Some Thoughts on Nagasaki Day
By Bob Gould, President, SF Bay Area PSR
Published:
August 9, 2009 in psrblog.wordpress.com
My
Mom passed away last week at the age of 86, after a three-year battle with metastatic
colon cancer. Over the last two months, our family and close friends were able
to share our love with her and help her have a “soft landing.” Through
all the sadness we felt losing her, what was striking was how fortunate we were
being able to participate so intimately in her passing, to have the time and opportunity
to be able to organically share and process the memories of someone so close—in
our own variation of what has been the collective experience of humanity grappling
with life and personal loss through the eons.
In this past week encompassing
the 64th Anniversary of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I couldn’t
help but think about how our experience of having the ability to share and process
profound personal grief differs so fundamentally from the Japanese Hibakusha survivors
who were wrenched so suddenly from the daily rhythms of life, loss and collective
history by the supreme violence of nuclear war that literally vaporized their
families and communities with no warning, allowing no such personal and communal
closure with such awesome loss. And how, despite the hopes for fundamental change
raised by new political leadership in our own nation, the forces arrayed for future
global nuclear annihilation remain as influential and powerful as ever.
Early
this year, PSR and our colleagues in IPPNW sent a “Medical Appeal for a World
Without Nuclear Weapons” signed by numerous leaders in medicine and public
health to Presidents Obama and Medvedev stating that the time was ripe to negotiate
a Nuclear Weapons Convention and take dramatic steps to fulfill our treaty obligations
to move towards complete nuclear disarmament. President Obama echoed these sentiments
in his extraordinary speech in Prague, stating “To put an end to Cold War
thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security
strategy and urge others to do the same,” … “We will seek to include
all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor.”
These were powerful
and welcome words from our President, followed by the tentative START agreement
reached with Medvedev calling for reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic
arsenals. Unfortunately, left off the table were other critical components necessary
for comprehensive moves towards nuclear disarmament, including ending destabilizing
missile “defense” programs such as those targeted for deployment in
Poland and the Czech republic, and taking nuclear missiles off “alert”
status so as to avoid the dangers of accidental nuclear war.
These initial,
limited moves towards setting a disarmament agenda have been met with vigorous
attacks from the Right, as exemplified by the report “U.S Nuclear Deterrence
in the 21st Century: Getting It Right” released in July by the New Deterrent
Working Group, in coordination with prominent editorials and op-eds in the Wall
Street Journal and elsewhere. The basic message has been that nuclear weapons
remain at the core of U.S. security and that the U.S. must continue to maintain
and strengthen its nuclear arsenal and avoid any substantive negotiations with
the Russians, including the minimal proposed START cuts.
These throwback
recommendations, so redolent of the “Team B” report of the late 1970s
that kicked-off the dangerous nuclear weapons policies of the Reagan Administration,
have unfortunately been reflected in recent Congressional efforts to constrain
the disarmament moves by Obama. Under an amendment inserted in the fiscal 2010
defense authorization bill, President Obama would be required to certify that
a new U.S.-Russian treaty includes no limits on U.S. deployments of missile defenses,
“space capabilities” or sophisticated conventional weaponry. In addition,
the president would have to certify that his fiscal 2011 budget request for the
National Nuclear Security Administration “sufficiently” funds nuclear
stockpile maintenance programs as well as efforts to “modernize and refurbish
the nuclear weapons complex.”
In other words, at a time when we are
in the midst of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, with
burgeoning unemployment and projected deficits looming on the order of $10 trillion,
coupled with the imperative need to provide the funding for universal healthcare
and preventing/mitigating the disastrous effects of climate change, we are called
on to continue to commit our increasingly scarce and precious resources to building
a new generation of nuclear weapons that can destroy human life more quickly in
the name of “security.”
We know we can do better. As outlined
by the 2006 “Weapons of Terror” report issued by the Weapons of Mass
Destruction Commission (chaired by former International Atomic Energy Agency Chief
Hans Blix), as well as the 2008 report “Towards True Security” by the
Union of Concerned Scientists, Federation of American Scientists, and Natural
Resources Defense Council, there are very simple, mutually reinforcing steps that
would allow significant nuclear stockpile reduction to the level of 1000 warheads
per nuclear power—and that would provide the basis for moving to PSR/IPPNW’s
goal of complete abolition of nuclear weapons. On this Nagasaki day, let us all
commit to redoubling our efforts to fight against the forces of rightwing realpolitik
and reclaim a vision of the world that will permit no repetition of the awful
events of August 1945, so that we can get on with our work of saving our planet
for renewed cycles of life and remembrance for all those fortunate to follow in
our wake.