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Hiroshima: The tragedy of forgotten
history
By Nobuyuki Takahashi
A lone-wolf US congresswoman who opposes her
country's use of military force in Afghanistan and
elsewhere found common ground with those who gathered
this month to remember the United States' atomic bombing
of Japan 57 years ago.
Barbara Lee, the only
member of the United States Congress to vote against a
resolution three days after the September 11 terror
attacks giving President George W Bush power to launch
an open-ended war against terrorism, visited Japan ahead
of the 57th anniversary of her country's atomic bombing
of Hiroshima. The California congresswoman had stood
alone against 420 of her colleagues to oppose the
use-of-force resolution on the grounds that it could
pave the way for a military assault against innocent
civilians.
She was invited to Japan by a group
of academics and citizens who now share those fears,
having counted the civilian losses in Afghanistan and
heard threats by the Bush administration to expand
military action elsewhere in Asia.
On August 2,
the Texas-born congresswoman made a speech to 2,000
people at the Akasaka Prince Hotel in Tokyo. She
reiterated her stance that diplomacy, economic
investment and negotiation, not war, are the means to
peace. She insisted that terrorists should be judged by
the rule of law. And she noted that the US federal
budget proposed for next year by the Bush administration
earmarks nearly US$400 billion for defense, while the
country's overseas development assistance is only 0.1
percent of gross domestic product, lower than that of
other developed nations and representing a 50 percent
decline from the 1980 figure.
The next day,
three days ahead of the anniversary of the world's first
nuclear attack, Lee visited Hiroshima, where a single
bomb killed 140,000 people in 1945. She met Mayor
Tadatoshi Akiba and told him of her vision of
establishing a Peace Department in the US government,
and of her fear that the existing administration sees
the actual use of nuclear weapons as an option.
Moved to tears by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Museum that stands on the site of the nuclear blast of
August 6, 1945, Lee said it was impossible to understand
the full horror of nuclear warfare without visiting that
place, and she urged other US politicians to do so as
well. The museum displays the words of former mayor
Takashi Hiroka: "To engage now in debate whether the
dropping of the bombs was necessary is merely empty
argument. I want to leave that judgment up to the
political scientists and historians. We should rather
debate how to change the current situation with respect
to nuclear weapons."
It is now known that the
atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 had not finished
their work when their blasts killed 140,000 in Hiroshima
in 70,000 in Nagasaki. Their radioactive after-effects
caused leukemia, cancer and antenatal problems,
accumulating a death toll of 340,000 by the end of 1950.
Even today, all over Japan, 320,000 people suffer pain
and disease attributed to the fallout.
One of
them is 77-year-old Sunao Tsuboi. He was 20 when the
bombs fell, and since then he has endured cancers and
related diseases. He has dedicated his life to the
worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons.
The day
Enola Gay dropped its bomb on Hiroshima, Tsuboi was on
his way to university a kilometer from the target point.
Blown off his feet by the blast, he had time to see
himself surrounded by black fog before he lapsed into a
coma for 40 days. Since then, doctors have despaired for
his life a hundred times, and he has been admitted to
hospital eight times. During his battle against death,
he became an executive of the Japan Confederation of
A-Bomb and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization in Hiroshima,
which is dedicated to preventing subsequent generations
from suffering the same experience.
Tsuboi and
other survivors of the 1945 nuclear bombings met with
Lee and found common ground. All denounced last
September's terrorist attacks on the United States while
at the same time disapproving of the Bush
administration's disregard, when it launched its war of
retaliation, for the inevitable innocent victims of that
campaign.
The New York Times on July 21 reported
that 396 people in 11 sites in Afghanistan had been
killed by US forces relying too heavily on inaccurate
information. Worse, the paper said: "The evidence
suggests that many civilians have been killed by air
strikes hitting precisely the target they were aimed at
... Americans did not carefully differentiate between
civilians and military targets." According to research
by Mark Herold, an economics professor at the University
of New Hampshire, more than 3,000 Afghan civilians have
been killed by US-led military activities in their
country since last October, while many others have been
maimed for life.
On August 6, at a ceremony
marking the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima,
Mayor Akiba stated that the world's tendency to forget
that hellish day 57 years ago increased the potential
for the renewed use of nuclear weapons. He deplored the
cycle of retaliation and hatred, noting that those who
suffered the consequences of September 11 were
overwhelmingly disadvantaged people, women, children and
the elderly, at the sites of conflict in Afghanistan,
the Middle East, India and Pakistan.
Akiba
strongly urged that Bush visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki to
witness what nuclear weapons do to human beings. Many
fear that after its unilateral withdrawal from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and after increasing its
military budget to a higher rate than the US average
during the Cold War, the Bush administration is poised
to lead the world into a new arms race, including
deployment of nuclear weapons.
Those who grieved
last September at the tragedy that hit innocent people
in New York's World Trade Center must not stand by as
the same thing happens to innocent people in Afghanistan
and elsewhere in Asia. As Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi
Akiba said: "Forgotten history will repeat itself."
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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