NucNews - July 31, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- asia Uzbekistan evicts U.S. from air base 7/31/2005 8:40 AM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-07-30-uzbekistan-eviction_x.htm WASHINGTON — The Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan has notified the State Department that U.S. military aircraft and personnel must leave an Uzbek air base that has been an important hub for American military operations in Afghanistan, a Pentagon official said Saturday. By Shad Eidson, AP Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said the notice was received Friday at the U.S. Embassy in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. Flood said he did not know whether the Uzbeks stated a reason for evicting U.S. forces from Karshi-Khanabad air base, commonly referred to as K2. The Washington Post, which first reported the eviction notice, said no reason was given and that U.S. forces would have six months to leave. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy confirmed that it received an Uzbek notice Friday but would not say what it contained. A base spokeswoman declined comment. The Uzbek government in recent months had tightened restriction on use of the base, including banning night flights. "We have to step back and look at our options now and see where we go from here," Flood said. "That airfield has been very important for our operations in Afghanistan" — humanitarian as well as military. K2 has been a critical staging point for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since the earliest days of the war, which began in October 2001. More recently, the base has been used to move supplies, including humanitarian aid, into northern Afghanistan. It also is a refueling point for transport planes. The eviction notice came just days after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld returned from a Central Asia visit to two Uzbek neighboring states, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Officials in Kyrgyzstan affirmed to Rumsfeld that U.S. forces can continue to use Manas air base for as long as the Afghan war requires. U.S. forces do not use any bases in Tajikistan, which shares a long border with northern Afghanistan. The Pentagon has an arrangement that permits U.S. planes to refuel there under certain circumstances. During his trip, Rumsfeld said he did not believe U.S. operations in Afghanistan would be hurt if the Uzbek government denied continued use of K2 because there are other air base options in the region. "We're always thinking ahead. We'll be fine," Rusmfeld said on Monday. In early July, a regional organization led by Russia and China issued a statement calling for the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan's ties with Washington have deteriorated after the Bush administration joined other Western nations in urging an international investigation into the suppression of a May uprising in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan. Uzbek government troops fired on protesters in the city after militants seized a prison and a government building. Authorities denied that troops fired on unarmed civilians and said that 187 people died in the unrest; human rights groups put the figure as high as 750. Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, who has ruled for 16 years and tolerates no dissent, has blamed the violence on Islamic militants. He has the demands for an outside inquiry, and, facing Western criticism, has found a strong support in Russia and China. Both of them are wary about the U.S. military presence in the strategic and resource-rich region. -------- depleted uranium Gulf veterans' brain cancer risk assessed BY LAURA BEIL Sun, Jul. 31, 2005 Dallas Morning News http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/12271389.htm DALLAS - (KRT) - Veterans involved in the demolition of chemical weapons in the first Iraq war appear to have an increased likelihood of dying from brain cancer, a new study has found. The soldiers who were studied destroyed two caches of chemical munitions - later found to contain the toxic nerve gas sarin - in March 1991 at Khamisiyah, Iraq. The explosions left behind an invisible cloud of chemicals that wafted into the air. While sarin is known to have pronounced short-term health effects, there is no evidence so far that it causes cancer. In the new study, researchers from the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs analyzed death records of the Army veterans who were exposed to the plume, comparing them with soldiers not exposed. After almost 10 years, one cause of death seemed out of the ordinary: veterans from Khamisiyah had twice the risk of dying from brain cancer. "We certainly don't know that sarin is the cause," said Dr. William Page of the national academy. "There is an association." The new study appears in July's American Journal of Public Health. In this study, a two-fold increased risk meant that about 12 to 13 more soldiers among 100,000 exposed died from brain cancer than should have occurred naturally over the 10 years. "This is an intriguing finding," Page said. "It's not definitive evidence." But Dr. Robert Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas points to other trends in the data that suggest the chemical exposure at Khamisiyah was responsible for the excess deaths from brain cancer. Haley was not involved in the current study, but has led other studies of illnesses among Gulf War veterans. He also sits on a Veterans Affairs research advisory committee for Gulf War illness. In the Khamisiyah study, soldiers were more likely to develop brain cancer if they had longer exposure to the plume, a trend consistent with something in the air causing the illness. Also, Haley pointed out, most of the malignancies appeared during the latest years of the study, which researchers would also expect if the cancers were due to some exposure that had occurred at the beginning. "That's a very convincing story for a causal effect," he said. However, he and others say, more research is necessary to confirm the finding. Scientists need to see whether the trend continues over time, and investigate a possible mechanism on the cellular level that may explain how something at Khamisiyah may have led to cancer in some soldiers. Haley said that brain cancer would be consistent with Gulf War veterans being exposed to an agent that created nerve cell damage. His research has found illness with an array of brain symptoms and increased rates of Lou Gehrig's disease. "When you have brain cell injury, there is a possibility you'll have neurodegenerative illnesses associated with it," he said. He cautioned that even in this study, brain cancer was still a rare cause of death. "The average veteran should not become despondent and think they're going to get brain cancer," he said. -------- iran Crisis looms as Iran vows to restart key nuclear activity TEHRAN (AFP) Jul 31, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050731182441.qy25duai.html Iran was preparing Sunday to defy the European Union by restarting an ultra-sensitive nuclear activity that could plunge talks with the EU on its atomic programme into crisis and risk UN Security Council action. A source said Iran would inform the UN nuclear watchdog on Monday that it would immediately resume uranium conversion activities, a dramatic move that heightens the risk Tehran will be hauled before the Security Council for possible sanctions. The move came after Iran demanded that the European Union deliver its latest proposals in a mooted nuclear deal by Sunday, a call that was only answered by expressions of astonishment and fury by the countries involved. However it remains to be seen whether the Islamic republic will stand by its rhetoric and take the consequences. A last minute U-turn cannot be excluded after such a change of mind was made in a similar situation in April. Iran will "on Monday give the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) the letter announcing the resumption" of uranium conversion activities ... the restart will begin immediately," the source said after a meeting of Iran's top security body. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said international inspectors currently in Iran would be taken to the Isfahan facility where the IAEA seals would be "removed in the presence of the inspectors and the work will resume." Another source close to the talks said that Iran was prepared to delay its move if the Europeans recognised its right to enrich uranium in the new proposals. The conversion process, carried out in Iran at a facility in the central city of Isfahan, changes uranium ore into the uranium gas that is the feedstock for enrichment. Iran agreed in November to suspend uranium enrichment, a process that makes fuel for civilian nuclear power plants but can also be the explosive core of atom bombs, during negotiations with the Europeans. The British government, which is spearheading the EU-Iran talks along with France and Germany, reacted angrily, saying threatened resumption of sensitive nuclear activities by Iran would be an "unnecessary and damaging step." The Foreign Office said it was seeking "clarification of Iran's intentions" and urged Tehran to avoid any unilateral move which "would make it very difficult to continue" the negotiations with the European Union. In Paris, a diplomat described the Iranian threat as "barely acceptable pressure that leads us to express our surprise and our concern." Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Agha Mohammadi earlier had made clear a new ultimatum, saying that if Iran did not receive European proposals by 5:00 pm (1230 GMT) Sunday, "we will resume some of our activities in Isfahan tomorrow." But he added: "Our position is that we want to pursue the negotiations with the Europeans." For his part, Asefi said there was a Monday deadline for the EU offer. The Europeans have previously said they intended to submit the proposals after hardline president Mahmood Ahmadinejad takes office on August 3. "We have had reports that the proposals were empty but wrapped up in a pretty package," Asefi said. "The Security Council is not the end of the world." Tehran insists it has the right to enrichment under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the issue has been one of the chief stumbling blocks in the process with the Europeans. Washington accuses its arch enemy of seeking nuclear weapons, a charge vehemently denied by the Islamic republic, and the negotiation process with the EU is aimed at avoiding Tehran being brought before the Security Council. The EU-3 is "warning about the consequences of breaking the suspension and that this will lead to the matter being taken to the UN Security Council," another diplomat told AFP on Saturday in Vienna, the headquarters of the IAEA. A diplomat close to the IAEA would not comment on whether the inspectors would go to Isfahan for the removal of the seals but said: "It's business as usual. The IAEA has inspectors every month in Iran. They rotate to different places." On Saturday, Iran said EU-3 ambassadors had sent a message informing Tehran that it would make the offer by August 7, to be followed up by an Iran-EU committee meeting on August 30 in Paris and then a foreign ministers' meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September. Ahmadinejad is due to address the assembly on what is expected to be his first visit abroad. ---- UN atomic agency would need three days to call Iran emergency session VIENNA (AFP) Jul 31, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050731194525.99z4mld0.html At least three days would be needed to convene an emergency meeting of the UN nuclear watchdog agency if the crisis over Iran's nuclear program were to escalate, an agency spokesman said Sunday. It would take "at least 72 hours" to convene a session in Vienna of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation board of governors, which could then send the Iranian dossier to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions against Tehran, said the spokesman, who asked not to be named. Britain warned Iran Sunday against taking the "damaging step" of resuming nuclear fuel work and said that if the Iranians persist, the EU "will as a first step consult urgently with our partners on the board of the IAEA, which is monitoring Iran's nuclear" activities. "There is a 72-hour official delay for circulation of the agenda (of an IAEA emergency meeting) and also there is the practical issue of giving the states time to get representatives to Vienna to participate," especially during summer vacations, the IAEA spokesman said. The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear program since February 2003 on US charges that the Islamic republic is secretly developing nuclear weapons. The United States wants Iran brought before the Security Council but is backing a European Union diplomatic effort to get Iran to guarantee it will not make nuclear weapons. On Sunday, Iran seemed ready to push forward with its nuclear program. A source in Tehran said after a meeting of Iran's top security body that Iran would inform the IAEA on Monday that it is resuming sensitive uranium conversion activities, which will then restart immediately. Iran will "on Monday give the IAEA the letter announcing the resumption" of uranium conversion activities at the Isfahan plant, said the source, who asked not to be named. "The restart will begin immediately," added the source, who was speaking after a meeting of Iran's supreme national security council. Iranian officials had warned earlier Sunday that Tehran would resume sensitive nuclear work within days if the EU failed to submit proposals for trade, security and technology benefits to be given to Iran in return for guarantees it will not develop nuclear weapons. The Iranian warning has dramatically raised the stakes in a more than two-year standoff over its nuclear program and risks seeing the Islamic Republic hauled before the Security Council, which could impose punishing economic sanctions. The IAEA currently has inspectors in Iran, although not necessarily at the uranium conversion site in Isfahan where the Iranians plan on resuming work related to uranium enrichment, a diplomat in Vienna said. Enrichment is the process that makes fuel for civilian nuclear power plants, but this material can also be the explosive core of nuclear bombs. -------- japan Chain Reaction By Reviewed by Marcia Bartusiak Sunday, July 31, 2005 Washington Post; BW06 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801514_pf.html BEFORE THE FALLOUT From Marie Curie to Hiroshima By Diana Preston Walker. 400 pp. $27 On a sunny August morning 60 years ago, a young Japanese mother named Futaba Kitayama looked up to see "an airplane as pretty as a silver treasure flying from East to West in the cloudless pure blue sky." As she watched, the plane released an object from its bomb bay that soon exploded into "an indescribable light." It was the device dubbed "Little Boy" -- the first deadly and fearsome display of the true power of the atom. Kitayama saw her own flesh peel off her body. Some 140,000 men, women and children in the city of Hiroshima were killed, either by the immediate blast or, within months, from radiation. It would have taken 3,000 B-29s carrying conventional bombs to equal the might of that single atomic explosion. Given the enormity of that event -- military, political and historical -- it is not surprising that the quest to unravel the secrets of the atom has been the subject of dozens of books over the years. In Before the Fallout, the British historian Diana Preston draws on many of those works but also adds her own archival research and interviews. While her book provides no startling revelations, Preston artfully distills the key moments of the pre-atomic-bomb era, both scientific and biographic, and weaves them into an absorbing narrative. The result is a concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen. Preston opens her tale in a rundown Parisian courtyard, where the Polish-born scientist Marie Curie spent many months huddled over her cauldrons, processing mounds of pitchblende (a heavy, black ore rich in compounds of uranium) in search of the yet unknown elements that she was sure it contained. It took her more than three years to crystallize a mere tenth of a gram of radium, but after that 1902 achievement, progress came quickly. The purity of her samples, with their high levels of radioactivity, enabled scientists in Europe and America to probe various materials with the penetrating rays and begin dissecting the atom. In 1911, physicists came up with the now familiar model: a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons, surrounded by orbiting electrons. This newly discovered atomic world soon took on an Alice-in-Wonderland quality, where matter turned out to be frozen energy (as quantified in Einstein's equation E = mc{+2}) and elements that were once considered immutable could disintegrate into a hail of elementary particles. By 1933, scientists were already speculating about whether nuclear transformations could be explosive, but notable physicists such as Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr called such talk "moonshine" and "beyond the reach of experiments." At the time they were right, but Preston lucidly describes how swiftly the situation changed. Just six years later, the Austrian theorist Lise Meitner figured out that a heavy nucleus could split apart like an amoeba dividing into two. It didn't take long for many in the field, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, to realize that this fission "could make bombs": A single neutron splits a uranium nucleus, which releases more neutrons, which in turn hit other uranium nuclei, triggering a self-sustaining reaction of lethal potential. In 1940, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls gave the British government their secret and influential three-page document, "On the Construction of a 'Superbomb,' " which outlined its feasibility. Was building the bomb inevitable? Probably. Various pieces of the puzzle were being discerned by scientists in a number of countries around the same time. And wartime pressures forced them to pursue it, if only to create a nuclear deterrent that put fear into their enemies. In the United States, the pursuit was quite aggressive; in Nazi Germany, it was more desultory. In Preston's account, Werner Heisenberg, a leading member of the German team, appears as capricious in the Nazi quest for nuclear weapons as the uncertainty principle he had earlier established in quantum physics. Preston provides just enough scientific details to make us appreciate the complexity of the task, and her portraits of the major players help us understand their motivations, concerns and misgivings. As she chronicles this race for the bomb, Preston never lets us forget the ultimate tragedy to come. She returns to Hiroshima several times over the course of her book, presenting vignettes of its ongoing life. In the 1920s, the city flourished as both an academic and a manufacturing center. By 1944, she writes, "Bramble shoots were stripped of their prickles and chewed. Reeds from the city's rivers were boiled and eaten." We come to see that the city's inhabitants were deprived and defeated even before the blast. In the end she asks, "What if?" What if certain scientists had died prematurely? What if the bomb's construction had taken a year longer? What if the bomb had been invented but never used? Such speculations are fascinating, but what lingers are the personal stories: British physicist James Chadwick, imprisoned by the Germans during World War I, using toothpaste containing thorium to carry out jailhouse experiments on radioactivity; Bohr, fleeing Nazi-ruled Denmark, dissolving in acid some gold Nobel medals left to him for safekeeping; the rear gunner of the Enola Gay comparing the plane's steep turn to safety after the Hiroshima bomb drop to "the cyclone rollercoaster ride at the Coney Island amusement park." "History," writes Preston, " . . . is inherently about people, how they thought, what they did with their thoughts, and how they interacted with the individuals immediately around them." With Before the Fallout , she conveys that history with both style and compassion. · Marcia Bartusiak teaches science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her latest book is "Archives of the Universe: A Treasury of Astronomy's Historic Works of Discovery." ---- Thousands gather in support of retaining pacifist Article 9 The Japan Times: July 31, 2005 http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20050731a3.htm Thousands of people attended a rally Saturday in Tokyo to protest against changing the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution. The public meeting was sponsored by the Article 9 Association, which was established in June 2004 by nine prominent intellectuals, including Kenzaburo Oe, 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, to seek a coalition of various political powers and the public to defend the constitutional clause. "I experienced wars during my 88 years of life," said Mutsuko Miki, one of the founding members and wife of the late Prime Minister Takeo Miki. "I hope Japan will be a peaceful country without armed forces, by maintaining Article 9," she said. Referring to the deployment of Ground Self-Defense Force personnel in Iraq for a humanitarian mission, Miki said, "I do not understand why they have to go there with instruments for war." Makoto Oda, another founding member, said, "The Constitution says peace should be achieved through nonviolence and that Japan should take the initiative in doing so." Inspired by the association, more than 3,000 local groups to seek public support for Article 9 have been established, according to the meeting's organizers. ---- HIROSHIMA: THE LEGACY 31 July 2005 UK Sunday Herald http://www.sundayherald.com/50970 Almost 60 years after the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, Torcuil Crichton speaks to the last survivors and hears their message … of laughter and peace MOST of us can only imagine death, but Sanao Tsuboi has a memory of it. Standing on Miyuki Bridge in the middle of Hiroshima, the very spot where he looked into the yawning maw that had swallowed so many lives that morning almost 60 years ago, he is separated from us by a veil of experience. We think of Hiroshima and, in our mind’s eye, we see the symbol of Armageddon, the sculpted mushroom cloud of the atomic blast: a rising column with a fiery red core topped by a bubbling mass of purple-tinged turbulence. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” is what Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic age, quoted after seeing the first smoky column rise above the New Mexico dawn of July 16, 1945, following the first ever nuclear explosion. Four hours later, an atomic device was being shipped from America to the Pacific in preparation for the deliberate terror bombing of civilian populations. The mushroom cloud is an awesome but abstract image, and as it blistered above Hiroshima it was probably its very lack of any human quality that caused Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay – the plane that dropped the bomb – to pound the pilot’s shoulder and shout: “My God. Look at that son of a bitch go!” In the mission log, he was more restrained, recording: “My God, what have we done?” It was August 6, 1945. What they had done, the crew of that B-29 Superfortress bomber, was drop the power of the sun on to the Earth. At 8.16am, the uranium bomb dubbed Little Boy exploded, slightly off- target, 580 metres above Shima hospital in Hiroshima with a force of 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Massive radiation and a fireball hot enough to melt stone, with the thermal power to burn flesh at a distance of 3.5km, was unleashed, followed by a blast of air that travelled at 28 metres a second, flattening everything in its path out to a radius of 2km. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki suffered the same fate through the 21,000 kilotonne blast of the Fat Man plutonium bomb. In Hiroshima, at least 40,000 people were killed instantly: vapourised by the heat of the blast or burned by the fireball that swept through the city. During the years that followed, thousands more would die from radiation sickness. In fact, the explosion that caused a moment of blinding light on that August morning has been killing ever since. By the end of 1945, 70,000 had died from their injuries; a conservative estimate of the death toll is 200,000. Most of us only read history but Sanao Tsuboi, he is testimony. As a 20-year-old student, Tsuboi stood little more than 600 metres from the centre of the blast: the original ground zero. He was thrown back 10 metres and horribly burnt. “People talk about a mushroom cloud,” says Tsuboi, “but all I saw was a white flash.” Against the roar of rush-hour traffic on the bridge, Tsuboi speaks, leading us on a journey back to the morning of August 6 , travelling beyond the mushroom cloud and into the very heart of hell . As an aide memoir, Tsuboi ponts to a photograph which was taken here, beside the Miyuki Bridge, on that morning of reckoning, three hours after the Hiroshima bomb heralded the most profound change in the course of human history. The camera came of age in the second world war, documenting the Blitz, the cult of Hitlerism, the Dresden bombings, the horrors of the death camps. But at Hiroshima there is almost a hole in history; there are remarkably few images. Just five pictures taken that morning by newspaper photographer Yoshito Matsushige survive. Only two people in his Miyuki Bridge photo are still alive. Tsuboi is one of them. Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for 10 hours that day, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing, and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures. He could only bring himself to push the shutter seven times. The black-and-white picture is grainy, the detail smeared by long exposure, but it freezes the apocalypse that unfurled across the city that morning. A young, shaven-headed Tsuboi can be clearly seen cowering like a frightened animal among other survivors against the parapet of the bridge. “I thought I would die here at the end of this bridge, so I wrote the inscription, ‘Tsuboi died here’, with a stone on the road,” he says. “My skin was so tattered, my hands so feeble, that the writing didn’t last. But that is what I thought: that this was the end. This bridge was the border between life and death.” Most of us think we feel pain but Sanao Tsuboi bears the scars. The old man wears thick lines of blue kohl drawn across his forehead where his eyebrows ought to be. It creates a slightly comic effect that may be a deliberate distraction from his other features. His ears look like wax that has melted in the heat and then reset on cooling. His forehead is pink-scarred and the backs of his hands are layers of candled skin. Twice he has been struck by cancer and his heart has been weakened. “As you can see, I was severely exposed. My ears were torn off, my face was burnt black. My skin came off – all of it. My mouth was swollen, like a monster. Half the sleeves of my shirt were blown away and my trousers were torn off below the knee. My hands were burnt black and blood ran down my arms. Dark blood ran from my upper hips to my legs.” In the picture, nobody is looking into the camera lens as Matsushige releases the shutter. It is difficult to tell if it is ragged clothes or charred skin that hangs from their arms. Matsushige, who could not focus through his tears, recalled that children were screaming all around him. In the picture everyone appears to stare mutely at the tornado of flame and smoke rushing across the city, but as you study the image you can hear their mewing pain. Little wonder that Matsushige’s eyes failed him in the ghoulish darkness of that day. “I was overwhelmed by the destructive power of the blast, ” says Tsuboi. “ I saw terrible sights: people with their eyes dangling out, people with their flesh stripped off to the bone, people who couldn’t walk. A woman in her 30s who’d been impaled with a stick which had been pulled out, taking her intestines with it. She was trying to put them back inside her body. Thousands of those miserable people I encountered. “There were seven rivers in Hiroshima and everyone, all the people, jumped into the water, young or old, whether they could swim or not, because they hurt so much from their burns. I saw rivers full of corpses : thousands of bodies.” Tsuboi survived with the help of many hands. He has no real memory of the first 40 days during which he drifted in and out of coma. “Every day the doctor would come and look at me and every day he said I would die.” By the following January , Tsuboi could not even walk. But he would not die, either. “I had lost my hair, I was bleeding from my gums, I had a high temperature and I was infested by maggots. My body was rotting.” His mother picked all the maggots from his suppurating wounds and eventually he crawled and then walked to health. “I say health but I have been hospitalised 10 times by radiation diseases – three times declared critical and my family called to my bedside. I have to admit I am getting bored with death.” There were years of bitter tears. “The atom bomb changed my life around 180 degrees. I kept thinking if there was no A-bomb … if there had been no war … I could have pursued my dream of inventing something. In that regard I hated the United States and I was envious of those who escaped the A-bomb and made their way in life.” The Hibakusha, as the survivors of the bomb are known, suffered tremendous discrimination and were ostracised after the war. “Medical opinion was that we would die early so nobody would seriously contemplate marriage to someone like that,” says Tsuboi. He twists his scarred face into a gargoyle. “If they were disfigured, women especially confronted a much more serious situation. Some are still single to this day. They have been denied love.” Having lost his first girlfriend in the A-bomb attack, Tsuboi fell in love with another but her family would not approve marriage. “So we tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills but I didn’t know how many we should take and the attempt failed,” says Tsuboi. “I felt so awful. I couldn’t die. We couldn’t get married and we could not get to heaven together.” Like Jacob labouring in Laban’s fields, Tsuboi persisted for another seven years until his sweetheart’s family relented. “O ur marriage, after all this hardship, never faltered. We have three children and seven grandchildren,” he says, grinning. The immediate death toll of mass bombing raids on cities such as Dresden and Tokyo, may have been higher, but the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs kept on killing long after peace had been delivered. At first, the Western press described the hitherto unknown effects of radiation as a mystery illness, and as a naive world struggled to find a moral context for the bomb’s killing power, doctors were baffled by the soaring death rates. Nobody knew – and nobody yet knows – how to treat the keloids, the genetic mutations, bone-marrow destruction, the internal bleeding, the cancers, the premature deaths, that follow exposure to high-level radiation. To begin with, nobody was overly concerned. The Pacific war had been cut short, a $2 billion US gamble on the A-bomb had paid off and the lives of thousands of US marines who would otherwise have had to fight the Japanese army every inch of the way had been saved. Confidence about the benefits of the new atomic age was only tempered when the New Yorker magazine, in August 1946, cleared an entire edition for a report by John Hersey, which gave the still-dying bomb survivors a voice among the millions of words of self-congratulation. The article crystallised a sense of moral unease about the use of nuclear weapons. Later, there would be debates about whether the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, would have surrendered anyway or whether the bombs were just a live experiment to forestall Russia’s entry into the Japanese theatre and prove America’s dominance in the post-war situation. Details of Japan’s barbaric treatment of prisoners and captured colonies and the fear of the communist might of Russia served effectively as justification against the doubters. Moral qualms did not, however, prevent the world from embracing the prospect of Armageddon. As the century progressed, the US and Russia created massive nuclear stockpiles with the potential to destroy each other . For a while, Dr Strangeloves, such as Herman Kahn, tried to convince us that nuclear war was survivable, but over Cuba, the superpowers stared into the abyss, then blinked and withdrew from the brink. The threat of destroying the world several times over only subsided in the 1980s when the communist system bankrupted itself and Mikhail Gorbachev declared the nuclear poker game over. By then, Britain had spent billions of pounds pursuing an independent atomic deterrent (and is about to do so again on a new generation of Trident missiles from the US). Post-imperial prestige, and seats on the UN Security Council, were purchased through ownership, or leasing, of nuclear deterrents. France also developed its own bomb and continued testing as late as 1996. Voices of dissent were raised through the mass civic protest movements against atomic weapons that began mobilising during the 1950s . Like many from Hiroshima, Tsuboi has been around the world campaigning against nuclear weapons. From New York to North Korea, he has been astonished at how little the public knows about the effects of nuclear weaponry , and he is driven to do something about it by a sense of haunted responsibility; even guilt. When the Japanese army arrived in Hiroshima, after the bombing, the only people they rescued were young men trained to use rifles. “I still hear the voice of the soldier shouting at me,” Tsuboi recalls. “‘Get this young man on a truck,’ he said. It’s then I realised how militaristic, how inhuman we had become, to only help young men and treat everyone else as if they were cabbage.” HIROSHIMA today is a modern city rebuilt from the ashes of the military hub, with widened tree-lined boulevards that are home to one million people and a centre for advanced manufacturing and technical research. It should be an ordinary city but the wounds inflicted by the bomb remain very public. There is a museum, a peace shrine in a memorial park, peace boulevards and the skeletal remains of the A-bomb dome, the former Industrial Promotion hall that stands witness to the destructive power of the world’s first A-bombing. In the Peace Park, Japanese schoolchildren politely cajole visitors into filling out questionnaires on such profundities as: “How do you feel about the 9/11 attacks on New York?” and “How can the war in Iraq be solved?” It is impossible, as a visitor at any rate, to escape the baleful legacy that the bomb bequeathed the city. Late at night, with a heavy, yellow moon slung low in the sky and the cicadas whirring in the trees, we are walking back to our hotel when the paean of a trumpet draws us to the fringes of the Peace Park. Below the illuminated A-bomb dome, Yoshitaka Shimizu is practising his trumpet by the river. In broken English, the young academic tells us he wants to be like Clifford Brown, the black American jazz genius who died in 1956 in a car accident on the Pennsylvania turnpike. We ask why he chooses to play here, in the shadow of such tragedy. “My grandmother died three years ago with cancer of the spine,” says Shimizu. “She was in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb. I come here so that my gran can hear my stuff.” In Hiroshima, the story of that day never ends, and parts of it have never been told. The censored dispatches of Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller from the blasted city were only uncovered by his son earlier this year. Days after the attack, he reported a mysterious “Disease X”, or radiation sickness, as did Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett, who successfully evaded the US censors. Burchett began his dispatch: “In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as an atomic plague.” “Hiroshima,” he wrote, “does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.” In another part of town, after much ritual bowing, smiles, mutual nodding and offers of green tea, Aiko Kobi, a nightingale-scaled woman wearing pale pink plumage, sits in the alcove of an air-conditioned café. Time has shrivelled her, the table top seems almost too high for her, but her personality has not shrunk and her voice tinkles like a crystal glass behind a broad smile, lipsticked to hide her scars. For six decades she has carried a terrible story in her head. Only now, with the gentle persuasion of her 25-year-old granddaughter who sits by her side, is she ready to give it up. Because she has experienced something that nobody ever should, we ought to listen to her. She clears her throat with a chirrup and we lean forward to hear words that she found unutterable for six decades. “I hesitated to tell my story because I wondered if I was entitled to speak,” says Kobi. “I didn’t suffer from severe burns and all my injuries healed, although my lips still hurt even when I was in my 50s.” There was no noise; just a flash, and in an instant she was buried under a two-storey home that stood on this very corner site where we now sip tea. “It was pitch black, I couldn’t see anything. I cried for help and my father called out, telling me not to move my head. I followed his instructions and, little by little, I was able to move out into the garden.” In the open air, 1.5 km from the centre of the explosion, Kobi was confronted by hell. “The house was devastated; the one next door was on fire. I was bleeding from shattered glass, and shoeless. We started walking southwards, barefoot because there was nothing else to do and no other way to go.” For some reason – common humanity, perhaps – she grabbed the hand of a six-year-old boy she found crying in the rubble, and looked after him for the next few days. Being short-sighted and without her spectacles saved Aiko Kobi from some of the horror. But she could not block out all of her senses. “The sound I remember most vividly is from the hospital,” she says. “There was a boy who collapsed. He fell down in front of us in his death throes. The boy crying: I still hear that, and the smell of burned flesh . It’s beyond description. “There were other people with pitch black faces. Their skin was burned off and their clothes were shredded; women stripped naked by the blast. Their skin was peeled off. People walked like ghosts with their arms stretched out in pain.” Kobi and the child spent that night in the mountains but, unaware of the dangers of radioactivity, they returned to the city the next day to search for the boy’s relatives . They didn’t find them. That six-year-old, Maso Yashida, died aged 43 of liver cancer that spread through his body. Surviving the explosion was one thing. Then came the aftermath . “For months,” recalls Kobi, “my injuries were inflamed and infected and didn’t heal.” There were few medicines and doctors had to treat the burns victims first. Twenty years later, Kobi’s father would still find shards of glass being pushed out from his scalp. With their family destroyed, both father and daughter considered retreating from society to become priests and tend the family shrine. A year later, aged 21, Kobi married a man who had lost his wife in the Hiroshima raid and became stepmother to his six-year-old daughter. “It was like starting from scratch. I had a new life, a husband, a sister and a daughter.” The couple had two other children and their son inherited the family printing business, building a modern eight-storey office with family apartments on the site of the house that had been destroyed by the bomb. Each year, Kobi would visit the various shrines in the city to commemorate her dead cousin and her dead brother. Yet she never revealed her own suffering. It was only when her granddaughter, Maki Nakamoto, became a peace volunteer at the city museum that the story, like the shards of glass from her wounds, surfaced. “I thought that without a special opportunity she wouldn’t tell me anything, so last August, on the anniversary, I went to the park with her,” says Maki Nakamoto, who shares her grandmother’s bright smile. As they walked together Kobi told Nakamoto what had happened. “I could tell how hard it was for her to talk about this,” says Nakamoto. “She didn’t complain but the tears started to run.” There are hundreds of personal testimonies recorded on video and audio in the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Echoing voices can be recalled at the push of a button. But today, when Nakamoto shows visitors around, she is imbued with the authority of her grandmother’s story. Maki Nakamoto, a third generation survivor, provides a link with a disappearing past. This coming anniversary may be the last major commemoration for many of the Hibakusha, whose average age is now 72. But their story will continue through people like Nakamoto who received, after 60 years of silence, an oral history from the benign, bruised lips of her grandmother. It’s another one of those baking mornings in Hiroshima. Takashi Hiraoka, a former mayor of the city, stands beneath the shade of Japanese bead trees and Kurogane holly that survived the 1945 blast and have been replanted in a rocky grove along one of the boulevards in the rebuilt metropolis. He worries that as the city prepares for this 60th anniversary , there is a danger that the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was bombed three days later, are being lost on 21st-century Japan. “We really have to ask ourselves if we live our daily lives with our ideals in mind. Even in Hiroshima, children don’t know what happened on August 6,” says Hiraoka. As a two-term mayor in the 1990s, he promoted nuclear-free local authorities, established a peace institute and grassroots exchanges across the world; yet he doesn’t feel he has done enough. “The danger of nuclear weapons has become greater. Look at depleted uranium shells in Iraq; nuclear is now accepted as conventional.” In his grey linen suit, knitted tie and silver hair, Hiraoka is a counterpoint to Japan’s new casual dress code promoted by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi . He has little time for fads, he says, or the Prime Minister and the empty rhetoric of the Japanese government. “Prime Minister Koizumi always says he prays for peace at the Yakusuni war shrine. If he really does, he should reveal the contents of his prayer to the people. If he is determined not to start war he should withdraw his defence forces from Iraq.” Neighbours like China and South Korea, who remember Japanese atrocities during the war, are furious whenever the Prime Minister visits the controversial Yakusuni shrine for the war dead, since those it commemorates include several condemned war criminals . Asian countries say they detect the stirrings of Japanese nationalism. The national anthem is being re-introduced to schools, after 60 years in the deep freeze of atomic peace. As the Chinese and Koreans, the abused of the Japanese empire, grow in economic strength, so do their demands for contrition that will only be expressed in empty terms. Each night, Japanese television broadcasts another story about the threat of the rogue nuclear state, North Korea . Through the distant lens, it seems the Japanese media is cranking up the propaganda of fear. Prime Minister Koizumi’s ambition for his country to play a bigger international role, especially in military peacekeeping, also worries nervous neighbours. His goal is to push through a revision of Japan’s constitution, removing the ban on “the threat or use of force”, contained in article nine of the peace constitution that was imposed after the second world war. Japan’s constitution has already been stretched to allow self-defence troops to first join the UN in relief work overseas. Then, in 2003, a law was introduced to permit troops to go to non-combat zones in Iraq. Prime Minister Koizumi wants to give the nation even greater powers and some conservatives have called for nuclear weapons to be considered for self defence. The mindscape of Japanese politics is a presumption that war will be possible in the future. That idea conflicts with Hiroshima’s call for peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons across the globe. “This is only an assumption but I think most people in Hiroshima and in Japan would back the reforms,” says Hiraoka. “This city is a conservative stronghold, the majority in the national assembly is Liberal Democrat, so we are in a dangerous situation. It’s only an assumption, but if it comes true the words of the August 6 service every year will be empty.” ---- Hiroshima & Nagasaki After the A-bombs For area survivors, 60th anniversary carries personal meaning Stories by Katya Cengel kcengel@courier-journal.com July 31, 2005 Louisville KY Courier-Journal http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050731/FEATURES/507310314&SearchID=73216271970632 Lilly Krohn of Laconia, Ind., says a flat tire on her bicycle saved her life the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. That was the morning the United States dropped the first atomic bomb used against a human population. Krohn, whose unmarried name was Yuriko Ishigaki, was supposed to be at her typewriter in downtown Hiroshima. But she was at her home in the Japanese city's outskirts when the bomb detonated at 8:15. She said her family's living room exploded around her seconds later. She pulled her 3-year-old sister, who was unconscious but alive, from the wreckage. Her parents, who have since died, also survived the blast, as did her brother and a sister, who were both out of town at the time. She said she eventually started to walk to work a mile away. On the way she passed a woman with a baby on her back. "But baby not all right, completely black and shriveled up," Krohn recalled. The baby was dead; the mother died a week later. Krohn continued on, past piles of ashes and smoldering buildings, to what had been her office. There she saw her typewriter -- melted. Every day for a month, Krohn, then 20, returned to the spot to look for fellow workers. At first she looked for survivors, then for identifiable bodies. She never found any. On Saturday, it will be 60 years since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing 100,000 to 150,000 people and directly affecting 210,000 to 250,000 more. Another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killing about 70,000 and affecting 200,000 more. But the suffering didn't end then. A week after the Hiroshima blast, Krohn lost her hair and appetite. She came to America after marrying Lloyd Krohn in 1955. Three years later, she lost her uterus to cancer. In 1972 she lost her stomach, again to cancer. "The consensus opinion is that the cancers and health issues she has are largely attributable to her being in close proximity to the bomb," said Dr. Michael Bonacum, who treats Krohn in Harrison County, Ind. Doctors created a new "stomach" for Krohn out of intestinal tissue by attaching the end of her esophagus to part of her small intestine. Occasionally her esophagus closes and she uses a dilating tube to open it. Still, she considers herself lucky. Although she lost her husband three years ago, Krohn, 81, has a daughter and granddaughter. Bomb debate The bombs are largely credited with quickening Japan's surrender on Aug. 14 and the war's subsequent end. But more than half a century later, the debate over their use rages. Robert Maddox, a World War II expert and Penn State University professor emeritus, believes that, if they hadn't been dropped, many more people would have died during the blockade, two planned invasions and fire bombings. "If the bomb (on Hiroshima) hadn't been dropped, (the dead) might have been up into the millions," Maddox said. Lee Thomas Jr., a combat infantry soldier headed for the invasion of Japan, said the bomb saved his life, but when he saw Hiroshima several weeks later he questioned its use. "It was absolutely flat," said the Louisville businessman, 79. "I saw the enormous cost to the Japanese of saving my life." It's a cost Krohn and other local survivors don't want the world to forget. In April they met Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, brought to Louisville by metro government and several local groups, including Interfaith Paths to Peace, to talk about nuclear disarmament. Terry Taylor, executive director of the nonprofit Interfaith Paths to Peace and current co-chair of the local Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemoration Committee, feels the bombs should not have been used but respects the opinions of those who fought in World War II and disagree with him. "My position is very strongly against it (the bombs), but my father fought his way across Europe and was going to be on his way to Japan, and he himself believes the atomic bomb saved his life," Taylor said. "I have to acknowledge the honesty of that emotion." Taylor added that there is one thing everyone seems to agree on, and it is what Krohn and other survivors want the world to understand: An atomic bomb should never be used again. ---- Meeting releases flood of memories By Katya Cengel kcengel@courier-journal.com July 31, 2005, Louisville KY Courier-Journal http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050731/FEATURES/507310315&SearchID=73216271970632 For almost 60 years, Margie Hunt of Louisville had buried memories of the smell of death and the screaming of horribly injured people wanting to be put out of their misery. Then this spring Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba came to Louisville to speak about nuclear disarmament. Hunt's head ached, her 5-foot frame shook and her eyes teared. And she remembered Aug. 6, 1945. It was a lazy day. A good one for a teenager to stare out the window and dream of the future. Margie Hunt, then known as Toyomi Hiyama, gazed through the office window of her father's engineering office on the outskirts of Hiroshima. She saw a dark yellowish color in the sky. At first she thought the sight was funny, a searchlight so early in the morning. "What's going on over there," she asked her father. Before he could answer, the windows broke and the walls crumbled. Hunt cowered under her father's desk. Just two miles away, in the center of the city, her friends in a factory were consumed by heat, fire and falling walls. Hunt, 17, was scheduled to work there that morning but had decided to play hooky and go to her father's office instead. The decision saved her life. After the blast, her father explored the ruins of the office building where he worked. Her mother, who was at home, walked a mile to her father's office. They eventually got home and saw the skeleton of their two-story house, but no walls or windows. Inside the remains, the straw tatami mats they slept on had been sucked up and twisted. Outside, people with their arms dangling like ghosts made their way through the rubble. Many in the procession were nude, their skin burned so badly it was in tatters. A woman with a face as gray as a rock and as swollen as a basketball approached Hunt. Her eyes were slits, the flesh was hanging from her hands like strips of cloth. "How can I get to my home," the woman asked. Hunt tried to direct her, careful not to touch her. Hunt's mother went searching for Sayoko, one of Hunt's two older sisters who had been walking to work when the bomb was dropped. The family didn't know yet that it was an atomic bomb. All Hunt and her family knew was a bomb had been dropped and Sayoko was missing. They found her a few days later among the wounded who had been moved to a small island off Hiroshima. Her arms, legs and half her face were burned. The family moved to a nearby ammunition depot-turned-hospital where Sayoko could be treated. Hunt remembered the screaming of the injured. "Kill me," she said they pleaded. She said she doesn't remember how long that lasted, a few days, a few weeks. Eventually her sister got better. Several months later, she returned to Hiroshima. "Next door I had a girlfriend, she never came home," Hunt said. Ready to talk All of this came back to Hunt -- who changed her Japanese name after marrying an American and emigrating to the United States in 1955 -- when she saw Mayor Akiba this spring. Her son, Delmar Hunt, 39, has heard little of her story. But he has always known it was there. "I'm sure it changed her," he said. "But she never showed it." On this day, though, Hunt wants to talk. With her thin hair pulled into a tight ponytail and a gold teddy bear pinned to her left breast, she talks about that horrible day. When she is done her hands are shaking. Soon her mascara will be smeared. It doesn't matter. Now she wants to remember. ---- Nagasaki explosion shattered girl's family By Katya Cengel kcengel@courier-journal.com July 31, 2005, Louisville KY Courier-Journal http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050731/FEATURES/507310333&SearchID=73216271970632 It was summer, but 10-year-old Barbara Brown, then known as Keiko Ikari, was at school in Nagasaki, helping with Japan's war effort by using rocks to straighten wires, for what use she was not told. Brown, who now lives in Louisville, had heard about a bomb falling on Hiroshima three days earlier. But she wasn't worried. She was used to bombs. She was a fearless tomboy, so when her classmates spotted a plane that day, she rushed toward the window. The last thing she remembers was a blinding light. Later a soldier told her aunt what happened. Childhood changed At 11:02 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki. By the end of the year, it would be blamed for the deaths of 70,000 people. The blast threw Brown and six of her classmates from the building as the ceiling collapsed, crushing the rest of the children, she learned later. The soldier who found her -- face down, her legs covered by rubble, her back bare -- transported her to another school, where wounded children were being treated. "What is your name and address," a nurse asked Brown. She didn't answer. She couldn't. Neither her mouth nor her fingers would work. Her face was so swollen her eyes were just a crack. She drifted in and out of consciousness for several days. Then a nurse spotted a pin with a cross on it on her clothes and decided to send her to a Catholic orphanage. There Brown saw Junko -- her twin sister. Brown pulled on her sister's clothes weakly but couldn't talk and wasn't recognizable. Junko had been in a tunnel serving tea to soldiers when the bomb was dropped and was not visibly injured. The twins were not reunited officially until their aunt Tosea Yama, who had found Junko and taken her home, came to get Brown after she was identified several weeks later. On the rickshaw ride from the orphanage, Brown saw a horse's head hanging from the streetcar cables. Brown didn't have to ask what had happened to her father. She already knew he was dead. He had been working at the medical school that day and everything at the school was gone, both inside and out. They found his body later. They don't know where her mother was when the bomb went off and never found her body. The only immediate family Brown had left was Junko. But soon purple sores appeared on Junko's face. The spots, a sign of hypodermal bleeding related to the bombing, were also a sign of doom. Junko died a few weeks later. Brown's family was gone. Fear for the future In 1957 she married American Ronald Brown, and moved to Colorado and later Louisville. In 1963 she became an American citizen. Her daughter, Sherri Watts, thinks the bombing of Nagasaki made her mother less emotional. "Really, I've seen my mother cry once," said Watts, who lives in Lexington, Ky. "And I won't even say it was a cry. It was just a couple tears." That was back in 1988 at a family funeral. Two years ago, Brown, now 70, returned to Japan for a free check-up for atomic bomb survivors. Next time she wants to take Watts, 45, and her son, Sidney Brown, 41. They have only half her blood. But that is enough. She worries about their health and wonders whether radiation exposure she suffered from the bomb may have affected them. The hereditary effects on second-generation victims are still being studied. She has lost so much of her family to the bomb, she has trouble believing she and her children will be all right. "I don't think I live this long," Brown says. -------- korea Text of N. Korea foreign minister on nuclear crisis Sun Jul 31, 2005 2:21 AM ET (Reuters) http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticleSearch.aspx?storyID=35843+31-Jul-2005+RTRS&srch=nuclear SEOUL, July 31 - North Korea will rejoin the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept international inspections if the current nuclear standoff is resolved to its satisfaction, state media said on Sunday. Following is a partial text of an address by North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun to an Asia-Pacific regional forum in Laos on Friday, provided in English by Pyongyang's official news agency. Six-party talks are currently going on in Beijing in an attempt to resolve the standoff. (DPRK is the state's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. NPT stands for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, IAEA for the International Atomic Energy Agency.) Text begins: "The DPRK has exercised its utmost patience and flexibility in an effort to seek a peaceful negotiated solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. In order to bring about a radical turn in realising the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula it is necessary to remove the basic factor which compelled the DPRK to have access to nukes. Our nukes are not meant to strike the U.S. and we do not intend to keep them permanently. We will have neither reason nor necessity to possess even a single nuke if the U.S. agrees to completely remove its nuclear threat to the DPRK and opens the relations of peaceful co-existence with the DPRK. If the nuclear issue finds a satisfactory solution, we will return to the NPT and accept the IAEA inspection. The six-party talks should prove fruitful by having an in-depth discussion on the ways of denuclearising the whole Korean Peninsula on the principle of respect for sovereignty and equality under any circumstances. To this end, we proposed practical ways of completely solving the nuclear issue at the fourth round of the six-party talks, calling for reaching the common understanding that it is necessary to terminate the hostile relations between the DPRK and the U.S., legally and institutionally open the ties of peaceful co-existence, eliminate all the nukes from the North and the South of Korea, completely remove the possibility of introducing nukes and nuclear substance into it from outside and the U.S. is required to assure the DPRK of an unconditional non-use of nukes with a view to putting an end to the U.S. nuclear threat to the Korean Peninsula and its vicinity." ---- N. Korea vows to rejoin NPT if nuclear issue solved Sun Jul 31, 2005 1:09 AM ET (Reuters) http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticleSearch.aspx?storyID=28182+31-Jul-2005+RTRS&srch=nuclear SEOUL - North Korea will rejoin the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept international inspections if the current nuclear standoff is resolved, Radio Pyongyang said on Sunday. The radio, monitored by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, said Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun told an Asia-Pacific regional forum in Laos that his country was patiently seeking a way out of conditions that forced it to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Paek was speaking on Friday as North Korean delegates attended six-party talks in Beijing aimed at coaxing Pyongyang into scrapping its nuclear weapons programmes. "North Korea will rejoin the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if the nuclear issue is soundly resolved and is willing to accept inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency," state radio quoted Paek as saying. "For a fundamental switchover that would allow the denuclearisation of the entire Korean peninsula to take place, the fundamental element that forced us to own nuclear weapons must be removed," he added. Paek's comments echoed his country's top leader, Kim Jong-il, who told a South Korean envoy on June 17 that Pyongyang would be ready to rejoin the NPT if its conditions were met. In Beijing this past week North Korea has been sticking to demands for security guarantees and aid in return for abandoning nuclear weapons development, while Washington insists the atomic programmes be dismantled first. Pyongyang's other conditions include its removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and the lifting of all sanctions against it. Since March, it has also demanded that the six-party process be turned into disarmament talks that would also discuss U.S. nuclear weapons it says are deployed in South Korea. Half a century after the Korean War, Washington still keeps some 30,000 troops in the South but says it no longer has such weapons there. Pyongyang recently repeated calls for the United States to conclude a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-53 conflict. They remain technically at war. An unconfirmed Seoul newspaper report this week said the North had even rejected a South Korean offer of energy aid in exchange for scrapping the programmes. The JoongAng daily, citing an official in Seoul, said Pyongyang wanted the energy aid but it wanted light-water nuclear reactors too. The latest crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials accused Pyongyang of pursuing a clandestine weapons programme, prompting it first to expel U.N. nuclear inspectors and then, in January 2003, to withdraw from the NPT. North Korea announced last February 10 that it was now a nuclear power. The six parties to the Beijing talks -- the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China -- met for the sixth day on Sunday. Delegates were attempting to thrash out the text of a joint statement of principles, hoping to set a course for ending Pyongyang's nuclear programmes in return for aid and security assurances. -------- u.s. nuc weapons From Hiroshima to Armageddon: A Reading List. By George Perkovich Sunday, July 31, 2005 Washington Post; BW07 On Aug. 6, the world will mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Out of the countless books written since then to try to make sense of the forces unleashed by the mushroom cloud, here are one nuclear expert's choices of the best -- the essential atomic bookshelf. The first nuclear explosion, six decades ago, was code-named "Trinity." When that fiery cloud erupted over the New Mexican desert, its chief creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, famously intoned a verse from the sacred Hindu script the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Twenty-nine years later, Indian nuclear technologists sent coded word of their first nuclear-test explosion by telling their prime minister, "The Buddha smiled." The bomb brings people as close as they can get to divine power and rouses their imaginations accordingly. But as the best literature on nuclear issues suggests, protecting civilization from atomic destruction depends on secular wisdom and will. This was less a problem during the Cold War, when -- despite slogans like "better dead than red" -- the main nuclear antagonists did not let their core differences prevent them from negotiating rules to keep from blowing each other up. Today, however, many of the countries, sects and terrorist groups reaching for nuclear weapons are unwilling to find common earthly ground for establishing rules that all can live by. We still await books to give us the language and perspective to make sense of the post-Cold War nuclear challenge -- one in which the chances of planetary annihilation are lower but the chances of a regional nuclear war (India-Pakistan, Iran-Israel, U.S.-China in the Taiwan Strait) or a city-shattering catastrophe (al Qaeda getting its hands on a nuke) are far higher. The earliest books on nuclear weapons can be read as explorations of a modern Fall. The New Yorker devoted its Aug. 31, 1946, issue to John Hersey's Hiroshima , which described the hellish fury and suffering of atomic blast and fire. Masuji Ibuse's novel Black Rain (1965) makes the experience intimate through the plain words and deeds of unexpecting victims. Hiroshima's collective meaning continues to evolve -- was it original nuclear sin, righteous self-defense or something in between? The book that best captures the span of marshaled fact and argument is Hiroshima's Shadow (1996), a compilation of historical documents and essays by some of the 20th century's greatest American and international writers, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Outstanding stories continue to be published of the bomb-builders in the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, France, China, Israel and India. (North Korea and Pakistan's nuclear stories remain shrouded in secrecy.) Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) focuses on the American program and remains the best-told example of this genre. David Holloway's Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (1994) and Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb (1998) also deserve special mention. Each country treats its own bomb-builders as demigods, and this trend would continue were Iran, Saudi Arabia or any other country to acquire nuclear weapons. (The father of Pakistan's atomic program, the infamous A.Q. Khan, was basically a thief and gray-market procurement wizard who has helped spread nuclear weapons know-how around the world, but he's treated as a scientific genius in Pakistan.) As long as some nations are allowed to have nuclear weapons, other people are going to want heroes to build them too, whether their governments are good or bad. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 elicited the fear of doomsday in ways that Americans had never experienced. Art cannot rival the intense drama of real life as recorded in The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis , edited by Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May (2002). In these pages, we observe the varieties of human strength and weakness, folly and wisdom, that are brought to bear when men choose to wager the fate of whole peoples on actions taken with imperfect information. After Cuba, the Cold War antagonists spent trillions of dollars building elaborate arsenals and control systems to implement apocalyptic strategies of deterrence. In The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), Fred Kaplan elucidated how the nuclear strategists Herman Kahn, Thomas C. Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter and others believed that, by thinking the unthinkable, they were preventing it from occurring. Robert Jervis's able critique of the deterrence edifice in The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (1989) remains insightful, while Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (1998), edited by Stephen I. Schwartz, is the only comprehensive attempt to assess the full costs of the nuclear weapons enterprise in any country. Still, to read these accounts of the Cold War nuclear standoff today is to remember, or perhaps to discover, how surreal the world of nuclear deterrence is. Not all Cold War scenarios have faded, of course. In John A. McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), a brilliant, pensive, nuclear weapons designer named Ted Taylor guides McPhee through the shadows of the bomb. At one point, Taylor stands with McPhee at the foot of one of the World Trade Center towers and exclaims, "What an artifact that is!" The expert then explains the various ways that an unsophisticated, tiny (half a kiloton) bomb could destroy one or both towers. Back in 1973, this arms designer feared that the nuclear industry and the U.S. government were not taking seriously the security requirements necessary to keep terrorists from acquiring fissile materials. This was a time when a dramatic expansion of nuclear industry was "inevitable," as the industry and its many governmental champions say it is again today. A quarter-century later, the nuclear-power boom that we prepared for has not happened, and the terrorism that we did not prepare for has happened. The economy thrived without an expansion of nuclear energy, and terrorists took down the towers without the bomb. What we miss most in nuclear literature are the voices of the people long viewed as unworthy to hold the bomb. Michael Ondaatje's lyrical novel The English Patient (1992) pivots to its end when the British-Indian sapper, nicknamed Kip, hears on his scratchy radio that the United States has bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He sinks to his knees and screams, then rises, grabs his rifle and races into the ruined villa to accost the patient being cared for there. Kip is told that the burned man is not truly English. "I don't care," the colonial subject exclaims. "When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman." Ondaatje, from Sri Lanka, conveys a feeling deeply held in much of the world: "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." Today, religious sectarianism fuels terrorism and conflict in the Middle East and casts shadows over nonproliferation challenges in Iran and South Asia. Christian evangelism is strong among America's future nuclear-war planners at the U.S. Air Force Academy. But there is no reason to think that the apocalyptic power of nuclear materials can be channeled only by our tribe and not by children of other gods. In this pluralistic world, only secular politics can produce the concepts and language needed to identify the common ground on which passionate and wary groups can agree to live and let live. A new literature, in new voices, must be written to inform this new politics. · George Perkovich is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of "India's Nuclear Bomb." -------- MILITARY -------- afghanistan Huge Weapons Cache Seized in Afghanistan Sunday July 31, 2005 12:16 PM (AP) http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5179636,00.html KABUL, Afghanistan - Thousands of rockets, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition have been seized in central Afghanistan in the largest cache of militant weapons discovered in months, a government spokesman said Sunday. The arms were to be used to subvert crucial legislative elections on Sept. 18, Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Saher Azimi said. The raid in Ghazni province's Khogyani district Saturday netted some 2,000 surface-to-surface rockets, 3,000 mortar rounds, 500 artillery shells and 100 boxes of anti-aircraft bullets, he said. ``The enemy planned to use them to sabotage the elections,'' Azimi said. ``This was a very important operation to prevent the killing of civilians.'' He declined to give any other details about the find, including whether the Taliban were suspected to have stockpiled the cache or whether anyone had been arrested. Afghan officials have warned that the Taliban and al-Qaida have launched a joint campaign to disrupt the September elections - the next key step toward democracy after a quarter century of war. Since March, a major upsurge in fighting has left more than 800 people dead, more than half of them suspected insurgents, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. -------- iraq US plans to reduce Iraq force to 80,000 by mid-2006: report WASHINGTON (AFP) Jul 31, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050731160336.c788x9ev.html The United States plans to reduce its troop levels in Iraq to 80,000 soldiers by the middle of next year and to a maximum of 60,000 by the end of 2006, Newsweek magazine said Sunday. The Defence Department has drawn up a force reduction plan, the magazine said quoting two officials who took part in the work. There are currently about 140,000 American troops in Iraq. The plan would tie in with a force reduction laid out in a British Defence Ministry memo leaked to media last month. It said Washington hoped to hand over control of security to Iraqi forces in 14 of 18 Iraqi provinces by early 2006, allowing it to slash overall US-led troop levels to 66,000 from 176,000. General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said last week that the United States hopes to heavily reduce its troop numbers in 2006 if Iraq can keep to the timeline set out in the interim constitution, which calls for elections for a permanent government by December 15, 2005. -------- ACTIVISTS Louisville's Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemorations Louisville, KY Courier-Journal, July 31, 2005 http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050731/FEATURES/507310334&SearchID=73216271970632 # Tomorrow: Book signing and discussion with Arch Taylor, author of "Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima & Beyond: Subversion of Values," at Carmichael's Bookstore, 2720 Frankfort Ave. # Tuesday: Poetry and music for peace, The Rudyard Kipling, 422 W. Oak St., 6 p.m. # Wednesday: Concert for contemplation and nonviolence, Cathedral of the Assumption, 443 S. Fifth St., 7-9 p.m. # Thursday: Action-day visit to offices of mayors and congressional representatives. People do this on their own in cities across the country. For those in Louisville who want more information, call Terry Taylor, (502) 214-7322. # Friday: Public reading of the book "Hiroshima" by John Hersey, Fourth Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. # Saturday: Silent prayer honoring the victims of Hiroshima, 8 to 9 a.m., Friends Meeting House, 3050 Bon Air Ave. # Saturday: Candle-floating ceremony, Cherokee Park Lake, 8 p.m. Also, bus trip to Oak Ridge, Tenn., for anti-nuclear action at the Y-12 plant. Those making the trip must chip in for gas; call Pat Geier at 454-0019 for details. # Next Sunday: Soka Gakkai International Peace Conference, University of Louisville Shelby campus, Shelbyville Road, 2-4 p.m. # Aug. 8: Anti-nuclear film "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" and pizza, James Lees Presbyterian Church, 1741 Frankfort Ave., 6 p.m. # Aug. 9: Tolling of the bell in honor of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Christ Church Cathedral, 425 S. Second St., noon. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, go to www.interfaithpathstopeace.org or check with Terry Taylor, (502) 214-7322 or at director@interfaithpathstopeace.org