greenhouse gases as indeed a long-term version of that nuclear mushroom cloud, blasting this planet in a fashion that’s likely to lead to an all too literal hell on Earth in the decades to come.
And if we’re indeed heading into such a landscape, then consider Donald J. Trump a slow-motion version of Satan (as are Vladimir Putin and all too many other global leaders). Certainly, his policies are making a mockery of global efforts (however modest) to rein in greenhouse gases. In some way, what lends him such a hand is the very fact that, unlike a nuclear war, climate change, being a slow-motion version of global hell, is strangely hard to take in.
Whether Donald Trump makes it to heaven or not, there can be little question that his legacy on earth will be satanic indeed.
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The Perilous Norm of Nuclear Weapons Testing
Trump's testing threat is the latest episode of existential terror imposed from above, highlighting what depths of apocalyptic misbehavior are now considered normal when it comes to how nuclear weapons countries behave toward one another.
Nov 14, 2025
On October 29, just before meeting with China’s President XI Jinping, President Donald Trump posted on the right-wing social media network Truth Social that “because of other countries [sic] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
The US stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1992—that is, detonating nuclear warheads. It regularly tests “delivery vehicles,” the missiles that would be used to carry the nuclear weapon to its intended target. The most recent of these tests took place early on Wednesday, November 5, when an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast of California. It’s possible that Trump simply does not understand the difference between these two things.
Observers speculated that Trump’s nuclear test announcement was a response to Russia's recent test of its Burevestnik missile, which is nuclear-capable—meaning it could carry a nuclear warhead, though it did not during the test—and powered by nuclear energy. Some pointed out that it would be the Department of Energy, rather than the Pentagon, that would carry out a test detonation of a nuclear weapon. Trump’s use of the phrase “on an equal basis,” given that China and Russia are not detonating nuclear weapons, was comforting to some.
Whatever he meant, it’s worth considering how this latest episode of existential terror imposed from above highlights what depths of apocalyptic misbehavior are now considered normal when it comes to how nuclear weapons countries behave toward one another.
We should not let nuclear testing once again become part of nuclear-armed countries’ business as usual.
The missile Russia tested was designed to deliver a nuclear weapon without being intercepted by missile defense systems, using nuclear power to extend its flight time much longer than non-nuclear powered missiles. The Russian government also claimed to have tested its Poseidon torpedo, also nuclear-capable and nuclear-powered, and designed to be used in coastal waters to create a huge wave of irradiated water that would wash ashore.
Neither of these, nor the ICBM test, amount to a “nuclear test.” But, should the US conduct a test explosion of a nuclear warhead, it would be adding to the environmental burden that has led to nearly half a million deaths, by one scholarly estimate, from the over 1,000 test nuclear detonations the US has carried out. (This is about half of the over 2,000 total tests carried out worldwide between 1945 and 2017.) The health and environmental effects of this testing are ongoing, and the United States hasn't come close to cleaning up after its earlier nuclear tests.
To take just one example, waste from tests conducted in the Marshall Islands is still sitting in the Runit Dome, a cracking concrete structure on Runit Island in the Enewetak Atoll that is under constant threat from worsening storms as a result of climate change. US nuclear testing has rendered Marshallese ways of life untenable for the long term, with no real prospects for full remediation on the horizon. (ICBM tests launched from Vandenberg are aimed at the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, a less dramatically destructive but still significant burden on a place that has long paid a high price for the maintenance of US nuclear weapons.)
Still, even if Trump is responding to recent nuclear tests that didn’t happen, this is largely in keeping with how nuclear-armed countries tend to justify changes in their nuclear policy as reciprocal responses to unprovoked aggression, no matter what the facts are. What’s more certain, however, is that if the US tests a nuclear weapon, Russia and China are far more likely to begin testing nuclear weapons of their own, as Russia has already threatened. This would lead to more environmental damage, more health consequences across the globe, and more normalization of nuclear explosions as part of the business of doing politics.
It seems as if much of the press has lost sight of the actual stakes here. The Washington Post’s coverage of Trump’s announcement, for one, skipped over all the reasons a nuclear test might actually be undesirable and instead merely named "far-reaching consequences for relations with adversaries" as the real thing its readers should be worried about. If that is indeed the main concern, conducting multiple missile tests a year that signal the US’ willingness to use ICBMs should be viewed for what it is—a gesture that keeps nuclear war on the mind of governments around the world as a real possibility, a norm of global politics rather than a collective fate that must be avoided at all costs.
The reality is, Americans share the unfortunate situation of everyone else in the world of being first and foremost potential victims of nuclear weaponry, vulnerable to the whims of the leaders they have theoretically empowered to control the country’s thousands of nuclear weapons, nearly all of which are much, much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear arsenals have been maintained using advanced computer modeling for decades. The fact that nuclear test explosions have entered even the far reaches of possibility, even for an administration which embraces brutal violence with such open enthusiasm, is cause for alarm and collective action against the threat that nuclear weapons pose to human life.
It’s easy to dismiss a “test” as something less than the full terrifying reality of nuclear weapons use. In some cases, this is true. Underground nuclear tests are less immediately hazardous to human and environmental health than atmospheric tests, which the US stopped conducting in 1962. An ICBM test does not involve the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
But the scale and political importance of a nuclear weapon test means any indication of a willingness to use it under any circumstances has political significance. Historians have noted that one of the main reasons the United States ultimately decided to use nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to test whether they would work as expected.
We should not let nuclear testing once again become part of nuclear-armed countries’ business as usual. A nuclear explosion is a nuclear explosion, and the fallout will be all of ours to deal with.
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Trump’s Nuclear Testing Threat: Playing with More Than Dynamite
We have to hope that there is sufficient wisdom and leverage hidden in the cracks of the Trump administration to convince Trump that he needs to reverse course.
Nov 11, 2025
The thriller House of Dynamite, playing in theaters and streamed into our homes, leaves its audiences hanging as an unprepared US president must decide humanity’s fate after a surprise nuclear attack. Now picture the real president, Donald Trump, whose uninformed and garbled statement about resuming nuclear testing may have sounded the starting gun for an existentially dangerous multinational nuclear arms race. We can hope that those who may be able to influence this unstable and ill-informed president will devise a face-saving way for him to walk back the threat. But we can’t count on that happening.
In a recent track II session with US, Russian, and European former arms control diplomats, military officials, and analysts, there was something like a consensus that Trump misunderstood one or more reports about recent Russian nuclear activities. The claim is that either Russia or China conducted explosive, rather than subcritical, tests, a claim rejected by the head of the US Strategic Command. Not wanting to be out done by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump made his threat. When questioned about it, Trump reiterated the threat. This has caused profound uncertainty and confusion, leading the Kremlin to request clarification about US nuclear weapons testing policy.
Worth noting is that this brouhaha comes at a time when significant forces within the Republican Party advocate renewed testing. The Kremlin has yet to receive that clarification or another one in response to its offer to extend the most essential elements of the New START Treaty beyond its February expiration date.
Among senior arms controllers, there is an understanding that if the US or Russia resume testing, it will open the gates for extremely dangerous nuclear weapons proliferation. Among the candidates for a nuclear breakout are South Korea, where a majority of the population wants their nation to develop nuclear weapons out of fear of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and growing uncertainties about Seoul’s military alliance with the United States. Other breakout candidates include Saudi Arabia, which recently concluded a military alliance with nuclear Pakistan and near-nuclear Iran. Despite Trump’s claims of having destroyed Tehran’s nuclear program, Tehran moved its highly enriched uranium prior to the Israeli and US missile strikes against its nuclear infrastructure. And as history teaches us, knowledge is not easily destroyed.
In our various nations we can use our people’s power to name, shame, isolate, and insist on no new nuclear weapons testing.
While Russia is reported to be in a position to resume explosive nuclear weapons testing in relatively short order, this is not the case for the US. While the Pentagon could detonate a nuclear weapon as a show of terrorizing force, it would take several years to install highly advanced nuclear testing technologies into the Nevada test site. Similarly, nations that aspire to join the nuclear powers will not immediately be able to test these “weapons of the Devil.”
However, the seminally important Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has successfully limited nuclear weapons proliferation and thus the dangers of nuclear war, will be at risk if Trump persists with the threat to resume nuclear weapons testing. Despite the US and China having yet to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, with the exception of North Korea nuclear powers have respected the moratorium on kinetic testing since the CTBT was negotiated 30 years ago in 1996. Fears abound that if Trump does not reverse course before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which begins at the United Nations in late April, he could torpedo the treaty. Despite the treaty’s double standards and failure to lead to the elimination of the world’s nuclear arsenals as prescribed in Article IV, the treaty remains a powerful diplomatic barrier to nuclear weapons proliferation. Dangerously, the last two Review Conferences were deemed failures for their inability to negotiate and issue a final declaration. The probability is that a commitment to resume nuclear weapons testing would sink the third RevCon.
In the tradition of three strikes and you’re out, a third successive NPT RevCon failure would likely doom the NPT, if not immediately then over the course of several years. In the mistaken belief that nuclear deterrence can provide national security, some states would withdraw from the treaty, become nuclear powers, and the resulting collapse of the treaty would “end the world as we know it.”
Where does this leave us? First and foremost, we have to hope that there is sufficient wisdom and leverage hidden in the cracks of the Trump administration to convince Trump that he needs to reverse course. In our various nations we can use our people’s power to name, shame, isolate, and insist on no new nuclear weapons testing. And with the NPT Review Conference approaching, we can organize to insist that the treaty’s Article IV commitment to nuclear weapons abolition, and previous implementation agreements, be respected.
Along the way we can remind people that even as we are enter and resist a new US-Russia-China Cold War, that arms control agreements between great power rivals can be negotiated, as was the case during the first Cold War. We can urge the US to join with Russia to extend the elements of the New START Treaty beyond the treaty’s February expiration. And we can join efforts to use the new Netflix film House of Dynamite to teach new generations about the existential threat of nuclear weapons and war and the reality that, as the Hibakusha teach, “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
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'Extremely Dangerous for Humanity': Trump Orders Resumption of US Nuclear Weapons Testing
"By foolishly announcing his intention resume nuclear testing," said one expert, "Trump will trigger strong public opposition in Nevada, from all U.S. allies, and it could trigger a chain reaction."
Oct 30, 2025
US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he has ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, an announcement made in a frighteningly vague social media post that threatens to shred decades of global progress and heighten tensions with China and Russia.
Trump mentioned both of those nations in his post, which was published to Truth Social just ahead of the US president's meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
"The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country," Trump wrote, inaccurately. "Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis."
Experts and nuclear nonproliferation advocates quickly began trying to parse Trump's statement and determine its implications for the global arms race. It's unclear from Trump's post whether he intends to resume explosive nuclear tests—the last of which was conducted underground in Nevada in 1992.
Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, warned that jumpstarting nuke tests would be "incredibly stupid" and pointed to the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the US signed but never ratified.
"This would have real, devastating impact for Americans," Fihn said of explosive nuclear testing. "It will harm, kill, and poison people. It has been estimated that past US nuclear testing killed as many Americans as its bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did."
"Even if such nuclear tests are conducted underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and venting of radioactive materials, as well as the potential leakage into groundwater."
Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, wrote in response to the US president's post that "Trump is misinformed and out of touch."
"The U.S. has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing for the first time since 1992," wrote Kimball. "It would take least 36 months to resume contained nuclear tests underground at the former test site in Nevada."
"No country except North Korea has conducted a nuclear test explosion in this century," Kimball observed. "By foolishly announcing his intention resume nuclear testing, Trump will trigger strong public opposition in Nevada, from all U.S. allies, and it could trigger a chain reaction of nuclear testing by U.S. adversaries, and blow apart the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."
One Nevada lawmaker, Democratic US Rep. Dina Titus, vowed following Trump's announcement to introduce "legislation to put a stop to this."
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One after his meeting with China's president, Trump said details of the testing resumption—including the sites—would be announced at an unspecified later date. Just months ago, the US announced that it completed the assembly of the first B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb "ahead of schedule."
"We don't do testing. We've halted it years, many years ago," Trump said. "But with others doing testing, I think it's appropriate that we do also.”
Russia, which just days ago successfully tested its nuclear-capable Burevestnik cruise missile, has said it would only resume explosive nuclear testing if the US does so first.
China's Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, expressed hope that the US "will earnestly fulfill its obligations under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and honor its commitment to suspend nuclear testing."
Trump's social media post is sure to heighten fears of escalating nuclear tensions and potentially catastrophic global consequences.
Manpreet Sethi, a member of the Science and Security Board at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, warned earlier this year that "the US has abdicated its role as a voice of caution" as "the risk of nuclear use continues to grow due to capabilities building up and treaties breaking down."
"It seems inclined to expand its nuclear arsenal and adopt a posture that reinforces the belief that ‘limited’ use of nuclear weapons can be managed," Sethi said just over a week after Trump's second term began. "Such misplaced confidence could have us stumble into a nuclear war."
Tilman Ruff, a board member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, wrote Thursday that a resumption of US nuclear weapon testing "would be extremely dangerous for humanity."
"It would almost inevitably be followed by tit-for-tat reciprocal announcements by other nuclear-armed states, particularly Russia and China, and cement an accelerating arms race that puts us all in great jeopardy," Ruff wrote. "It would also create profound risks of radioactive fallout globally. Even if such nuclear tests are conducted underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and venting of radioactive materials, as well as the potential leakage into groundwater."
"It's really an extraordinarily dangerous time in history," Ruff added.
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The Movement Continues for a Nuclear-Free World
As we commemorate the lives lost and damaged by nuclear weapons 80 years ago, we commit ourselves to work harder for the elimination of these weapons.
Aug 06, 2025
Thank you for the opportunity to speak at the 2025 World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.
I bring you greetings and solidarity from civil society movements in the U.S. who have been working diligently for a nuclear-free world against a U.S. government that is intent on spending huge amounts of money on “modernizing” its nuclear weapons.
As this is the commemoration of horrific deaths and wounding of hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago in 1945, as an American citizen, I offer my profound apologies to the families of those killed in Japan—Japanese, Koreans, and other nationalities including the U.S. prisoners of war who were there. And to Marshallese and U.S. “downwinders” who suffered from U.S. testing of atomic and nuclear weapons, for the criminal actions of my government in using these weapons of mass destruction. I also apologize to the Vietnamese delegation at the conference for the U.S. dropping millions of gallons of Agent Orange and leaving tons of unexploded ordnance in Vietnam.
The knowledge that the horrific weapons would be used to kill and maim innocent civilians as a strategy to end the war was brutal, reckless, and without any sense of humanity.
80 years later, we are battling our governments as they continue to spend trillions of dollars to “improve, upgrade, modernize” these weapons.
80 years later, we now know the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the testing of these terrible weapons in Nevada in the United States, the Marshall Islands, the Russian Federation, Mururoa, French Polynesia, Australia, and Algeria have resulted in the legacy of genetic medical conditions for the generations that have followed those who were initially exposed to the radiation emanating from the testing of nuclear bombs.
Most of the test sites were on the lands of Indigenous peoples and far from the capitals of the testing governments. Large swathes of land remain radioactive and unsafe for habitation, even decades after test sites were closed.
Slow Ratification of the TPNW
And yet, 80 years later, we are battling our governments as they continue to spend trillions of dollars to “improve, upgrade, modernize” these weapons that have now been banned by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which opened for signature at the United Nations on September 20, 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2021.
We know the statistics. By the end of 2024, a total of 94 nations have signed the TPNW, but only 73 have signed and ratified the treaty. There are currently 21 signatory countries that have signed but NOT ratified the TPNW, countries in which their citizens must put pressure on their governments.
Citizen pressure must be put on the 44 nations that, incredibly, OPPOSE the treaty including the nine nuclear weapons countries: the U.S., Russian Federation, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan. Fifteen other nations are undecided on whether to accept or reject the treaty.
U.S. States and Cities Say No to Nuclear Weapons
The state legislatures of 5 out of 50 states in the United States—California, Oregon, New Jersey, Maine, and Rhode Island—have passed resolutions in support of the TPNW. Five large counties in the U.S. have passed resolutions in support of the TPNW, including the city and county where I live, Honolulu, Hawaii, as well as the city and county of San Francisco, and two counties in Maryland next to Washington, D.C.
Dozens of cities across the country, including Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., have also appealed to the U.S. government to sign and ratify the TPNW. In 2021, New York City resolved to pursue the divestment of public funds from nuclear weapons makers in response to the TPNW’s entry into force.
Japanese-American Rep. Jill Tokuda Cosponsors Stop the Nuclear Arms Race Resolution
In 2025, in the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) introduced House Resolution 317 “Urging the United States to lead the world back from the brink of nuclear war and halt and reverse the nuclear arms race.”
Unfortunately, the resolution has only 28 sponsors or cosponsors out of 435 members of the House of Representatives, all from the Democratic Party, none from the Republican Party, meaning we have much work to do in the U.S. Congress.
About House Resolution 317, Jill Tokuda, my congressional representative in Hawaii who is a cosponsor of the resolution and who is Japanese American, one of only four Japanese Americans in the U.S. Congress, stated:
As a Japanese American, my heritage is deeply tied to the devastating impact of nuclear weapons and the atrocities of war. This resolution is about our moral imperative to achieve nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. It is not only a call for peace, but a commitment to ensuring that such tragedies are never repeated. This resolution represents a vital step toward a safer, more just world.
The resolution urges the United States to:
- Engage in good-faith negotiations with all nuclear-armed states to halt the buildup of nuclear arsenals and pursue verifiable, time-bound reductions;
- Conclude new arms control agreements with Russia and engage China on nuclear risk reduction;
- Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
- End the Cold War-era “hair trigger alert” posture;
- Rein in the production of new nuclear warheads and delivery systems;
- Preserve the moratorium on nuclear testing;
- Protect radiation-impacted communities and workers through full remediation, compensation, and expanded healthcare, including an expanded Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA); and
- Plan a just economic transition for workers and communities dependent on the nuclear weapons industry.
U.S. Organizations Sending Greetings
There are a multitude of organizations in the United States and around the world that are working for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
They send their greetings to colleagues here in Japan and around the world as they continue their work in the U.S. Congress, in the states and cities and counties of the United States.
From June 8-11, 2025, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s (ANA) held its 38th annual D.C. Days to advocate in the U.S. Congress for safer nuclear weapons and waste policies.
ANA includes 30 organizations concerned with the local and national consequences of nuclear weapons and waste policy decisions. During the week of advocacy in the U.S. Congress, meetings were held with 80 members of Congress or their staff.
Referencing the Trump administration’s goal of eliminating waste in the federal government through the draconian measures taken by the Department of Government Efficiency, ANA published a new resource, “What about WASTE? 80 Years of Nuclear Waste” as a part of this year’s effort in the U.S. Congress.
The Nevada Desert Experience continues its annual spring Sacred Peace Walk from the Atomic Tests Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, 60 miles out to the Nuclear Test site on Western Shoshone land. The site was the primary testing location of American nuclear devices from 1951 to 1992. Around 928 announced nuclear tests occurred there; 828 tests were underground and 100 were atmospheric tests.
In another initiative for public awareness of the bloated U.S. military budget and nuclear weapons program, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream in June 2025 initiated a $2.3 million, 2-year advocacy project called “Up in Arms.” The campaign is to reduce U.S. military spending, particularly on nuclear weapons; to make cutting the Pentagon budget a debate in the 2026 elections; and to bring a national focus onto nuclear dangers and the necessity of disarmament.
The International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 U.S. Atomic Bombings continues to bring international attention, and hopefully justice, to the Japanese and Korean victims and survivors of the effects of the horrific U.S. atomic bombs used in 1945.
The Lakenheath Peace Camp held in May 2025 at the U.S. Air Base in Lakenheath, U.K. focused on stopping nuclear weapons being sent again by the U.S. to be housed on U.K. soil.
NO to NATO events were held in June in The Hague, Netherlands to protest the 5% increase for NATO countries in national spending for military at the expense of social programs for the people and to alert the world to the dangers of the use of nuclear weapons in any conflict.
The International Peace Forum in Brussels, Belgium also in June 2025 focused on the increased militarization in Europe and the necessity of eliminating nuclear weapons.
The annual STOPP RAMSTEIN camp and demonstration, held in June at the largest U.S. air base in Europe, underscored the need to challenge the continuing U.S. dominance in European security issues and the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla attempted to sail two ships in May and June to break the Israeli genocide and the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, the complicity of the U.S. and other countries in the genocide, and the refusal of Israel to acknowledge its nuclear weapons.
Individuals Continue to Take Action to Bring Attention to Ending Nuclear Weapons
In 2024-2025, 81-year-old U.S. citizen Susan Crane spent 230 days in prison in Germany for cutting a fence into Büchel Air Force Base, climbing atop earthen bunkers used to store both nuclear weapons and German Tornado fighter jets to protest the stationing of American nuclear weapons in Germany, and for refusing to pay a fine. For three decades, Crane protested nuclear weapons in the U.S. and in Europe. She’s poured her own blood on a nuclear destroyer and taken a hammer to warplanes. In total, she said she’s served around seven years in prison.
Büchel Air Force Base trains German soldiers to drop hydrogen bombs on behalf of the United States as part of NATO's nuclear sharing arrangements.
Susan van der Hijden from the Netherlands and Gerd Buntzly from Germany were both in prison in Germany starting in June 2024 for similar actions at the Büchel Air Force Base.
Four U.S. peace activist have been incarcerated in Germany over protests at the Büchel Air Base: John LaForge; Dennis DuVall; Susan Crane; and Brian Terrell, a long-time Catholic Worker and human rights activist from Maloy, Iowa who works with the Nevada Desert Experience and served 15 days in the Wittlich Prison south of Cologne, from February 26 to March 12, 2025.
In June 2025, Veterans For Peace members held a 40-day fast at the United Nation and the U.S. and Israeli missions to the U.N. in New York City to stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as well as for a nuclear free world.
Pledge to Continue Working for the End of Nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction
As we commemorate the lives lost and damaged by nuclear weapons 80 years ago, we commit ourselves to work harder for the elimination of these weapons, taking on our governments and the industries that make money from the construction and testing of these weapons of mass destruction.
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Nuclear Justice Efforts Are Here to Stay
The states that have caused harm to peoples around the planet can finally stop pretending that such harms are either nonexistent or that they have done enough to address them.
Nov 19, 2024
On November 7, the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly supported a resolution to help victims of nuclear weapons use and testing. Brought forward by the Republics of Kazakhstan and Kiribati, and co-sponsored by 39 additional U.N. Member States, the resolution received 169 votes in favor, with only four nuclear weapon possessors—Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom—voting against it. The remaining five nuclear armed states (China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and the United States), plus Poland, all abstained.
The vote is a resounding affirmation that nuclear justice efforts are here to stay. The states that have caused harm to peoples around the planet, including their own citizens and those whose care they were entrusted with, can finally stop pretending that such harms are either nonexistent or that they have done enough to address them. The nuclear weapon possessors, most especially the five nuclear weapon states—China, France, Russia, United States, and the United Kingdom—recognized as such by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, must engage in earnest.
Ultimately, nuclear justice must also include elimination of all nuclear weapon arsenals. This would ensure that the suffering of those impacted by nuclear weapons has not been in vain.
Ever-growing understanding of the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapon attacks by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the testing of nuclear weapons that lasted for decades and reached numerous corners of the globe, provided a huge impetus behind the Humanitarian Initiative, a successful effort started in the early 2010s by a group of states in collaboration with civil society, all motivated to change the nuclear weapons status quo. Coupled with the growing appreciation of what nuclear war would bring today or tomorrow (subject of another U.N. resolution that passed this month with 141 in favor votes, 30 abstentions, and France, Russia, and the United Kingdom voting no), as well as the research on the risk of nuclear weapon use and the recognition that no adequate response could be devised for such a possibility, the Humanitarian Initiative led to successful efforts to bring into the U.N. system a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons (Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons or TPNW).
When the TPNW was drafted in 2017, the diplomats recognized that it wasn’t enough to prohibit nuclear weapon activities, but that the past and present consequences for people and the environment had to be addressed head-on. This led to the Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW on victim assistance, environmental remediation, and international cooperation, which are collectively referred to as the humanitarian provisions of the treaty. The goal is not just to make these ongoing harms integral to the effort to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons, but to address them directly and provide tangible results for the communities that have suffered from adverse health and socioeconomic impacts for decades and whose environments may still be radiologically contaminated. Having entered into force in 2021, the TPNW is now faced with the implementation of these provisions for two states that are already parties to the treaty, Republics of Kazakhstan and Kiribati. Kazakhstan was the site of 456 Soviet nuclear tests from 1949 to 1991, while Kiribati was home from 1957 to 1962 to United States and United Kingdom tests whose cumulative yield was equivalent to more than 2,000 Hiroshima bombs.
The humanitarian provisions of the TPNW have led to the broadening of conversations about these harms and the new norm arising from the treaty of the obligation to address them. While the United States had a Radiation Exposure Compensation Act from the early 1990s until its expiration earlier this year, and France introduced its Loi Morin law in 2010, these efforts have been severely limited in their scope and impact. In both cases, the definition of a victim was restricted in such a way as to prevent many of those harmed from qualifying for the compensation. Even for the people who have qualified, the assistance has been inadequate. Worse yet is the case of all of the communities that have been completely disregarded and excluded from such compensation schemes.
What is particularly powerful about the nuclear justice resolution is that, with the exception of Poland this year, it has left the nuclear weapon possessors totally alone. Even their closest friends and allies have now voted in favor of the resolution for the second year in a row. More than 70 states that have not yet joined the TPNW have now affirmed that nuclear justice is a worthwhile effort they are ready to stand behind. In this way, the resolution is a powerful example of the way in which the TPNW Is already having an impact on international norms and policies even as nearly half of U.N. Members States have yet to join the treaty.
The road to nuclear justice is long. It will include acknowledgment, compensation, and the promise to never cause such harms again. The next phase must consist of genuine and independent assessment of needs both for victim assistance and environmental remediation in all impacted areas, with the international community coming together to offer help, including technical and financial assistance. How much remains to be done will in many ways depend on what the assessments demonstrate.
Ultimately, nuclear justice must also include elimination of all nuclear weapon arsenals. This would ensure that the suffering of those impacted by nuclear weapons has not been in vain. Instead, future generations will see it as the rallying call that brought the international community together to guarantee the right of survival to humanity and our fellow Earth inhabitants for the foreseeable future.
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Congress Must Renew and Expand Compensation for Nuclear Downwinders
The U.S. is projected to spend over $750 billion on nuclear weapons over the next decade—a fact it feels impossible to reconcile with the abandonment of the people affected by that spending.
Aug 27, 2024
It’s been nearly 80 years since the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico. Communities have been reeling ever since.
For generations, Americans who live “downwind” of nuclear testing and development sites have suffered deadly health complications. And this summer, funding for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) expired, putting their hard-earned compensation at risk.
Coming alongside sky-high spending on nuclear weapons development, this lapse is an outrage. Funding for these communities, which span much of the country, should be not only restored but expanded.
To protect future generations—and our own—the ultimate goal should be an end to all nuclear weapons development.
Alongside New Mexicans, people in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Utah, and beyond have suffered health complications from nuclear testing in Nevada. And fallout from decades of tests ravaged the Marshall Islands, which were occupied by the U.S. after World War II.
Communities in Colorado were exposed to radiation from the Rocky Flats weapons plant. And people living near Missouri’s Coldwater Creek were exposed when World War II-era nuclear waste was buried there.
Over the generations since, tens of thousands of people have been affected. Health impacts include respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, birth defects, and elevated rates of cancer.
We’re from New Mexico, the only “cradle-to-grave” state in which all steps of the nuclear production process—mining, testing, and disposal—occur together. We’ve lived near impacted communities our entire lives.
Tina Cordova, co-founder of New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, says five generations of her family have suffered health and economic impacts from nuclear testing. “We are forced to bury our loved ones on a regular basis,” she said.
Uranium mining in the Navajo Nation has also taken a terrible toll. Between 1944 and 1986, 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo land. Indigenous miners were exposed to radiation without proper safety protocols, resulting in aggressive cancers, miscarriages, lung diseases, and other illnesses.
After decades of struggle to get compensation, communities impacted by nuclear weapons development finally won passage of RECA in 1990—45 years after the first atomic bomb was dropped.
The initial law provided $2.6 billion to around 41,000 individuals, limiting coverage to onsite participants and downwinders within designated areas of the Nevada Test Site. The bill was amended in 2000 to include those who contracted cancer or other specific diseases from working as uranium miners between 1942 and 1971.
Since then, there have been bipartisan efforts to expand the bill’s narrow scope to other impacted communities. In response to years of advocacy, an extended and expanded version of RECA successfully passed the Senate this spring with 69-30 in favor—and President Joe Biden’s backing.
The bill would have expanded RECA eligibility to all downwinders in Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and Guam, along with previously excluded areas of Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. And it would have included miners exposed to radiation until 1990.
But Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson blocked a vote in the House, abandoning the unseen victims of the U.S. nuclear arms race. Now RECA has expired altogether.
It’s not for lack of money. The U.S. is projected to spend over $750 billion on nuclear weapons over the next decade—a fact it feels impossible to reconcile with the abandonment of the people affected by that spending.
Meanwhile, people are still being exposed to radiation.
Even now, 523 abandoned uranium mines containing waste piles remain on Navajo territory—and companies continue to haul uranium through Navajo land, despite a nearly two-decade old ban on uranium mining there.
Mismanagement of nuclear waste is another ongoing concern. In 2019, 250 barrels of waste were lost en route to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
To protect future generations—and our own—the ultimate goal should be an end to all nuclear weapons development. But as we work toward that goal, repairing the harm to impacted communities—by renewing and expanding RECA—is a necessary next step.
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On the 70th Anniversary of the Castle Bravo Test, Remember the Victims
Between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands that vaporized whole islands, carved craters into the shallow lagoons, and exiled hundreds of people from their homes.
Mar 01, 2024
March 1 marks 70 years since the U.S. used its biggest ever nuclear weapon—on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The bomb was 15 megatons, 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
On this day we remember the victims of the Castle Bravo nuclear blast and all other victims of the nuclear era, which has brought untold pain, death, and damage, affecting both people and planet in profound ways.
There’s no better way to remember Castle Bravo day than by taking action on behalf of the victims of radiation and pushing for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. The blasts vaporized whole islands, carved craters into the shallow lagoons, and exiled hundreds of people from their homes. The Castle Bravo blast was the largest of all, sending particulate and gaseous fallout around the entire planet.
Stopping the Nuclear Weapons Tests
Concerned U.S. citizens tried to stop the tests by contacting Congress, the president, and the press and by demonstrating on campuses and in the streets. They weren’t successful through these conventional means, so in 1958 four Quakers bought a small sailboat, the Golden Rule, and attempted to sail her right into the testing zone in the Marshall Islands.
The crew of the Golden Rule was arrested in Honolulu and could not continue. A second boat, the Phoenix of Hiroshima, took the baton and completed the sail into the Marshall Islands, resulting in the arrest of the Phoenix’s captain. The actions and arrests of these crews spurred a massive public outcry that finally led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
The Golden Rule also inspired the founding of Greenpeace in 1971, whose first mission was to sail to Amchitka Island, Alaska, to stop nuclear weapons testing. The U.S. Navy stopped Greenpeace, too. The nuclear bomb the group had come to stop was detonated, but the subsequent tests were canceled and the U.S. stopped the entire Amchitka nuclear test program.Rongelap Relocation
Greenpeace and her vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, played an important role in the Marshall Islands in 1985 when Rongelap residents asked Greenpeace to help them relocate to a new home. Both Bikini and Enewetak’s people were evacuated from their island homes prior to the nuclear tests, hoping to avoid radioactive fallout. But the inhabitants of Rongelap (150 kilometers away) were not so fortunate. Within four hours of the Castle Bravo explosion, fallout was settling on the island. A fine white ash landed on the heads and bare arms of people standing in the open. It dissolved into water supplies and drifted into houses.
With double the usual miscarriages and other health problems caused by the Castle Bravo test, the people of Rongelap begged the U.S. government to evacuate them. But they were now human “guinea pigs,” and U.S. scientists wanted to study the effects of radiation on the population.
Finally, in 1985, Greenpeace made three 180 kilometer trips from Rongelap to Mejato (in the Kwajalein Atoll), taking 300 islanders to safety.
New Relationships Built: Marshallese and the Golden Rule
The Golden Rule disappeared from public view in 1958 and eventually sank in Humboldt Bay in far northern California in 2010. After a five-year rebuild, she was re-launched and returned to her anti-nuclear mission by Veterans For Peace.
In 2016 when the Golden Rule visited Portland, Oregon, we visited with a Marshallese group who built a traditional sailing canoe. Most people in and from the Marshall Islands have never heard of the Golden Rule or the Phoenix of Hiroshima. However, when they hear the story, they are very excited that people attempted to help them all those years ago.
Kiana Juda-Angelo presented the Golden Rule Project with a Marshallese flag at our public presentation in Portland, Oregon in 2016.
Hawaii has one of the largest populations of Marshall Islanders in the U.S. It has been our pleasure to meet them and commemorate Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day in Honolulu in 2019.
In 2022, as the Golden Rule sailed down the Mississippi River along the “Great Loop,” we passed through Dubuque, Iowa, where there is a community of 800 or so Marshall Islanders. Veterans For Peace member Art Roche told them the story of the Golden Rule’s 1958 voyage and that we were bringing the boat to Dubuque! They greeted us with leis and songs of sweet harmony in their traditional clothing. We enjoyed dancing, speeches, and song for a whole weekend.
The Marshall Islands and the United States Today
When the Golden Rule was in New York City we met the Permanent United Nations Representative from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Ambassador Amatlain Elizabeth Kabua. She explained that there were several issues that could be improved:
- Although the Marshallese have increased radiation-caused cancer, there is no chemotherapy facility anywhere in the Marshall Islands.
- Although Marshall Islanders, like the Indigenous people in the United States, volunteer at a proportionately high rate for the U.S. military, there is no VA clinic in the Marshall Islands.
For the last three decades, Marshall Islanders have sought compensation from the U.S. for the health and environmental effects of nuclear testing. They’ve been denied standing to sue in U.S. courts, and Congress has declined their requests. The Compact of Free Association (COFA) which governs the relationship between the U.S., Palau, Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands was renegotiated in 2023. However, Congress has yet to fund the $7 billion dollars that was approved.
The Marshall Islands are also being hit hard by global warming and slowly sinking into the rising seas. This will submerge a highly radioactive nuclear waste dump, Runit dome. Runit dome contains nuclear contamination from both the Marshall Islands and the Nevada test site.
Take Action
On March 1, let’s remember all of the victims of radiation—from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; nuclear testing areas; and uranium mining, milling, processing, and disposal sites.
Let your senators and representative know that you support fully funding the Compact of Free Association (COFA).
Tell them that you support the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, including its expansion to include those people exposed from the Trinity test in New Mexico in 1945.
Work for the U.S. to sign the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which includes compensation for victims of radiation. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, is working hard to get all nations to sign the treaty.
Back from the Brink urges the U.S. government to:
- Actively pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals (they support the TPNW);
- Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
- End the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. president to launch a nuclear attack;
- Take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
- Cancel the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.
Their website has an advocacy toolkit and sample scripts for talking with the press and policy makers.
Two important bills are in Congress: H. Res 77 would implement the Back from the Brink Measures. HR 2775 would move money from nuclear weapons manufacturing to funding fossil-free, nuclear-free energy as well as human needs. Ask your representative to sponsor these bills and your senators to introduce a companion bill!
There’s no better way to remember Castle Bravo day than by taking action on behalf of the victims of radiation and pushing for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
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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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