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NUCLEAR
U.S. to ship plutonium to France without armed escort
Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up
Japan remembers the horror of Hiroshima
Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Three characters, no dialogue
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Peace Pilgrimmage arrives at Hiroshima
How can Japan preserve the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Hiroshima mayor chastises U.S. for developing small nukes
Hiroshima's Goal Is a Nuclear-Free World
Japan, NKorea may hold nuclear, kidnapping talks next week
Canada insists no decision on missile shield despite amending US pact
Canada opens door for missile shield
Bush Administration Slammed For Inaction on 'Loose Nukes'
Washington's Gift to Bomb Makers
You show yours, I'll hide mine
Bush's pointless treaty
History teaches that war policy is bankrupt
Battle Swirls on Security at A-Plants
MILITARY
Sudanese Suffer as Militias Hide in Plain Sight
Mass Killings Reported in Ivory Coast
Russian rail workers unearth World War II explosives
Central Asian, Russian militaries hold manouevres in Kyrgyzstan
Suit Accuses Halliburton of Fraud in Accounting
Radical Cleric in Iraq Sets Off Day of Fighting
Iraqi Cleric Urges Renewed Revolt
Fierce Gunbattles Rage for a Second Day in Iraq
Iraq set to use martial law in terror fight
Shia cleric urges truce in Iraq
Israeli Pullback in Gaza Met With Palestinian Rockets
Israel Reopens Border Crossing Between Egypt and Gaza
Uprooted trees, razed houses... Israel leaves its calling card in Gaza
Gaza's breadbasket left in ruins after Israel ends five-week offensive
Russia, irked by NATO enlargement, expels Lithuanian envoy
Pakistan, India discuss Siachen demilitarisation
India, Pakistan hold new round of talks on strategic Kashmir glacier
Pakistan Pressures Al Qaeda
Georgian Vows Peaceful Solution With Russia
Russia, irked by NATO enlargement, expels Lithuanian envoy
Sri Lanka's army spy chief seeks retirement amid controversy
Security Fears Are Slowing U.N. Return to Baghdad
UN Bureaucrats Angry Over Iraq's Refusal to Pay Dues
Copter-Borne Medics: Disciplined Ballet, Choreographed to Save G.I.'s
G.I. granddaddies: Vietnam vets bring jungle-tested grit to new tour
Corruption in the Corps?
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Besieged D.C. Both Resentful And Resigned
Passport ID Technology Has High Error Rate
Confusion Mounts Over Threat
Supporters question arrest of mosque leaders
Guantánamo Detainees Begin Hearings
Court: Stateless can be held indefinitely
US opens up Guantanamo tribunals for first time
U.S. Ties British Detainee to Terror Recruitment
2 Mosque Leaders Are Arrested in Plot to Import Missile and Kill Diplomat
N.Y. Home Searched In Anthrax Probe
Two Leaders of Mosque Arrested in Albany Sting
Iraqi Prison Abuse Not a Strategy, Officer Says
POLITICS
Senator Is Described as a Likely Source of Intelligence Leak
59 Years Later: The Legacy of Hiroshima
Whitewashing Hiroshima
At Journalist Convention, Bush Defends Terror-Threat Alert
Rumfeld: No way to stop all terrorism
Powell Denies Rift Over Iraq Invasion
ENERGY
Bioenergy Producers Compete for $150 Million in Subsidies
Sunny California Flirts With Million Solar Homes Proposal
California EPA wants to spur solar-home development
ACTIVISTS
Obituaries: Gloria Emerson, 75, who wrote about war and its victims
War Crimes Trial Victoria Square, ChCh Aug. 7
Peace pastor faces penalties for Iraq trip
Puerto Rican Kayakers Carry Enviro Message Against All Odds
-------- NUCLEAR
U.S. to ship plutonium to France without armed escort
(Kyodo News)
August 6, 2004
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=8&id=307797
WASHINGTON - The U.S. government plans to ship weapons-grade plutonium from disassembled Russian nuclear arms from the United States to France for reprocessing, but the vessels will not be escorted by warships, according to U.S. Energy Department documents obtained by Kyodo News on Thursday.
Anti-nuclear groups have expressed opposition and concern that the two vessels transporting 140 kilograms of high-purity plutonium across the Atlantic Ocean could be targeted by terrorists, even though they are armed. (Kyodo News)
-------- depleted uranium
Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up
GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death
By Carol Sterritt,
August 2004
Coastal Post
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01.htm
"There are only two things worth knowing in life, but I forget what they are."
John Hiatt, American songwriter
Now I remember what the two important things are. One is that the situation is dire. (And thus we need the artist and musician, the soul healer and the clown, more than ever.)
The other is that despite the horror of the day, there are people who are so brave and beautiful in both thought and action that one is moved to tears.
Look at the mindfulness of actions here in this county. For years, certain people in Marin have devoted a large portion of their lives to an outfit called the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition. Inside that group, some members are beginning a major work that could affect military service today and in the future when a draft might be instituted.
One such Peace and Justice member is Yvette Wakefield. For over eighteen months, she has examined the Depleted Uranium issue. A county employee, she has often read the inscription on the 20 North San Pedro Building. This inscription reads: "The mission of health and human services is to promote and protect the health, well-being, self-sufficiency and safety of all people in Marin."
Yvette could not reconcile what she learned about depleted uranium (DU) with the idea of health and human safety. For one thing, she had befriended Leuren Moret, a geoscientist who is now a world renowned authority on DU. Moret, who comes from a Quaker background, once worked at Livermore Labs. She now travels the world speaking out against the "omnicide" destructiveness of this material.
The Creation of A World Class Activist
How could someone like Moret, who once worked for the war industry, become a friend of a "peacenik," like Wakefield. Or for that matter, how could she herself become a peace activist? Well, back in 1991, Moret had a major realization. According to Moret, "In 1991 I became a whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San Francisco, CA. Richard Berta, the Western Regional Inspector for the Department of Energy, told me, "The Pentagon exists for the oil companies and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon."
The more Moret learned, the more she became convinced that research and work involving depleted uranium was immoral. Beginning in 1991, depleted uranium was used to support three policies: One, to test the radiobiological effects of 4th generation nuclear weapons (still under development); Two, to blur and break down the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons; Three, to make it easier to reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal.
While at her job at Livermore, Moret watched America wage a short and apparently victorious Gulf War. In just a few short weeks, and after only 110 American casualties, we routed Iraq from Kuwait. But the true toll of this war upon our young servicemen and women occurred over the next decade. Of the 700,000 troops who served in the region, 267,000 suffered from some form of disability. Not only that, but some soldiers "infected" their spouses with disabilities similar to their own. Or they suffered the tragedy of having a child born with birth defects. Some victory, huh?
At first, in its usual fashion, the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Pentagon simply denied that this was happening. Those men and women, who had been hale and hearty before their military service, were now branded "malingerers."
But internationally, other researchers spoke on record that these illnesses had nothing to do with malingering. Testimony from Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Former Chief of the Naval Staff, India reads, "DU weapons emit Alpha particle dose impacting a single cell from U-238 some 50 times the annual dose level. Cancer is initiated with one alpha particle, its daughter isotopes effect generations as the isotopes bio-concentrate in plants and animals. They then travel up the food chain. It is a nuclear weapon because the energy is derived from the nucleus of the atom. The particles enter the body through the lungs, the digestive system or breaks in the skin.
"One gram of DU releases more than 12,000 particles per second. The radiation slowly kills the cells that make life possible. The Gulf War syndrome of 1991 did just that (reported by Dr. Asaf Durakovic, Prof. of Medicine, Georgetown University, and discoverer of the Gulf War Syndrome.)"
Our military has lobbed more than 500 tons of DU munitions on Afghanistan. Professor Yagasaki has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the "atomicity equivalent to 83,000 Nagasaki bombs." This fact he presented to the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg in October 2003. The amount of DU used in Iraq in 2003 equals nearly 250,000 Nagasaki bombs. Just as the Gulf War vets and their families have been imperiled by their service in Gulf War I, those veterans about to return from the Iraq war will undoubtedly face similar consequences.
The Local FallOut
This is why Yvette Wakefield is concerned. Should Marin County expend the energy and funding to nurture its children with healthy baby clinics, education Kindergarten to twelfth grade, sports programs and parks and recreation, only to then hand our kids at age eighteen over to the military? And not just any military, but one that plans on dispatching its personnel to a killing field where they will, even if surviving the "normal" activities of the battlefield, come home to a life of infirmity, sickness and hospitalization? Wakefield has problems with this idea.
A trained paralegal, she began work on a County wide resolution that would proclaim the unacceptability of any Marin citizen serving in any area of the world where their health might forever be destroyed by DU.
Her working draft of this resolution reads: Therefore in view of those dangers posed by exposure to depleted uranium, Marin County requires that all Marin residents serving in the United States Armed Forces and its Reserves be prohibited from serving in those areas where depleted uranium weaponry is used. This is because we acknowledge that our residents should not be required to face the life-threatening and lifelong health problems of radiation poisoning. Their having faced the normal dangers of combat should be enough. Soldiers who survive their military service are entitled to return home to a normal life of working, having families and friends and engaging in normal activities.
She is now building a case for her resolution. She has set up a public forum on August 12, at 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church 9 Ross Valley Drive, San Rafael. Both Leuren Moret and Dennis Kyne will be speaking at the event. Their talk is titled "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War." Once people in Marin hear the truth of the DU deployment, and they realize the horrific consequences born by the populations in the Middle East and our soldiers, they can be counted on to be supporters of this County wide resolution.
Where DU Policies Came from, And Why They Continue
The use of depleted uranium can be traced back to certain Nixon-Kissinger era decisions. When our country was stymied by the 1973 oil embargo, Nixon remarked that we have to make sure that an oil embargo will never happen again. Perhaps he would have been stopped by the test ban treaty of 1963, signed by Russia and the United States, both super powers at that time. According to the treaty, nuclear war was outlawed. But one way for a nation to achieve sovereignty over another nation was and is to utilize depleted uranium weaponry. Although such weaponry will not necessarily offer up a mushroom cloud, the wake of its devastation can be as deadly. Thus a policy of using depleted uranium in weapons began. It first surfaced in the Arab-Israeli war, Fall 1973, when Israel received and used such weapons from the United States. It used these weapons under our country's supervision. (Never think for a moment that the Muslim nations hate us for our shopping centers and our democracy, our backyard swimming pools and our skyscrapers. They hate us for what we have done, and are doing, to them.)
The population-devastation politics of DU continues to this day. It is an effective policy. Witness what is occurring to the civilian population in Iraq. Following the Gulf War, birth defects and cancer cases rose exponentially. In one Baghdad hospital, which in pre-war days saw a single birth defect a week, there soon occurred three and four birth defective babies in a single day. (According to Moret, these defects are a deliberate contamination of the population.) For the past thirteen years, rare leukemias and bone cancers have been on the rise there. And of course, in the days of sanctions, the hospital supplies and equipment to help those affected were unavailable. Now, after the devastation of the "shock and awe" campaign of Spring, 2003, supplies are equally non-existent. Also, hospitals are now faced with the consequences of having only sporadic electricity and a lack of clean water. (The Bagdad population has survived the past winter by utilizing rainwater, collected in pots and pans put out on their roofs.)
The stories related to birth defects are heart-breaking. Some Iraqi babies are born with eyeballs the size of lemons protruding from their eye sockets. Some babies have no brains. Some babies are born without any skin. Some pregnancies, although carried close to full term, result in a birth of only a lump of flesh, with no discernable torso, limbs or head or facial features.
Our soldiers are coming home from our Middle East "adventures" with bodies pushed to the breaking point. On KPFA radio in June, it was revealed that of nine returning servicemen to New York City, six tested positive for unusually high levels of radioactivity in their bodies. Those with the highest levels already feel its effects. They are mind-numbingly tired; they have rashes, muscle aches and pains, and their nervous systems are impaired.
The Horrific Working of Pernicious Materials
These men were average soldiers in terms of their war experiences. But for certain soldiers, especially those who have survived the destruction of their tanks, the radiation diseases hit hard and heavy.
By its nature, DU is aerosolized when impacted by explosion. Also the metal components of DU-hardened tanks become a deadly, inhale-able radiation upon explosion. The men and women experiencing this first hand are unaware that every breath they take during these events is impacting their lungs and blood streams with nano-sized charged particles that begin the ruin of their health immediately.
Unlike the Japanese survivors of atomic blasts, who first felt radiation sickness within three days to a week, our soldiers can experience symptoms almost immediately. This is the result of the aerosol effects of the materials. The radioactive dust can be pulverized to the point that it is one hundred times smaller than bacteria. The particles go from the air to the lungs to the blood stream. They then end up attacking the body's mitochondria. The results range from multiple sclerosis type illnesses, to Parkinson's, to chemical sensitivities, and of course, at a somewhat later date, various cancers.
Our nation's youth will sacrifice their prime years to this devastation, wearing adult diapers, shuffling along with walkers, using oxygen tanks, and trying to live with blindness and hearing loss.
Meanwhile, our nation's policy shapers have big plans inside our country as well. In both Ohio and Kentucky, DU processing plants are underway. Both these areas have high unemployment rates. The local populace, desperate for work and a steady income, will have few qualms about what they are doing or why they are doing it. They will be told that the work is safe, and indeed it will seem so. There is no stench to uranium processing; the tiles and linoleum in the plants will no doubt be spotless. Those who recruit them will seem friendly and kind. The fact that the DU workers may have health problems five or ten years down the road is not a big matter for concern. After all, if you don't consider reality, how can it bother you?
I ask that if you are moved by this account of Depleted Uranium devastation, you make a commitment. Red circle the date of the public forum, August 12th, on your calendars. For further information, call 415 721 2844. The lives you save are your own. After all, the air a Baghdad housewife breathed in this morning can be in your lungs by tomorrow afternoon.
Public Forum "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War." 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church 9 Ross Valley Drive, San Rafael
-------- japan
Japan remembers the horror of Hiroshima
Around 140,000 people died from both direct and indirect fallout
Friday 06 August 2004,
AFP
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E5672DB8-C69A-4F71-BE6E-AE3B713D3064.htm
Atomic Bomb Dome, a preserved ruin of the 1945 bombing
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/E5672DB8-C69A-4F71-BE6E-AE3B713D3064/44755/D512B38D033D47D3A5C68B979C32827E.jpg
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/E5672DB8-C69A-4F71-BE6E-AE3B713D3064/44756/459F51A499F84EB1B84E8879AC44D0BF.jpg
The mayor of Hiroshima has slammed the United States for continuing to develop nuclear arms.
His criticism came on the 59th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing which killed tens of thousands of people in this Japanese city.
"The egocentric world view of the US government is reaching extremes," Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said on Friday at the ceremony held against the backdrop of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the preserved ruins of one of the few buildings not flattened by the blast.
Memorial ceremonies are being held to mark the 6 August 1945 second world war bombing by the US.
"Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law, the United States has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more usable," the mayor told 45,000 people at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
Chain of violence
Meanwhile, a chain of violence and retaliation around the world showed no sign of ending, he said.
"Reliance on violence-amplifying terror and North Korea, among others, buying into the worthless policy of 'nuclear insurance' are salient symbols of our times," he said.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi meanwhile pledged that Japan would stick to its post-1945 war-renouncing constitution.
As the clock clicked onto 8:15 am (2315 GMT Thursday), the exact time the US dropped the bomb codenamed Little Boy, those at the ceremony bowed their heads for a minute's silence in memory of victims of the attack.
Around 140,000 people - almost half the city's population of the time - died immediately or in the months after the dropping of the 20 kiloton atomic bomb, from radiation injuries or horrific burns.
During Friday's ceremony officials added to the existing toll the names of 5142 atomic bomb sufferers who died or were confirmed dead during the past year.
Cumulative toll
The additions brought the cumulative death toll associated with the effects of the bombing to 237,062.
The Hiroshima bombing was followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, leaving tens of thousands more dead.
The appalling loss of life among ordinary Japanese was credited with forcing Japan to surrender six days later, ending the second world war II in the Pacific theatre.
The mayor also declared the period from Friday to 9 August 2005 to be a year of "Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World", while calling on Americans to act as "a people of conscience".
The head of a group of survivors of the bombs said they were "boiling with anger" over global stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the spreading violence since the September 2001 attacks.
"We have a grave duty in today's critical situation ...," Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-Bomb Sufferers Organisations head Sunao Tsuboi said.
"We have to pass stories of our suffering from generation to generation and appeal more to the public about the terrible nature of nuclear weapons," he said.
----
Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by Anthony Gregory,
August 6, 2004
Future of Freedom Foundation
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408b.asp
The U.S. government has killed civilians for well over a century. During the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman waged war on civilians in Atlanta. During the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of 20th century, U.S. forces killed about 200,000 civilians, and even had a policy to shoot anyone more than 10 years old who dared to resist the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. During World War II, the Allies ruthlessly firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and other cities in Germany and Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent noncombatants.
But there was nevertheless something special about Hiroshima and its sequel of mass horror, Nagasaki.
People still defend Harry Truman's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on pragmatic grounds. Truman's defenders say that the bombings saved far more lives than they extinguished. They concede that the bombing was an act of targeting civilians, but insist that it was for the worthy goal of ending the war.
Before even examining the plausibility of this argument, we have to acknowledge the argument's essence. In effect, to rationalize the targeting of noncombatants as the best method of bringing about a greater good is to make excuses for state terrorism. Terrorism, if it means anything, is a method by which civilians are the targets of violence for the purpose of achieving political goals. Having Imperial Japan surrender, even if a worthy goal, was nevertheless a political one, and the targeting of innocents to achieve that goal was an act of terrorism.
Indeed, it was terrorism on an incredibly large scale. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese were instantaneously wiped off the earth on August 6 and August 9, 1945. Many more died in the following years from the radioactive climate left behind by the bombings.
So the questions remain: Was this a case where terrorism was justified? Can there be other circumstances where the overt targeting of civilians can be justified, so as to bring about a greater good?
In the case of Hiroshima, no substantive evidence exists that the bombing was "necessary" to make Japan surrender. In fact, the Japanese had already attempted to sue for peace in July and were only hesitant because they distrusted the terms of unconditional surrender that the Allies demanded. They specifically wanted to keep their emperor, which, after the atomic bombings, they were allowed to, anyway. The military estimated before Hiroshima that invasion would cost as many as 20,000 American lives, but not nearly the half million lives that Truman later claimed had been the estimate. Even without invasion, Japan was utterly defeated by the war and U.S. blockades prevented the island nation from getting the necessary food to survive, much less maintain any type of threat against America.
Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against civilians has not gone without criticism from the political and military elite of his time. Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, wrote in his book I Was There that using the "barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." He lamented that the U.S. government "had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages" and that he "was not taught to make war in that fashion." In 1963 Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." Although many Americans revere Truman and think he made the right decision, that was not the universal opinion among the top brass.
Why did the U.S government even develop such a ghastly weapon? The conventional history dictates that a reasonable fear of Hitler's acquiring nuclear bombs forced the U.S. government to develop them first. Albert Einstein wrote Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, and warned about Germany's potential development of nuclear weapons. Even the master physicist Einstein seemed to have no idea how potent and deadly the atom bomb could be, as he wrote:
A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
So Roosevelt, if he took Einstein's advice and assumed the worst, had good reason to worry about a Nazi nuclear weapons program. But this is not the whole story.
After Germany surrendered to the Allies, the Alsos Mission (American Science Intelligence Unit) dismantled the German nuclear effort in April 1945. In May, the Allies confirmed there had been no German atomic threat, but the Manhattan Project continued unabated.
The Manhattan Project employed 180,000 people who worked for several years with a clear mission and a $2 billion budget, whereas the German nuclear operation had nothing remotely near that manpower or level of organization. In fact, the scientists who had worked on Germany's nuclear program had believed as early as 1941 that the atomic bomb was virtually unattainable, and were stunned to see the "success" of the Hiroshima bombing.
We know this because in July 1945 the British brought the top ten scientists in Hitler's nuclear program to Farm Hall, near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Confined to a house until January 1946, the scientists were monitored and much of their dialogue was recorded and transcribed. The transcripts became declassified in 1992, and are now available in the books Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts and Hitler's Uranium Club, which present the British and American translations of the transcripts, respectively.
Hitler would have doubtless loved to have had the atom bomb, but from the Farm Hall transcripts it becomes clear that the German scientists had lacked the resources, personnel, and understanding to build it. Germany's most brilliant physicist, Werner Heisenberg, reacted with complete disbelief that the Allies achieved what the Germans never hoped to accomplish. Heisenberg did not fully understand the science that went into the isotope separation, had made arithmetic errors, and, upon hearing of Hiroshima, rightly conjectured that to pull it off the United States must have used tens of thousands of people - many times more than what the Germans had. The scientists pondered among themselves how the Allies had done it, even wondering which fissionable element had been used. At times, Heisenberg assumed the Allies were bluffing about Hiroshima.
Several of the scientists expressed horror at the Hiroshima bombing. Otto Hahn said, "I am thankful that we didn't succeed," and Max von Laue cried out, "The innocent!" Walther Gerlach expressed sorrow that the Germans had failed to do what the Allies had done, prompting Hahn to reply, "Are you upset we did not make the uranium bomb? I thank God on my bended knees we did not make the uranium bomb."
Heisenberg voiced a similar sentiment that we hear today: "One could equally say [the atomic bomb was] the quickest way of ending the war." Some have wondered if Heisenberg knew how to develop nuclear weapons, but sabotaged the Nazi program out of a sense of morality. We cannot be totally sure, but we do know that he insisted until his death that he had been completely clueless that the weapons could feasibly be made. We know that the Germans were light years from attaining them and that it took 180,000 people working on the Manhattan Project to develop them - and that the Allies continued the project even after they knew the Germans had never come close.
Truman has been quoted as saying, "The atom bomb was no 'great decision.'... It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness." He also called the bomb the "greatest achievement of organized science in history," and wondered aloud about how "atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace."
We cannot know whether Truman believed this or exactly why he chose to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some still insist that the president genuinely thought it was the least deadly way to end the war; others think that he was trying to intimidate Stalin or even prevent the USSR from invading and conquering Japan before the United States could.
But we do know that the bombings did accomplish a number of things. They ushered in a new era of warfare, in which targeting civilians became an acceptable strategy. The advent of the nuclear bomb brought on decades of Cold War between the U.S. and Russian superpowers, whose subjects lived in constant anxiety under the perennial threat of nuclear annihilation. It encouraged the Russians to accelerate their production of weapons of mass destruction. It further consolidated power in the executive branch of the U.S. government - what power even compares with the power to destroy so many lives at the push of a button? And it launched civilization toward the ultimate collectivism, whereby civilian lives became expendable fodder for the sufficiently empowered governments of the world. More than half the fatalities in World War II were civilian, and the apocalyptic finale of the war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically altered the formula for waging war, henceforth branding civilians as legitimate targets to achieve higher, collectivist purposes.
Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government has continued to treat civilians and combatants as roughly indistinguishable. During the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon carpet-bombed Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of peasants. The first Bush and Clinton administrations devastated the lives of Iraqi civilians, bombing civilian infrastructure and imposing UN sanctions with the express policy goal of destroying civilian water treatment facilities and starving the Iraqi people into submission, in hopes to incite them to rise up and overthrow Saddam.
On 60 Minutes in May 1996, Leslie Stahl asked Clinton's UN Ambassador, Madeline Albright, point blank: "We have heard that a half million children have died [from the sanctions]. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And - and you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
Perhaps there has never been a clearer case of a U.S. official rationalizing the targeting of countless foreign civilians in the context of what happened at Hiroshima. The precedent had been set, and what decades ago may have been considered an immeasurable but necessary evil to stop Imperial Japan has more recently been invoked as a proper way of dealing with as negligible a threat to the United States as Saddam Hussein.
Surely, Albright's words were well publicized in the Islamic world, where Muslims saw little concern whatever on the part of U.S. officials for the civilian lives of Middle Easterners, as long as expending such lives achieved "higher" policy goals. Reciprocally, Islamist terrorists have had little concern for American civilian lives in their quest to change U.S. policy.
Three years after Albright's frightening admission, Clinton went on to drop cluster bombs on Serbia, knowing full well that civilians would endure the most suffering. In regard to Gulf War II, the U.S. government has shown a complete apathy toward civilian dead in Iraq, refusing even to keep and publicize an accurate body count.
Some Americans have celebrated Hiroshima, as though it was a necessary end to the madness of World War II in which 50 million people lost their lives. They perceive the atomic bombings the way one might look at a peace treaty. Several years back, the Post Office even commemorated the event with a stamp depicting the image of the mushroom cloud that took hundreds of thousands of lives.
Instead, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered with solemn and thoughtful reflection as atrocities that reinforced collectivist attitudes toward war and sparked the beginning of a fearful era of cold and hot war with the United States and its proxies against the USSR and its proxies.
Instead of making excuses for past U.S. war crimes, we need to remember them for the great evils that they indeed were. We cannot undo history, but with determination, we might possibly prevent such horrendous crimes from ever again being done in our name. The worst way to guarantee a brighter future is to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and draw the lesson that sometimes the government needs to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians for the sake of humanity. Indeed, it is that conventional lesson that has helped solidify the United States in a state of perpetual war since the end of World War II, and that dangerously faulty lesson might still one day be invoked to facilitate such terror and atrocity that we can now hardly imagine.
Anthony Gregory is a writer and musician who lives in Berkeley, California. He earned his bachelor's degree in history at UC Berkeley, where he was president of the Cal Libertarians. He is an intern at the Independent Institute and has written for RationalReview.com, the Libertarian Enterprise, and LewRockwell.com. See his webpage, AnthonyGregory.com, for more articles and personal information. Send him email.
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In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Cultural Conditions of Unconditional Surrender
By DAVID PRICE
August 6, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/price08062004.html
Today's fifty-ninth anniversary of the United States' bombing of Hiroshima finds most Americans still satisfied that President Truman's decision to use the bomb was a difficult but necessary one designed to bring peace and save lives. It seems unlikely that many Americans will reconsider their positions on this issue. To some Hiroshima has become the paradigm of the very notion of "bombing for peace," and one's variance from this position tends to mark an individual as holding liberal or radical political tendencies. But a few days ago as I was reading through the papers of the late sinologist and cold warrior George Edward Taylor at the University of Washington I encountered some documents which reminded me that questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese civilians to end the Pacific War is not a position reserved for the contemporary left: even at the time of these bombings there were embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence community who viewed the use of these weapons as unnecessary folly.
George Taylor was a classic Twentieth Century international man of intrigue. He ran intelligence operations in Japanese occupied China, during World War Two served as Deputy Director for the Far East of the Office of War Information (OWI), later worked with Rand, State, other articulations of the Twentieth Century's revolving door of American intelligence agencies and universities. During World War Two Taylor brought anti-Communist sinologist Karl Wittfogel to the United States, after the war he helped establish a safe nest for then "useful" Nazi-collaborator Nicholas Poppe, and during the McCarthy era he betrayed his former friend Owen Lattimore before Senator McCarran's Internal Security Subcommittee. His support for the Vietnam War on the University of Washington campus marked him as a Nixonian reactionary. Taylor was a sort of Third Man who shape-shifted through the foreground and background of various Twentieth Century theatres of conflict-and his correspondence finds him holding court with the likes Henry Kissinger, Edward Lansdale and Harold Lasswell.
In 1996 I met Taylor at his spectacular penthouse home atop Seattle's Pill Hill-- overlooking the city and the Olympic and Cascade Mountains--to conduct a lengthy interview covering his contacts with Wittfogel, the McCarthy period and his years supervising a small army of anthropologists weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese at the Office of War Information (OWI) during the Second World War.
At OWI Taylor's team of social scientists studied Japanese culture and created cultural-specific propaganda-primarily leaflets dropped from airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. Because Taylor believed that an understanding of culture was vital to the success of his OWI team he recruited over a dozen anthropologists and other social scientists to work on his Japanese analysis and propaganda campaigns. Among other resources, Taylor's team had access to five-thousand diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers, and these heartfelt writings were used as important resources for voicing the OWI's successful propaganda efforts. Ruth Benedict's OWI work resulted in her post-war publication of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword which analyzed the culture and personality of the Japanese. Benedict's work focused on the role and importance of the Emperor in Japanese culture and reflected many of the institutional views of Taylor's OWI division.
When I interviewed Taylor I was surprised by his insistence that at the beginning of the war he viewed his psychological warfare programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing their surrender-however, as the war advanced and the American advantage became clear he came to see his job as being to convince U.S. civilian and military leaders that they did not have to engage in acts of genocidal annihilation to end the war. Racist stereotypes of maniacal Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death dominated the War Department and the White House, and Taylor and his staff increasingly strove to battle this domestic enemy as a prime deterrent of peace. It was with great difficulty that Taylor and his staff of anthropologists worked to convince civilian and military personnel that that Japanese were even culturally capable of surrender.
Taylor's papers contain numerous typewritten speeches capturing his efforts to convince U.S. military strategists that the Japanese could surrender. In one such undated speech (probably from 1944) he argued that, "If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for sixty men to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man."
But it was just this sort of reasoned analysis--arguing against the War Department's pull for a genocidal campaign to obliterate a "race" believed incapable of surrender--that was ignored by the War Department and White House. The OWI had little success in convincing President Roosevelt of the importance on not including the demise of the Japanese Emperor in America's demands for unconditional surrender, but as Taylor told Sharon Boswell in a 1996 interview "fortunately Roosevelt died and Truman came in."
Taylor maintained that Truman understood the OWI's insistence that surrender could be negotiated and he seemed to grasp the importance of exempting the Emperor from conditions of "unconditional" surrender. Taylor said that Truman authorized the OWI to communicate this to the Japanese. As Japan's war effort collapsed there was a growing interest in surrender.
A few days ago I found among Taylor's papers and correspondence some blurry photocopies of declassified intelligence reports from the codename "MAGIC-Diplomatic Summaries." These are translated Japanese diplomatic intercepts that were secretly being decoded and read by American military intelligence during the war. A May 11, 1945 MAGIC intercept supports the views of Taylor, others at the OWI, and elsewhere in military intelligence that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender:
"Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz: 'An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.'
Note [by U.S. military intelligence]: Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters."
This mention of "halfway honorable" terms of surrender was exactly why the anthropologists in Taylor's group had been focusing on the importance of the emperor in Japanese society. But such considerations were easily ignored by a War Department whose cost benefit calculations weighed the coming hundreds of thousands dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the balance of specifying the acceptable conditions that came to follow unconditional surrender.
Even more tragic is a July 20th MAGIC intercept in which Japanese Ambassador Sato advocated his desire for a Japanese surrender if the United States would assure him that the "Imperial House" would remain in existence. These MAGIC Documents are a sad testimony that in the days before the attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American intelligence had good evidence that Ambassador Sato was close to surrendering to the Americans. But neither the knowledge gleaned from these intercepts nor the general advice of social scientists at the OWI dissuaded American plans to unleash nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians.
Perhaps it is George Taylor's gloomy credentials as a hawk, a dangerously-anti-Communist-conservative, and as an intelligence insider that makes his voice such an intriguing one in the chorus of those questioning the necessity of Truman's deployment of the A-Bomb. While out of the A-Bomb decision making loop Taylor and others at the OWI knew Japan was ripe for (pseudo-unconditional) surrender. Like many others, Taylor later came to believe that Truman's decision to use of nuclear weapons had more to do with "scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union" than it did with saving the inflated estimates of American lives some argued would be lost in a Japanese invasion and occupation.
But beyond the obvious message sent to the Soviet's, Truman's decision to use his doomsday weapon (twice) without presenting the Japanese with the actual conditions of his unconditional surrender revealed elements of an important American post war trajectory-a trajectory of violence where American military force became the tool of preference selected over the promise of diplomacy.
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Three characters, no dialogue
August 6, 2004
Nation Institute
TomGram
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1666
[Note for Tomdispatchers: Good news! To the right of the main screen at www.tomdispatch.com, the site now has a Google search window. So if you put in "peak oil," "permanent bases," "Mike Davis," "Chalmers Johnson," "Rebecca Solnit," or anything else you might want to recover from Tomdispatch 2004, you'll find it immediately at hand.]
Here we are cycling for the 59th time since 1945 past August 6, the day the Earth stood still (to steal the title of a 1951 sci-fi film). Remembrance of August 6, Hiroshima Day, is receding even in Japan where the aging hibakusha or survivors of the blast are dying off. It never gained a place in the country that developed the Manhattan Project and made the first atomic weapons, loosing one over Hiroshima and another, three days later, over Nagasaki in those final weeks of World War II. As Justin McCurry of the British Guardian writes, "Almost six decades after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective horror at their consequences is being replaced by collective amnesia."
And yet, even though we in the U.S. hardly acknowledge August 6th and the weapons themselves have been swept into a larger, muddier catch-all category ("weapons of mass destruction"), the nuclear story refuses to go away. This is in part because our own nuclear arsenal remains at approximately 10,000 weapons; while the Bush administration continues to push for yet more research on ever newer generations of them, continues to threaten to settle nuclear proliferation questions unilaterally through "proliferation wars" of its choosing, and had no hesitation about scaring Congress or citizenry into the first of these by invoking the image of Iraqi mushroom clouds rising over American cities.
As if to offer its own version of a Hiroshima Day celebration, only last week the Bush administration reversed course and announced, according to the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer, that "it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear weapons materials... Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they said, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs."
At least, to look on the bright side, if some of those "materials" should fall into the hands of terrorists, this administration has a plan -- to save itself. With an extra $652 million in supplemental Armageddon funds last year and thanks to a Relocation Procedures and Support Handbook it's produced, notes Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, top Bush administration officials will be prepared to repair to Site R, the Raven Rock underground bunker that housed Vice President Dick Cheney after Sept. 11, with full instructions on what to bring:
"'Two complete changes of clothing,' as well as a combination lock, flashlight, two towels and a 'small box of washing powder.' The government will provide lodging, but it draws the line at detergent. Nor does the installation accommodate those who like a late dinner: Its dining facility, known as 'Granite Cove,' closes at 5 p.m."
As scholar Paul Boyer pointed out in By the Bomb's Early Light, a now-classic volume on the bomb's cultural fallout in the United States, Americans grasped the world-ending, species-endangering implications of atomic weapons almost instantly. Our most familiar images of nuclear holocaust entered our culture within weeks, or at most months, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and have now migrated to other world-ending scenarios -- whether of global warming or the arrival of random asteroids).
The bomb, as I argued in my Cold War history, The End of Victory Culture, turned upside down a reasonably sunny American triumphalist tale filled with mobilizing ambushes that led to victory. It was no-time before our leaders were warning of "nuclear Pearl Harbors." Of President Kennedy's terrifying televised Cuban Missile Crisis address to the nation ("We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth"), I wrote:
"Each step up the ladder of military 'preparedness' [in those years] ensured that against a nuclear Pearl Harbor there could be no defense. Planning for and fear of such a sneak attack was at the heart of nuclear strategy, of all those thoughts about 'the unthinkable.' With the possibility of a nuclear first strike, the ambush had escaped its familiar boundaries. Writ so large, it obliterated victory and sapped the last stand of all symbolic meaning. The president could no longer address the people after a "day of infamy"; he would have to do so beforehand [as Kennedy did]. ... Nothing could rally Americans for such a war. The mobilizing last stand had been replaced by a demobilizing one. After this Alamo, there would be no Texas; after this Little Big Horn, no Montana; after this Pearl Harbor, no Hawaii."
The dangers we're focused on have changed. We've now forgotten the Russians, though their arsenal remains almost as world-ending as ours and worry instead about stray missiles from North Koreans, nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, or an obliterating nuclear war in South Asia between India and Pakistan. But on this 49th post-August 6th, perhaps it's still worth thinking about those days at the end of a bitter global war when all of us were ushered into a new and frightening age that opened out for the first time in history on a potential landscape of species-ending destruction.
This -- a little personal tale of my own -- then is the first of at least three pieces touching on nuclear issues that I'll be posting between now and the end of next week. Tom
Hiroshima Story By Tom Engelhardt
Even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City "Ground Zero" -- once a term reserved for an atomic blast -- Americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the nuclear age they ushered in.
There can be no question that, as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted Cold War America. In those years, while the young watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into B-horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopping spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that grew into the tens of thousands of weapons.
When the Cold War finally ended with the Soviet Union's quite peaceful collapse, however, a nuclear "peace dividend" never quite arrived. The arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remained quietly in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission, while just beyond sight, the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini-cold wars.
In 1995, fifty years after that first bomb went off over the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the U.S. to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. Was August 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new age? The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, and a shattered school child's lunchbox from Hiroshima could not yet, it turned out, inhabit the same exhibit space at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
Today, while the Bush administration promotes a new generation of nuclear "bunker-busters" as the best means to fight future anti-proliferation wars, such once uniquely world-threatening weapons have had to join a jostling queue of world-ending possibilities in the dreams of our planet's young. Still, for people of a certain age like me, Hiroshima is where it all began. So on this August 6th, I would like to try, once again, to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell.
In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue. There is my father, who volunteered for the Army Air Corps at age thirty-five, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. Then there's me, growing up in a world in which my father's war was glorified everywhere, in which my play fantasies in any park included mowing down Japanese soldiers -- but my dreams were of nuclear destruction. Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me.
This is a story of multiple silences. The first of those, the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories I told myself. If anything, his silence enhanced them, since in the 1950s, male silence seemed a heroic attribute (and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way I imagined at the time). Sitting in the dark with him then at any World War II movie was enough for me.
As it turned out though, the only part of his war I possessed was its final act, and around this too, there grew up a puzzling silence. The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. Like other school children, I went through nuclear attack drills with sirens howling outside, while -- I had no doubt -- he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who watched the irradiated ants and nuclearized monsters of our teen-screen life stomp the Earth. It was I who went to the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour, where I was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties of the A-bombing, and to On the Beach to catch a glimpse of how the world might actually end. It was I who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams, felt its heat sear my arm before I awoke. Of all this I said not a word to him, nor he to me.
On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, "done things" that could not be discussed to "boys" he had known. Subsequent history -- the amicable American occupation of Japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally -- did not seem to touch him.
His hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because Japan was so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products); we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no Japanese people ever came to visit. Even the evil Japanese I saw in war movies, who might sneeringly hiss, "I was educated in your University of Southern California" before they met their suicidal fates were, I now know, regularly played by non-Japanese actors.
In the end, I followed my own path to Hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father so vehemently rejected. In 1979, as an editor, I published Unforgettable Fire, the drawings of Hiroshima residents who had lived through that day. It was, I suspect, the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage there made it into mainstream American culture. I visited Japan in 1982, thanks to the book's Japanese editor who took me to Hiroshima -- an experience I found myself unable to talk about on return. This, too, became part of the silences my father and I shared.
To make a story thus far, would seem relatively simple. Two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. It is the story we all know. And yet, there is my third character and third silence -- the Japanese boy who drifted into my consciousness after an absence of almost four decades only a few years ago. I no longer remember -- I can't even imagine -- how he and I were put in contact sometime in the mid-1950s. Like me, my Japanese pen-pal must have been eleven or twelve years old. If we exchanged photos, I have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. If I can remember half-jokingly writing my own address at that age ("New York City, New York, USA, Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe"), I can't remember writing his. I already knew by then that a place called Albany was the capital of New York State, but New York City still seemed to me the center of the world. In many ways, I wasn't wrong.
Even if he lived in Tokyo, my Japanese pen-pal could have had no such illusions. Like me, he had undoubtedly been born during World War II. Perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of Japan's charred cities. For him, that disastrous war would not have been a memory. If he had gone to the movies with his father in the 1950s, he might have seen Godzilla (not the U.S. Air Force) dismantle Tokyo and he might have hardly remembered those economically difficult first years of American occupation. But he could not at that time have imagined himself at the center of the universe.
I have a faint memory of the feel of his letters; a crinkly thinness undoubtedly meant to save infinitesimal amounts of weight (and so, money). We wrote, of course, in English, for much of the planet, if not the solar-system-galaxy-universe, was beginning to operate in that universal language which seemed to radiate from my home city to the world like the rays of the sun. But what I most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on (or in) his letters. For I was, with my father, an avid stamp collector. On Sunday afternoons, my father and I prepared and mounted our stamps, consulted our Scott's Catalog, and pasted them in. In this way, the Japanese section of our album was filled with that boy's offerings; without comment, but also without protest from my father.
We exchanged letters -- none of which remain -- for a year or two and then who knows what interest of mine (or his) overcame us; perhaps only the resistance boys can have to writing letters. In any case, he, too, entered a realm of silence. Only now, remembering those quiet moments of closeness when my father and I worked on our albums, do I note that he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. He existed for both of us, perhaps, in the ambiguous space that silence can create. And now I wonder sometimes what kinds of nuclear dreams my father may have had.
For all of us in a sense, the Earth was knocked off its axis on August 6, 1945. In that one moment, my father's war ended and my war -- the Cold War -- began. But in my terms, it seems so much messier than that. For we, and that boy, continued to live in the same world together for a long time, accepting and embroidering each other's silences.
The bomb still runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current -- a secret unity -- through our lives. The rent it tore in history was deep and the generational divide, given the experiences of those growing up on either side of it, profound. But any story would also have to hold the ways, even deeper and harder to fathom, in which we lived through it all together in pain, hatred, love, and most of all silence.
In this fifty-ninth year after Hiroshima, a year charged with no special meaning, perhaps we will think a little about the stories we can't tell, and about the subterranean stream of emotional horror that unites us, that won't go away whether, as in 1995, we try to exhibit the Enola Gay as a glorious icon or bury it deep in the Earth with a stake through its metallic heart. For my particular story, the one I've never quite been able to tell, there is a Japanese boy who should not have been, but briefly was, with us; who perhaps lives today with his own memories of very different silences. When I think of him now, when I realize that he, my father, and I still can't inhabit the same story except in silence, a strange kind of emotion rushes up in me, which is hard to explain.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of the American Empire Project (www.americanempireproject.com) and consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism and the Cold War, and coeditor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 6, 2004
by Ralph Raico <mailto:rraico@earthlink.net>
a senior scholar of the Mises Institute
http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html
This excerpt from Ralph Raico's "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution in John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001), is reprinted with permission. (The notes are numbered as they are because this is an excerpt. Read the whole article.)
The most spectacular episode of Truman's presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.87
Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded, testily:
Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.88
Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."89
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.
On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city - and escaped serious damage."90 The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn't like the idea of killing "all those kids."91 Wiping out another one hundred thousand people . . . all those kids.
Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command's list of the 33 primary targets.92
Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.93 The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll - nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War - is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."94
Still, Truman's multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.95 Otherwise, Americans - and the rest of the world - might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.96 The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's own chief of staff, was typical:
the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.97
The political elite implicated in the atomic bombings feared a backlash that would aid and abet the rebirth of horrid prewar "isolationism." Apologias were rushed into print, lest public disgust at the sickening war crime result in erosion of enthusiasm for the globalist project.98 No need to worry. A sea-change had taken place in the attitudes of the American people. Then and ever after, all surveys have shown that the great majority supported Truman, believing that the bombs were required to end the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, or more likely, not really caring one way or the other.
Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis - innocent Japanese lives balanced against the lives of Allied servicemen - might reflect on the judgment of the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of moral rules.99 When, in June 1956, Truman was awarded an honorary degree by her university, Oxford, Anscombe protested.100 Truman was a war criminal, she contended, for what is the difference between the U.S. government massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?
Anscombe's point is worth following up. Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children? Yet how is that different from the atomic bombings?
By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote: "It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil."101
That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference, and, with Churchill's enthusiastic concurrence, it became the Allied shibboleth. After prolonging the war in Europe, it did its work in the Pacific. At the Potsdam conference, in July 1945, Truman issued a proclamation to the Japanese, threatening them with the "utter devastation" of their homeland unless they surrendered unconditionally. Among the Allied terms, to which "there are no alternatives," was that there be "eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest [sic]." "Stern justice," the proclamation warned, "would be meted out to all war criminals."102
To the Japanese, this meant that the emperor - regarded by them to be divine, the direct descendent of the goddess of the sun - would certainly be dethroned and probably put on trial as a war criminal and hanged, perhaps in front of his palace.103 It was not, in fact, the U.S. intention to dethrone or punish the emperor. But this implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to the Japanese. In the end, after Nagasaki, Washington acceded to the Japanese desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.
For months before, Truman had been pressed to clarify the U.S. position by many high officials within the administration, and outside of it, as well. In May 1945, at the president's request, Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum stressing the urgent need to end the war as soon as possible. The Japanese should be informed that we would in no way interfere with the emperor or their chosen form of government. He even raised the possibility that, as part of the terms, Japan might be allowed to hold on to Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea. After meeting with Truman, Hoover dined with Taft and other Republican leaders, and outlined his proposals.104
Establishment writers on World War II often like to deal in lurid speculations. For instance: if the United States had not entered the war, then Hitler would have "conquered the world" (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasn't it Japan that was trying to "conquer the world"?) and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in this case: assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do - through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the worst - that the Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part of their empire, say, Korea and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it is quite possible that Japan would have been in a position to prevent the Communists from coming to power in China. And that could have meant that the thirty or forty million deaths now attributed to the Maoist regime would not have occurred.
But even remaining within the limits of feasible diplomacy in 1945, it is clear that Truman in no way exhausted the possibilities of ending the war without recourse to the atomic bomb. The Japanese were not informed that they would be the victims of by far the most lethal weapon ever invented (one with "more than two thousand times the blast power of the British 'Grand Slam,' which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare," as Truman boasted in his announcement of the Hiroshima attack). Nor were they told that the Soviet Union was set to declare war on Japan, an event that shocked some in Tokyo more than the bombings.105 Pleas by some of the scientists involved in the project to demonstrate the power of the bomb in some uninhabited or evacuated area were rebuffed. All that mattered was to formally preserve the unconditional surrender formula and save the servicemen's lives that might have been lost in the effort to enforce it. Yet, as Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the century's great military historians, wrote in connection with the atomic bombings:
Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.106
Isn't this obviously true? And isn't this the reason that rational and humane men, over generations, developed rules of warfare in the first place?
While the mass media parroted the government line in praising the atomic incinerations, prominent conservatives denounced them as unspeakable war crimes. Felix Morley, constitutional scholar and one of the founders of Human Events, drew attention to the horror of Hiroshima, including the "thousands of children trapped in the thirty-three schools that were destroyed." He called on his compatriots to atone for what had been done in their name, and proposed that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as Germans were sent to witness what had been done in the Nazi camps. The Paulist priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another stalwart of the Old Right, castigated the bombings as "the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law." David Lawrence, conservative owner of U.S. News and World Report, continued to denounce them for years.107 The distinguished conservative philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by
the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . . pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Weaver considered such atrocities as deeply "inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built."108
Today, self-styled conservatives slander as "anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Truman's massacre of so many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents from the air. This shows as well as anything the difference between today's "conservatives" and those who once deserved the name.
Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:
If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.109
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.
Notes
87. On the atomic bombings, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); and idem, "Was Harry Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?" Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29, no. 2 (June 1998); also Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Vintage, 1977); and Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
88. Alperovitz, Decision, p. 563. Truman added: "When you deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true." For similar statements by Truman, see ibid., p. 564. Alperovitz's monumental work is the end-product of four decades of study of the atomic bombings and is indispensable for comprehending the often complex argumentation on the issue.
89. Ibid., p. 521.
90. Ibid., p. 523.
91. Barton J. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 257. General Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. strategic bombing operations in the Pacific, was so shaken by the destruction at Hiroshima that he telephoned his superiors in Washington, proposing that the next bomb be dropped on a less populated area, so that it "would not be as devastating to the city and the people." His suggestion was rejected. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 147-48.
92. This is true also of Nagasaki.
93. See Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (June-July 1986): 38-40; and idem, "Wrong Numbers," The Independent Monthly (July 1995): 41-44.
94. J. Samuel Walker, "History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 320, 323-25. Walker details the frantic evasions of Truman's biographer, David McCullough, when confronted with the unambiguous record.
95. Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 299. On the fate of the bombings' victims and the public's restricted knowledge of them, see John W. Dower, "The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," in ibid., pp. 275-95.
96. Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 320-65. On MacArthur and Eisenhower, see ibid., pp. 352 and 355-56.
97. William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 441. Leahy compared the use of the atomic bomb to the treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan, and termed it "not worthy of Christian man." Ibid., p. 442. Curiously, Truman himself supplied the foreword to Leahy's book. In a private letter written just before he left the White House, Truman referred to the use of the atomic bomb as "murder," stating that the bomb "is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them wholesale." Barton J. Bernstein, "Origins of the U.S. Biological Warfare Program," Preventing a Biological Arms Race, Susan Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 9.
98. Barton J. Bernstein, "Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 35-72.
99. One writer in no way troubled by the sacrifice of innocent Japanese to save Allied servicemen - indeed, just to save him - is Paul Fussell; see his Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988). The reason for Fussell's little Te Deum is, as he states, that he was among those scheduled to take part in the invasion of Japan, and might very well have been killed. It is a mystery why Fussell takes out his easily understandable terror, rather unchivalrously, on Japanese women and children instead of on the men in Washington who conscripted him to fight in the Pacific in the first place.
100. G.E.M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman's Degree," in idem, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 62-71.
101. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman's Degree," p. 62.
102. Hans Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur S. Smith, Jr., eds., World War II: Policy and Strategy. Selected Documents with Commentary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1979), pp. 345-46.
103. For some Japanese leaders, another reason for keeping the emperor was as a bulwark against a possible postwar communist takeover. See also Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 236: "the [Potsdam] proclamation offered the military die-hards in the Japanese government more ammunition to continue the war than it offered their opponents to end it."
104. Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 44-45.
105. Cf. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 254: "it does seem very likely, though certainly not definite, that a synergistic combination of guaranteeing the emperor, awaiting Soviet entry, and continuing the siege strategy would have ended the war in time to avoid the November invasion." Bernstein, an excellent and scrupulously objective scholar, nonetheless disagrees with Alperovitz and the revisionist school on several key points.
106. J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939-45: A Strategical and Tactical History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 392. Fuller, who was similarly scathing on the terror-bombing of the German cities, characterized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "a type of war that would have disgraced Tamerlane." Cf. Barton J. Bernstein, who concludes, in "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 235:
In 1945, American leaders were not seeking to avoid the use of the A-bomb. Its use did not create ethical or political problems for them. Thus, they easily rejected or never considered most of the so-called alternatives to the bomb.
107. Felix Morley, "The Return to Nothingness," Human Events (August 29, 1945) reprinted in Hiroshima's Shadow, Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. (Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteer's Press, 1998), pp. 272-74; James Martin Gillis, "Nothing But Nihilism," The Catholic World, September 1945, reprinted in ibid., pp. 278-80; Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 438-40.
108. Richard M. Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," in idem, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 98-99.
109. Wainstock, Decision, p. 122.
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Peace Pilgrimmage arrives at Hiroshima
Melbourne Indymedia
06/08/2004
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/archives/archive_by_id.php?id=9247&category_id=13
After eight months and 4500 km of walking on the long road from Roxby Downs, the International Peace Pilgrimage (IPP) will arrive at Hiroshima Peace Park. The walk will join the commemorations at the Atomic Dome, to remember the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the atomic bomb on this day in 1945, and acknowledge the millions of others who continue to be affected by the nuclear industry globally.
August 6, 59 years since the devastation of the 'little boy' atomic bomb was wrought on Hiroshima, the nuclear machine continues to create new tragedies and invent new horrors. The message from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is "NO MORE HIBAKUSHA". In Melbourne members of several anti-war and environmental groups assembled with others at Federation Square from 7.30am this morning to mark the 59th anniversary of the droppng of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.
At 8.15am August 6, 1945, a nuclear bomb was exploded 500 metres above the city of Hiroshima. It is estimated 140,000 people, mainly women, old men and children, died directly and in the few months after the bomb exploded. It's effects can still be seen in the survivors and their descendants today. Historical research shows the use of nuclear weapons could have been avoided, with far less loss of life on both sides, if diplomatic alternatives had been properly pursued. The USA continues to use nuclear weapons of mass destruction, as in depleted uranium munitions used in Iraq.
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How can Japan preserve the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Sachie Kanda
Japan Today
August 6, 2004
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=popvox&id=504
SachikoTashiwazaki, 23
"I actually saw some special TV programs about the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversary this week. I can see some media are working on this issue. However, a friend of mine said, 'I'm sick of these programs.' Many young Japanese people are not interested in what happened 59 years ago. We've got to change this attitude. We should watch more documentaries on the war and listen to stories of A-bomb survivors without being sick of hearing of them. It is very important to create such programs and stories as a personal matter, realizing that it is something that could happen to you and your family."
Takumi Miyaza, 22
"The best way to be more aware of the war is to go to Korea and China. We need to learn more about their feelings toward Japan. I think the news we saw the other day about the Chinese soccer fans booing the Japanese team is a good example of unresolved issues. There is still deep-rooted anti-Japanese sentiment in those countries. We do not often see that kind of feeling expressed by Chinese in Japan so much. However, I believe that we can also find something important in the hearts of Chinese and Korean people that many Japanese people have forgotten about."
Hitoshi Shimamura, 28
"When Japanese people hear what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they can feel sorry for them and show great sympathy. But when they look at things like America's use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq, they also have to see that this is similar to what Japan experienced. I guess not many Japanese people even know about this issue. Therefore, I want more Japanese to take part in peace activities, support war victims and listen to their experiences that they actually do not want to reveal. When you hear those stories and how people's entire lives were destroyed and debased, you will feel something more than sorrow."
Shizuku Miura, 20
"I don't think we have forgotten about the A-bombs. Many Japanese know war is never the way to solve anything, and do not want to see any more war victims. People often say that young Japanese people don't know about the war because we haven't experienced such fear. However, you don't need to have experienced war to understand it. What's more important is to be more aware of the faulty notions that lead to war. By remembering that there was a war 60 years ago and that atomic bombs were dropped, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remain etched in our minds, and ensure that Japan will never embrace war. Otherwise we can't say we love peace."
Adachi, 30
"Since today's parents are not aware of the importance of preserving the memory of the A-bomb, there should be more movies related to the atomic bombings and exhibitions of war objects, photos, diaries and journals everywhere in Japan. That is the best way to touch ordinary people who have no war experience. When I was an elementary school student, I saw a cartoon movie called "Picadon" at school. That was the most horrible movie I ever saw. The illustrations were excessively realistic and made many students so sick they couldn't eat lunch. It may sound too harsh for small children, but I strongly think that such education will lead our children to learn what is good and bad."
Natsuko, 31
"Reminding us of the importance of the A-bomb is actually rather depressing especially when we hear horrible news everyday regarding the war. However, learning about what Japan did wrong which eventually led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is valuable. The Japanese government should acknowledge the truth of our own mistakes and reeducate us again."
Tetsu Kamuro, 34
"War is not only the A-bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. War is always happening somewhere in the world everyday. If the media could report timely news with details such as the use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq, we would still be more aware of the present cruelty of war and human beings. We need to move on from what happened nearly 60 years ago. We should stop feeling sorry only for ourselves now because our experience is a global experience. It is time for Japan to pay more attention to the world, so please report more on current conflicts." Yoshimoto Seki, 36
"I've been doing research on nuclear power plants and I often see how politicians do not use their position to preserve the memory of the A-bomb and strive for peace. Every year on Aug 6, the mayor of Hiroshima gives a peace declaration. The current mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, speaks very well on this subject and I personally like him very much. However, I want to tell him one thing. It's fine to speak out against war and nuclear weapons, but he also needs to talk about the hazardous nature of nuclear power plants when everyone all over the world is watching him. He could explain how much nuclear power plants have been damaging the environment and how they could eventually be used as a source for a bomb. Last year, TEPCO said we might have a power shortage due to the shutdown of some nuclear power plants, but that didn't eventuate. That is because they used a natural power plant that can produce as much power as a nuclear power plant does. However, the government has a vested economic interest in nuclear power plants. So do local economies. When a nuclear power plant was being built in Niigata, the small town flourished as construction workers went to bars and nightclubs every night. Once the plant was completed, they left the town. So the local government offered to host another TEPCO plant. There are many stories like that. I think those people really need to learn about the war. When the memory of Chernobyl - which happened in 1986 - is fading, how could the A-bombings of 60 years ago stay in our minds? Without experience, people learn nothing. Today's young people have never even heard of Chernobyl. We've got to show more cruel scenes of the war. People can grow by confronting death. That will influence how we live."
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Hiroshima mayor chastises U.S. for developing small nukes
Friday, August 06, 2004
By Eriko Sugita,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-06/s_26412.asp
HIROSHIMA, Japan - The mayor of Hiroshima rebuked Washington on Friday - the 59th anniversary of his city's atomic bombing by the United States - for wanting to develop small nuclear weapons that he feared would be easier to use.
Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba made the remarks at a ceremony attended by about 40,000 people, including Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi plus survivors and relatives of victims of the world's first atomic attack.
"The egocentric world view of the U.S. government is reaching extremes," Akiba told the annual memorial ceremony at the city's Peace Park, near where the bomb was dropped.
"Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law, the U.S. has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more 'usable'."
The Peace Bell was tolled at 8:15 a.m. - the moment a U.S. warplane dropped the bomb on August 6, 1945 and destroyed the city - and there was a minute of silence.
"The morning of August 6, 59 years ago, was just another summer morning, but a single atomic bomb changed it into a morning that humankind will never forget," 11-year-old Koya Yurino told the assembly.
Paper cranes symbolizing peace were draped around the park and incense burned on prayer altars as Akiba placed three books containing the names of the bomb's victims under the park's arch-shaped cenotaph.
The names of 5,142 people who died recently were added to the list of victims, bringing the total number recognized by the city to 237,062. A few thousand names are added each year.
The bomb had killed some 140,000 people by the end of 1945, out of Hiroshima's estimated population of 350,000. Thousands more succumbed to illness and injuries later.
The southwestern city of Nagasaki was bombed three days after Hiroshima, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.
Changing Attitudes
Japan, where people are raised on stories of the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been staunchly pacifist and anti-nuclear since its defeat, and its postwar constitution renounces the right to go to war.
But with the average age of Hiroshima's survivors now well over 70, there are signs that support for the country to assume a greater global military role is growing.
Even talk of becoming a nuclear power is no longer taboo.
However, Koizumi repeated a pledge that Japan - the only nation to suffer an atomic attack - would work for nuclear disarmament.
"We will maintain the pacifist constitution under our strong resolve to never again repeat the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he said at the ceremony.
Under Koizumi, Japan has passed a law allowing its military to participate in the rebuilding of Iraq and has sent 550 soldiers to Iraq in its largest post-war dispatch of troops.
Koizumi's ruling party and the largest opposition party are both working on drafts to revise the constitution, whose Article Nine renounces war as a means of settling international disputes.
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Hiroshima's Goal Is a Nuclear-Free World
By Tadatoshi Akiba,
Mayor, The City of Hiroshima
August 6, 2004
(ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-06-insaki.asp
HIROSHIMA, Japan - "Nothing will grow for 75 years." Fifty-nine years have passed since the August sixth when Hiroshima was so thoroughly obliterated that many succumbed to such doom. Dozens of corpses still bearing the agony of that day, souls torn abruptly from their loved ones and their hopes for the future, have recently re-surfaced on Ninoshima Island, warning us to beware the utter inhumanity of the atomic bombing and the gruesome horror of war.
Mayor of Hiroshima Tadatoshi Akiba (Photo courtesy Office of the Mayor) Unfortunately, the human race still lacks both a lexicon capable of fully expressing that disaster and sufficient imagination to fill the gap. Thus, most of us float idly in the current of the day, clouding with self-indulgence the lens of reason through which we should be studying the future, blithely turning our backs on the courageous few.
As a result, the egocentric worldview of the U.S. government is reaching extremes. Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law, the U.S. has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more "usable."
Elsewhere, the chains of violence and retaliation know no end: reliance on violence-amplifying terror and North Korea, among others, buying into the worthless policy of "nuclear insurance" are salient symbols of our times.
We must perceive and tackle this human crisis within the context of human history. In the year leading up to the 60th anniversary, which begins a new cycle of rhythms in the interwoven fabric that binds humankind and nature, we must return to our point of departure, the unprecedented A-bomb experience. In the coming year, we must sow the seeds of new hope and cultivate a strong future-oriented movement.
To that end, the city of Hiroshima, along with the Mayors for Peace and our 611 member cities in 109 countries and regions, hereby declares the period beginning today and lasting until August 9, 2005, to be a Year of Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World.
Our goal is to bring forth a beautiful "flower" for the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings, namely, the total elimination of all nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth by the year 2020. Only then will we have truly resurrected hope for life on this "nothing will grow" planet.
The seeds we sow today will sprout in May 2005. At the Review Conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to be held in New York, the Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons will bring together cities, citizens, and NGOs from around the world to work with like-minded nations toward adoption of an action program that incorporates, as an interim goal, the signing in 2010 of a Nuclear Weapons Convention to serve as the framework for eliminating nuclear weapons by 2020.
Around the world, this Emergency Campaign is generating waves of support. This past February, the European Parliament passed by overwhelming majority a resolution specifically supporting the Mayors for Peace campaign. At its general assembly in June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing 1183 U.S. cities, passed by acclamation an even stronger resolution.
We anticipate that Americans, a people of conscience, will follow the lead of their mayors and form the mainstream of support for the Emergency Campaign as an expression of their love for humanity and desire to discharge their duty as the lone superpower to eliminate nuclear weapons.
We are striving to communicate the message of the hibakusha around the world and promote the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study Course to ensure, especially, that future generations will understand the inhumanity of nuclear weapons and the cruelty of war. In addition, during the coming year, we will implement a project that will mobilize adults to read eyewitness accounts of the atomic bombings to children everywhere.
The Japanese government, as our representative, should defend the Peace Constitution, of which all Japanese should be proud, and work diligently to rectify the trend toward open acceptance of war and nuclear weapons increasingly prevalent at home and abroad.
We demand that our government act on its obligation as the only A-bombed nation and become the world leader for nuclear weapons abolition, generating an anti-nuclear tsunami by fully and enthusiastically supporting the Emergency Campaign led by the Mayors for Peace. We further demand more generous relief measures to meet the needs of our aging hibakusha, including those living overseas and those exposed in black rain areas.
Rekindling the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we pledge to do everything in our power during the coming year to ensure that the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings will see a budding of hope for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. We humbly offer this pledge for the peaceful repose of all atomic bomb victims.
-------- korea
Japan, NKorea may hold nuclear, kidnapping talks next week: official
TOKYO (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806085307.czoo9ny8.html
Japanese and North Korean officials may hold working-level talks as early as next week to discuss nuclear issues and Japanese kidnapped by Pyongyang, Japan's top government spokesman said Friday.
"The both parties have indicated their willingness to hold a meeting as early as next week," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a regular press conference.
"We have yet to finalise our discussions," over scheduling the meeting, he said.
He was responding to media reports which said officials from Tokyo and Pyongyang would meet in Beijing next Wednesday and Thursday.
Japanese officials were expecting to receive a status report on North Korea's re-investigation of the fate of 10 Japanese nationals who were kidnapped by North Korean agents and whom Pyongyang has said are dead, Kyodo News said.
The Beijing meeting would also be an opportunity to discuss North Korea's nuclear programs, major media said.
Hosoda's comment came a day after the Japanese cabinet approved the first food aid to North Korea in nearly four years, set to be delivered to the impoverished Stalinist state later this year.
The 125,000 tons of food is to be delivered through the World Food Program while seven million dollars' worth of medical supplies will be handled by the UN Children's Fund UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The aid package worth some 47 million dollars is the first tranche of assistance promised to the North in May during a summit between Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang.
-------- missile defense
Canada insists no decision on missile shield despite amending US pact
OTTAWA (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040805224153.zg5ov2h2.html
Canada insisted Thursday that it had not covertly signed up to the US plan for a missile defense shield -- despite agreeing to extend joint air defense arrangements with Washington to facilitate the scheme.
Ministers said Canada had yet to decide whether to join the national missile defence system, which emerged as a political hot potato during the country's recent general election campaign.
The United States and Canada earlier announced they had extended the North American Aerospace Defense Command aerospace warning function to support missile defense.
The deal allows the command, known as NORAD, information on incoming missiles to be used by the future US missile defense program.
Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew said it made "good sense to amend the agreement so that this essential NORAD function can be preserved and Canada can continue to benefit from the security it provides to our citizens."
"This amendment safeguards and sustains NORAD regardless of what decision the government of Canada eventually takes on ballistic missile defense."
Defense Minister Bill Graham told reporters the move did not "affect or in any way determine the ultimate decision as to whether Canada will participate in missile defense."
Washington, keen to press on with constructing the missile defense system, a key plank of the Bush administration's defense policy, has been pressing Canada for a decision for over a year.
But the Canadian government has had to walk a political tightrope on the issue.
Advocates of the scheme say a decision not to take part would badly damage the country's prestige and make Canada largely irrelevant in the defense of its own continent.
But ministers realise that the scheme is highly unpopular in Canada, as is the Bush administration which is building it.
Ministers have relied on the tortuous position that they oppose any system that involves the "weaponization of space" -- a position observers say does not rule out current US plans for missile defense.
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Washington looked forward to "continuing this longstanding defense cooperation" through NORAD.
The new deal "formally assigns" to NORAD the responsibility for providing the threat information under the missile defense mission, Boucher said.
Missile defense meanwhile thrust itself to the top of Secretary of State Colin Powell's agenda.
Powell was due to leave the US capital early Friday for a one-day trip to Greenland to sign a series of pacts intended to modernize a US military base which will support the missile defense program.
He will meet Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller and Greenland Deputy Premier Josef Motzfeldt to sign agrrements paving the way for an upgrade of radar facilities at Thule Air Base which will support the US missile defense program.
Thule served as a key listening post during the Cold War and is now considered essential to US missile defense plans.
As compensation to Greenland, where there was much opposition to the modernization and expansion plans, Copenhagen and Washington are to renew a 1951 treaty with Greenland recognizing it as an autonomous Danish territory.
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Canada opens door for missile shield
By DREW FAGAN
Aug 06, 2004
Toronto Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040805.wxdnd0806/BNStory/National/
Canada and the United States have expanded military co-operation in a possible precursor to Ottawa joining the U.S. missile-defence program, though Defence Minister Bill Graham insisted Thursday that the Liberal government remains "a long way" from deciding whether to take that major step.
In an announcement that had been widely expected for weeks, Mr. Graham confirmed that the role of NORAD - the joint Canada-U.S. military organization with headquarters in Colorado - now includes transmitting radar and satellite monitoring to the U.S. command responsible for the missile-defence system.
Mr. Graham characterized this not as an inevitable step toward Canada's participation in the missile shield, but as a necessary step toward preserving the possibility that Canada can participate if it so chooses, with NORAD playing a central role. Ottawa is expected to make its decision this fall. "We're keeping all options open, the option both not to go in and the option possibly to go in," he said. "This does not have to be an incremental step to anything."
The first missile under the Bush administration plan was installed in Alaska a couple of weeks ago, but the controversial system, which has been plagued by technical glitches and delays, will not be operational until more tests are completed. The U.S. government plans to have about 10 interceptor rockets deployed by the end of the year at sites in Alaska and California.
North Korea is commonly cited by Bush administration officials as posing a potential threat of launching intercontinental missiles at North America. It tested a new, longer-range ballistic missile last week, though its range of about 4,000 kilometres is far short of being capable of crossing the Pacific.
The Americans would prefer to integrate missile defence into the existing North American Aerospace Defence Command, with the kind of Canadian participation that Canada now has within NORAD, such as having a Canadian hold the deputy commander post.
But if Canada balked, missile defence would be maintained under sole U.S. command, making NORAD increasingly marginal to the defence of North America.
Thursday's announcement, government officials said, was integral to protecting NORAD. Had Canada not agreed to the sharing of NORAD's radar and satellite information with U.S. Northcom, which is responsible for missile defence, Washington would have bypassed NORAD and set up a parallel system to monitor aerospace.
"My own view is that...the role of NORAD will probably be expanded over the years," Mr. Graham said. "What this does is preserve NORAD."
The Globe and Mail reported in late April that the Martin government had quietly made it known to Washington that it agreed to what it announced Thursday, but this was later denied by government officials who did admit then that Ottawa was "positively inclined" to take this step.
But Thursday's move remains simply the opening act, followed by deciding whether to join missile defence.
Prime Minister Paul Martin advocated this before taking office last December, but he has been much more cautious since. He sidestepped the issue during the election, and Liberal sensitivity about being viewed as becoming cozier with the Bush administration likely will only be exacerbated by the party's minority-government status.
The government could sign on to missile defence without seeking Commons approval, though the government did promise Thursday parliamentary "input" on the issue.
Conservative defence critic Gordon O'Connor called for a full debate when Parliament resumes in early October and a vote on any missile-defence deal.
He characterized Thursday's announcement as a "first step" toward Canadian involvement and said there is little doubt the Liberals will sign on. But he accused them of trying to play down the issue by making public a key move toward that end on a quiet August morning.
"This is going to change the strategic balance and defence policy," he said. "It needs to be debated."
There was a non-binding vote in the Commons 14 months ago on missile defence, in which a Canadian Alliance motion in favour of having NORAD take responsibility for command of a continental missile-defence system was approved 156 to 73. But 38 Liberal MPs voted against the motion.
The Bloc Québécois and NDP oppose Canadian involvement in missile defence.
NDP foreign affairs critic Alexa McDonough characterized Thursday's announcement as bringing Ottawa "a step closer...to Bush's missile-defence madness."
But Canadian participation is not inevitable, she said, calling for the Liberal government to facilitate a full debate nationwide before it makes up its mind.
-------- terrorism
Bush Administration Slammed For Inaction on 'Loose Nukes'
The Forward
By ORI NIR
August 6, 2004
http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=nir200408041110
WASHINGTON - With the country on high alert for another Al Qaeda attack, the Bush administration is facing increasing criticism for allegedly not doing enough to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
The 9/11 Commission and leading nonproliferation experts say that the administration has been too lax in securing nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Administration officials are expected to be grilled on the issue next week, during congressional hearings on the report of the 9/11 Commission.
The commissioners, in their final report, stopped short of directly assigning blame for the situation. They did, however, mention that "outside experts are deeply worried about the U.S. government's commitment and approach to securing the weapons and highly dangerous materials still scattered in Russia and other countries of the Soviet Union."
In contrast to the Bush administration, which has focused intensely on neutralizing the threat of nuclear material transfers from Middle Eastern governments to terrorists, the 9/11 report stresses the danger of unsupervised nuclear materials ending up in the hands of terrorists. A nuclear bomb, the report states, "can be built with a relatively small amount of nuclear material." A bomb made with highly enriched uranium or plutonium "about the size of a grapefruit," detonated by commercially available explosives "would level Lower Manhattan," the report warns.
Sensing Bush's vulnerability on the issue, the democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, has recently made the problem of "loose nukes" one of his main arguments in criticizing President Bush for his performance on national security. Experts who, for the most part, agree that Bush has not made the containment of "loose nukes" a high enough priority, expect the issue to emerge during debates between Kerry and Bush.
"Kerry and [his running-mate, Senator John] Edwards, are making this a line of attack, and they have a point," said Scott Parrish, editor of The Nonproliferation Review, a journal issued by the independent Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. A month ago, the center published an extensive report on nuclear terrorism, which criticized the administration for lacking a comprehensive plan to address the threat of terrorists with nuclear capability and for not making it a higher priority.
The administration needs to be more focused on the former Soviet Union, where many nuclear facilities lack minimal safety devices, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an independent Washington think tank. "All the experts I know recommend that the most urgent task to prevent terrorist networks from getting their hands on such materials is to secure the stockpiles of these materials where they exist," Kimball said. "And the prime location is Russia and the former Soviet Union."
The main tool for securing the Russian and former Soviet nuclear stockpile, according to the 9/11 Commission's report, is the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, popularly known as the "Nunn-Lugar" program, named after the senators who sponsored the legislation in 1991. The program aims at destroying or converting Russian nuclear warheads, and securing stockpiles of nuclear materials and nuclear facilities in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The program, at first, received $300 million to $400 million per year. Some conservatives criticized it as an inappropriate use of American dollars on a former foe, which in turn could free up Russian money to further develop weapon systems.
Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration intended to cut funding for the program, but reversed course after the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The White House decided to maintain the $400 million figure, while promising to increase funding to a level of $1 billion for the next 10 years. In addition, the administration leveraged a pledge from members of the Group of Eight Industrialized Nations for a similar sum.
Most critics agree that the level of funding is now sufficient, but they also said the pace is too slow and that the scope is too narrow. "Ten years is too long," said Joseph Cirincione, director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of "Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction."
"We should be aiming to do that in the next four years. It's a perfectly reasonable timetable. Let's go out there and get this stuff," Cirincione said. "What we should be doing is implementing a very aggressive program, to go out and secure and eliminate all potential sources of nuclear weapons and materials that terrorists might attain" whether in the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran or more than 40 countries that run research reactors. "Would this be expensive? Yes. But you could do that annually for the price of about one moth of operations in Iraq: $3 billion to $4 billion a year."
Administration officials recently said that about 70% of nuclear facilities in Russia and the former Soviet republics meet the safety standards prescribed by the Nunn-Lugar program. But outside experts argue that the rate is as low as 40% to 50%.
Some experts criticized the 9/11 Commission for not going far enough in outlining the effort that is needed to curb and control nuclear proliferation, to prevent such materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.
The report concludes that preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons "warrants a maximum effort - by strengthening counter-proliferation efforts," including an expansion of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program to detect nuclear materials in shipments at American ports, and continued support for the Nunn-Lugar program.
Some experts say that the commission didn't go far enough. Given its focus on the specter of nuclear terrorism, one could expect bolder recommendations. "These are relatively minor measures," said Carnegie's Cirincione. "It will be good to do all these things, but this is nowhere near a maximum effort. A maximum effort, said Cirincione and other experts, would be an aggressive, comprehensive global strategy that covers all nuclear facilities worldwide. "It's too bad that the commission pulled its punches for the sake of bipartisan consensus."
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Washington's Gift to Bomb Makers
August 6, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/opinion/06fri1.html
There is no bigger and more urgent threat to the security of every American than the possibility of nuclear bomb materials falling into the wrong hands. That is why it is astonishing, and frightening, that the Bush administration is now pushing to strip the teeth from a proposed new treaty aimed at expanding the current international bans on the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. With talks on the new treaty set to begin later this year, the administration suddenly announced last week that it would insist that no provisions for inspections or verification be included.
This reversal of past American positions - ignoring Ronald Reagan's famous cautionary advice, "Trust, but verify'' - is all the more disturbing because it guts a treaty that could have significantly advanced President Bush's oft-stated goal of "keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.'' After raising the alarm on this terrifying problem, the White House now says Americans and the rest of the world are better off trusting empty, unverified promises.
The agreement, the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, would, for the first time, ban all countries from producing highly enriched uranium or plutonium for nuclear weapons. It would cover the four countries that do not subscribe to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel. And it would apply to the five officially recognized nuclear weapons nations, including the United States; they would be allowed to retain and use only their current inventories.
No treaty has ever been or will be foolproof. But a strong fissile materials treaty would help dry up international nuclear-trafficking networks - like the one set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb designer - and make it harder for North Korea to go into the business of exporting plutonium and enriched uranium. But the treaty could not achieve these vitally important goals without credible verification provisions, like on-site inspections.
The Bush administration argues, unpersuasively, that such inspections might interfere with making fuel for American nuclear submarines and might allow foreign inspectors to glimpse secret American nuclear technology. To the extent that these are legitimate concerns, it would be better to try to persuade other nations to grant narrowly tailored exemptions instead of eliminating inspections. Washington also claims that an enforceable treaty would generate a false sense of security and that it would be easier to get other countries to sign an unenforceable one. Those are generic arguments that can be deployed against any enforceable arms control treaty. They ignore the enormous positive trade-offs of a verifiable fissile materials treaty, like strict limits on the material available for making nuclear weapons.
We live in a world where no nation has a monopoly on bomb technology. The most effective remaining way to curb the spread of nuclear weapons to growing numbers of countries and terrorist groups is to impose strict, verifiable international controls on the production of nuclear bomb ingredients. The Bush administration prefers a treaty that endorses nuclear virtue but that then averts its eyes.
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You show yours, I'll hide mine
Guardian
by Simon Tisdall
08/06 2004
http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=64987
George Bush was not pulling his punches. In a definitive policy speech earlier this year on preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the US president declared: "The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons.
"America will not permit terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most deadly weapons," he went on. "We're determined to confront those threats at source. We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We'll block them being transferred. We'll prevent them ever being used."
The US position, it seems, could hardly be clearer. So how to explain, and how conceivably to justify, a little-noticed demarche last week by Mr Bush's officials at the UN conference on disarmament in Geneva? What the US did, in effect, was to torpedo a new global treaty banning the production and supply of materials essential to the building of nuclear weapons.
It is known as the fissile material cut-off treaty. It has been under discussion for years, strongly supported by Britain and the EU. Its main aim is to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of the international effort to curb the spread of WMD. It is specifically aimed at nuclear-armed states such as India, Pakistan and Israel which are not party to the NPT.
But by seeking a global halt to the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons, its wider overall aim is to reduce the chance of such materials being obtained by irresponsible regimes or non-state terror groups.
While dismaying, the Bush administration's stance was not totally unexpected. Bill Clinton backed the fissile material treaty in 2000, but once in office the Bush administration dragged its feet. Last year in Geneva it announced a review of its position, thus delaying further talks.
Last week the US ambassador to the conference, Jackie Wolcott Sanders, finally gave the go-ahead for negotiations, but with a fatal caveat attached.
The US would back the treaty in principle, but it would not support the inclusion of binding monitoring, verification and inspection provisions.
A state department statement said the proposed inspection regime "would have been so extensive that it could compromise key signatories' core national security interests, and so costly that many countries will be hesitant to accept it".
But as the US knows very well, any new treaty is all but unenforcable without effective monitoring and verification. Inspections are essential, say arms control experts, if such treaties are to work. That is a view with which the British government, for example, wholeheartedly agrees.
"We believe that such a treaty should be established. We support it. It is a useful step towards curbing global proliferation," a Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday. "We continue to believe it should be verified. We do not take the same position as the US."
In private, officials are hard put to conceal their disappointment at the US stance.
Stated American concern about security and cost does not wholly explain it. At the nub of the issue is Washington's fundamental objection to opening up American military bases and industrial plants to international, especially UN, inspection.
For the neo-conservatives and ideologues around Mr Bush this is a visceral objection - even a matter of principle. Put plainly, they appear content to place the safeguarding of an uncompromised, untrammelled American sovereignty ahead of effective global arms control.
And they have plenty of form. In 2001, for this same basic reason, the Bush administration scuppered a proposed inspections regime to police the biological weapons convention, again to Britain's great dismay.
For much the same reason, perhaps, key aims of the 1997 chemical weapons convention (CWC) remain unfulfilled. Between them the US and Russia possess more than 97% of the world's known chemical weapons material, but neither will remotely meet the 2007 deadline for its full destruction, according to the US government accountability office. It says more inspections are needed to enforce the CWC, especially at dual-use chemical plants.
For much the same reason, the Bush administration has set aside the comprehensive test ban treaty and is pressing ahead, beyond international scrutiny and in defiance of the NPT, with the development of new generation nuclear weapons.
Iranians and North Koreans are under intense US pressure to cooperate with inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. But to Mr Bush, it seems, international verification procedures are a one-way street. What happened in Geneva last week underlined that.
The very same US government that went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein did not fully comply with UN weapons inspections unilaterally rejects similar control over its own WMD arsenal.
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Bush's pointless treaty
August 6, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/06/EDGV682LKM1.DTL
WHILE HARDLY anyone was watching, the Bush administration has rejected provisions of an international treaty calling for inspections and verifications of nuclear weapons. It's a significant, unexpected and imprudent shift in U.S. policy that clashes sharply with the president's oft-stated support for global nonproliferation.
The Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty would ban the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons. In the works for 10 years, it was the result of collaboration among 66 nations, in part to tighten control over India, Pakistan and Israel which until now had rebuffed any effort to curb their nuclear stockpiles.
But the White House tossed in a monkey wrench: In a dumbfounding announcement, the administration said it supported the treaty, but not its call for inspections and verifications, without which the treaty is meaningless. The announcement, coming as a whisper last week when the Democratic National Convention held much of the nation's attention, called such oversight too costly and intrusive, but offered few details.
This means the White House is declining to adhere to the kinds of inspections that it has long insisted upon for much of the rest of the world.
In the process, President Bush is contradicting his post-Sept. 11 pledge to make blocking the spread of nuclear materials a priority as a way to blunt the chances of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction. It's a perplexing move that renders the treaty useless and adds to global insecurity.
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History teaches that war policy is bankrupt
August 6, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
John Nelson
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/06/EDG4983MLT1.DTL
As U.S. politicians debate the intelligence failures that preceded the Iraq invasion as well as the war in Afghanistan, they can take little comfort that history will judge these wars charitably. Today and Monday mark 59 years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium bomb