Hiroshima survivors mark anniversary

This video from Japan is called Anti-War, Anti-Nuke Parade in Hiroshima city August 6, 2011.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

50,000 mark anniversary at peace park

Monday 06 August 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

A bell tolled to begin the moment of silence today while tens of thousands marked the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Ageing survivors, relatives, government officials and foreign delegates joined hands in prayer during an annual ceremony at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park commemorating the US bombing of the city nearly seven decades ago.

“On this day, in this city, let me proclaim again: there must never be another nuclear attack, never,” said UN high representative for disarmament affairs Angela Kane, reading a message from secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon.

“Such weapons have no legitimate place in our world. Their elimination is both morally right and a practical necessity in protecting humanity.”

A US B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on August 6 1945, turning the city into a nuclear inferno and killing an estimated 140,000.

Around 50,000 people attended the official ceremony, while thousands of others joined demonstrations, marches, forums and concerts across the city, which is a focal point for the global movement against nuclear weapons.

In separate rallies more than 7,000 people including atomic bomb survivors and evacuees from the Fukushima area staged anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Usually sedate Japan has seen a string of anti-nuclear protests since Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda ordered the restart of two reactors in June.

Many atomic bomb survivors, known as “hibakusha,” oppose both military and civil use of nuclear power, pointing to the tens of thousands who were killed instantly in the Hiroshima blast and the many more who later died from radiation sickness and cancers linked to the attack.

“We want to work together with people in Fukushima and join our voices calling for no more nuclear victims,” said 70-year-old atomic bomb survivor Toshiyuki Mimaki.

Demonstrators marched around the headquarters of Chugoku Electric Power, a regional utility which has reactors of its own, chanting: “Noda should quit. We oppose nuclear power.”

Weekly demonstrations outside the prime minister’s official residence have drawn thousands, while a rally in west Tokyo last month saw a crowd that swelled to 170,000.

Peace campaigners called on Britain and the rest of the world to disarm all nuclear weapons today on the 67th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima: here.

Hiroshima nuclear horror remembered

This video is called Nazım Hikmet & Joan Baez – Hiroshima.

By Rory MacKinnon in Britain:

Hiroshima horror remains with us

Sunday 05 August 2012

Solemn mourners will gather tomorrow to mark 67 years since an atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima – and to warn that the threat of nuclear annihilation is still with us today.

Rallies across Britain and the world are being held to mark the date when the United States government became the only power in history to devastate another people with nuclear bombs – the exhausted civilian population of wartime Japan.

In London demonstrators will gather at noon in Camden’s Tavistock Square, where a Japanese cherry tree stands in memory of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, site of a second bombing on August 9 1945 in the last major act of WWII.

Speakers will include 106-year-old lifelong peace activist Hetty Bower, researcher Peter Burt of the Nuclear Information Service, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and Green MEP Jean Lambert.

The 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted in strict secrecy.

Only Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett evaded military censors to report “a warning to the world” from Hiroshima – the horrifying, slow radiation burns that would bring the city’s death toll to between 100,000 and 180,000.

But Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Kate Hudson told the Morning Star that the world could not afford to treat Hiroshima as a thing of the past.

She said activists in Japan were “twinning” the ceremony with the memory of last year’s Fukushima disaster which left nearly 80,000 locals in exile from their irradiated hometown.

Ms Hudson also pointed to the fact that the use of depleted uranium munitions during the Iraq war has been linked by researchers to a swathe of birth defects.

“Every year we remember that the only country that has used nuclear weapons is the United States.”

And she warned that though generations had passed since Hiroshima and the superpower stand-offs of the cold war the danger now is that world powers are becoming complacent about their own nuclear arsenals or accepting them as irreversible, she said.

“So long as nuclear weapons exist there’s still an increasing chance that they will be used – by accident or design.

“It’s criminally irresponsible,” Ms Hudson said.

Other commemorative events are planned outside the capital.

In Brighton and Hove the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom will meet tomorrow evening in Queens Park for a candlelight vigil “to remember the dead from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear tests and accidents.”

In Derby CND and others will gather at Rolls-Royce’s Raynesway, which manufactures reactors for the Trident fleet of nuclear-armed submarines.

In Glasgow the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Faslane Peace Camp will launch paper lanterns on the Clyde River, 25 miles from where the Trident fleet are based.

Japanese officials pledged to seek a society less reliant on nuclear energy today as the country marked the 67th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki: here.

Events to commemorate the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki took place at centres across Yorkshire and the north today, writes Peter Lazenby: here.

Radioactive cesium found in Japan’s fish, seawater: here.

From Hiroshima to Iran, by Noam Chomsky

This video says about itself:

Hiroshima child- Fazil Say – Nazim Hikmet

Hiroshima Child

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I’m only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I’m seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play

by Nazım Hikmet

Kız Çocuğu

By Noam Chomsky in the USA:

In Hiroshima‘s Shadow

Thursday, 02 August 2012 09:25

August 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

This year‚ Aug. 6 memorials have special significance. They take place shortly before the 50th anniversary of, “the most dangerous moment in human history,” in the words of the historian and John F. Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., referring to the Cuban missile crisis.

Graham Allison writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that Kennedy, “ordered actions that he knew would increase the risk not only of conventional war but also nuclear war,” with a likelihood of perhaps 50 percent, he believed, an estimate that Allison regards as realistic.

Kennedy declared a high-level nuclear alert that authorized, “NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots … (or others) … to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb.”

None were more shocked by the discovery of missiles in Cuba than the men in charge of the similar missiles that the U.S. had secretly deployed in Okinawa six months earlier, surely aimed at China, at a moment of elevated regional tensions.

Kennedy took Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, “right to the brink of nuclear war and he looked over the edge and had no stomach for it,” according to Gen. David Burchinal, then a high-ranking official in the Pentagon planning staff. One can hardly count on such sanity forever.

Khrushchev accepted a formula that Kennedy devised, ending the crisis just short of war. The formula‚ boldest element, Allison writes, was, “a secret sweetener that promised the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was resolved.” These were obsolete missiles that were being replaced by far more lethal, and invulnerable, Polaris submarines.

In brief, even at high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, it was felt necessary to reinforce the principle that U.S. has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, some aimed at China or at the borders of Russia, which had previously placed no missiles outside the USSR. Justifications of course have been offered, but I do not think they withstand analysis.

An accompanying principle is that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent U.S. invasion. The plans for Kennedy‚ terrorist programs, Operation Mongoose, called for, “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime,” in October 1962, the month of the missile crisis, recognizing that, “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention.”

The terrorist operations against Cuba are commonly dismissed by U.S. commentators as insignificant CIA shenanigans. The victims, not surprisingly, see matters rather differently. We can at last hear their voices in Keith Bolender‚ “Voices from the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba.”

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Allison offers them as, “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general.” In particular, today‚ conflicts with Iran and China.

Disaster was perilously close in 1962, and there has been no shortage of dangerous moments since. In 1973, in the last days of the Arab-Israeli war, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war. There have been innumerable cases when human intervention aborted nuclear attack only moments before launch after false reports by automated systems. There is much to think about on Aug. 6.

Allison joins many others in regarding Iran’s nuclear programs as the most severe current crisis, “an even more complex challenge for American policymakers than the Cuban missile crisis,” because of the threat of Israeli bombing.

The war against Iran is already well underway, including assassination of scientists and economic pressures that have reached the level of, “undeclared war,” in the judgment of the Iran specialist Gary Sick.

Great pride is taken in the sophisticated cyberwar directed against Iran. The Pentagon regards cyberwar as, “an act of war,” that authorizes the target, “to respond using traditional military force,” The Wall Street Journal reports. With the usual exception: not when the U.S. or an ally is the perpetrator.

Defense Companies Use Congress to Save Their Profits, No Matter What. Dina Rasor, Truthout in the USA: “All the members of Congress will talk a good game when it comes to going after waste and fraud in the Pentagon in their campaign literature to look tough when the next overpriced weapon or spare part hits the press, but they are counting on the Pentagon contractors to keep them fat in campaign contributions and to make sure that the contractors have got the Congress’ back”: here.

From Hiroshima to Fukushima

This video is called Hiroshima Atom Bomb Impact.

From the World Socialist Web Site:

From Hiroshima to Fukushima: The political background to the nuclear disaster in Japan

By a guest contributor

23 June 2011

This is the first of a two-part article on the historical antecedents of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, the meltdown of the nuclear reactor in Fukushima continues to alarm people all around the world. The world witnessed the events virtually live as one reactor building after another exploded and one of the planet’s most high-tech countries tried to quell the 770 000 terabecquerel radioactivity unleashed from the meltdown with bucket and hose. Japan was desperate to convince the world that everything was under control.

Following the media reports from Japan, many people ask themselves why governments chose to gamble on nuclear power in such an earthquake-prone country—after the US and France, Japan is the world’s third largest nuclear power nation—and why the people of this land appeared to be so indifferent to the dangers of nuclear energy.

These are the questions we want to pursue.

Eisenhower’s change of course

The propagation of nuclear technology in Japan was a direct consequence of the US military’s endeavours to wield influence over the country’s development immediately after the Second World War. Shortly after the end of the war, the US began to transform Japan into a bulwark against the Soviet Union. This policy was intensified following the taking of power by Stalinist regimes in China and Korea. Having lost the monopoly on nuclear weapons, it became necessary for the US to make Japan receptive to nuclear power.

On April 20, the Japanese Mainichi Shimbun newspaper wrote: “During the eighth General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1954, former US President Eisenhower held a speech, entitled “Atoms for Peace”. His strategy was to assign relevant technologies to other countries in order to integrate them into the US power bloc, thereby securing hegemony in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. That Japan, the only country to have suffered the full force of nuclear weapons, would agree to embrace nuclear technology was of enormous strategic importance“.

The CIA agent, “Podam”

The same newspaper article quoted Tetsuo Arima, media researcher and professor of social science at the University of Waseda, concerning the Japanese pro-nuclear politician and media magnate, Matsutaro Shoriki: “After the world war, the CIA worked closely with Mr. Shoriki to advance the campaign for nuclear energy in Japan. It did so because this man had not only the necessary connections to politics and economics, but also the power to mobilise his newspaper and television empire”.

During years of research in the United States National Archives and Records Administration, Arima discovered 474 pages of CIA files, documenting in detail the progress of the introduction of nuclear technology to Japan. From one of these, he quotes the following: “Relations with Podam have now progressed to the stage where outright cooperation can be initiated”.

“Podam” was the code name for the member of parliament and CIA asset, Matsutaro Shoriki, who would later become president of the atomic energy authority he founded, as well as minister for science and technology. Shoriki is today regarded as father of Japan’s nuclear power.

The Japanese Goebbels

Shoriki’s career would have been unthinkable without his close relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon. As head of the political police in fascist Japan before and during the war, he was particularly responsible for hunting down and crushing the unions, communists, socialists and opponents of the war. Later he became a member of the upper house of parliament and head of the information department of the interior ministry, which was responsible for ideological warfare and propaganda. He had become owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun as early as 1924. This newspaper was to become the main mouthpiece for the warmongers and the military dictatorship in the 1930s and 1940s. Yomiuri Shimbun is today Japan’s largest newspaper with a circulation of about ten million. It can be said that Shoriki was the Joseph Goebbels of Japan.

Following the war, he was imprisoned as a major war criminal for three years. However, his case was never brought to prosecution. Instead, he was released without trial. The CIA and the US Defense Department needed his skills and influence to implement Eisenhower’s policy in Japan. Secret US government files show that the CIA and the Pentagon provided funds, amounting to tens of millions of dollars, for the construction of the Shoriki media empire—he was also the founder of the first private television broadcaster, Japan TV, as well as Japan’s professional baseball league.

Part 2 of this article is here.

Japan: Huge protest against nuclear power: here.

The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up: How the US hid shocking footage for decades: here.

Britain: Blockade of nuclear plant planned: here.

USA: As Nebraska’s two nuclear power plants on the Missouri River are threatened by rising floodwaters, an AP report reveals that three-quarters of US plants are leaking radioactive tritium: here.

Jeremy Corbyn looks back at the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the hands of the US government: here.

Desmond Tutu, Project Syndicate: “Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars on modernization of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of United Nations disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of these instruments of terror seems all but inevitable”: here.