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Visiting a park is not paying respects: the appalling failure of the G7 to act on nuclear disarmament

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By Linda Pentz Gunter

Seven super-hypocrites took a walk in a park recently and called it paying respects. If this sounds like the opening to a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, it may as well be. Because nothing tangible or real came of this caper.

The park was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the visitors were the leaders of the G7 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Afterwards, US president, Joe Biden, tweeted: “Today, my fellow G7 Leaders and I paid a visit to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park where we paid our respects.”

Walking in a park isn’t paying respects to the dead of Hiroshima, where at least 140,000 were killed (although estimates have never been certain) when the United States dropped the first of its two atomic bombs on Japanese citizens. 

Abolishing nuclear weapons is paying respects.

And the G7 haven’t paid. The US has never apologized for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. France and the UK (as well as the US) have not only never apologized, but have refused to acknowledge the true extent of the harm caused by their decades of atomic testing. Germany and Italy have not kicked the US nuclear weapons bases out of their countries.

At the close of the G7 summit, hosted by Japan and deliberately held in Hiroshima as a reminder of the horrific consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, the member countries released a joint statement — grandiosely entitled “G7 Leaders’ Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament”. They prefaced it by saying they were issuing it in “a solemn and reflective moment’. 

But the statement, which never once acknowledges the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) as the only genuine instrument for nuclear disarmament, is even worse than the “thoughts and prayers” offered after a mass shooting. In its protracted finger-pointing, principally directed at Russia, which is mentioned 11 times, the statement lays out a pathway toward the provocation of yet more violence, not disarmament, making the likelihood of nuclear war greater.

And with breathtaking hypocrisy, while also castigating North Korea, Iran and China, it conveniently fails to mention US plans to spend $1 trillion on revamping its nuclear weapons arsenal. 

Instead, the G7 claim that as long as nuclear weapons exist — and they will with these leaders in charge — they “should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression and prevent war and coercion,” a failure demonstrated all too clearly by the situation in Ukraine.

As the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said in a press release after the G7 summit, the leaders “are evading their own responsibility for the current threat nuclear weapons pose to everyone.”……………………………………………………….. more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/05/28/visiting-a-park-is-not-paying-respects/

May 29, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, weapons and war