The human impact of ”Trinity” and a thousand other nuuclear bomb tests on American soil
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75 Years Later, Victims of Nuclear Bomb Tests on U.S. Soil Still Seek Justice, https://truthout.org/articles/75-years-later-victims-of-nuclear-bomb-tests-on-u-s-soil-still-seek-justice/, BY Satya Vatti, Globetrotter / Independent Media Institute, November 15, 2020 They thought the world was coming to an end,” Genoveva Peralta Purcella explains.
On July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States. The detonation was code-named “Trinity.” It is the day that would seal the fate of many Americans living in the surrounding areas for generations to come. Seventy miles from what became known as ground zero—the Trinity test site—Genoveva’s family lived on a ranch just outside the village of Capitan in New Mexico. Genoveva was born the year after the blast. Now 74 years old, she solemnly recalls how her family remembers the day that would change their lives forever. Genoveva’s sisters had come to visit their father and pregnant mother at the ranch. At precisely 5:30 a.m., as dawn broke, the sky suddenly went pitch dark. Having no other point of reference, they mistook the abnormally loud roaring and rumbling in the sky for thunder. The entire house began to shake. Fear-stricken, the family huddled together in a corner. When the sky cleared, her father stepped outside the house and found himself being showered with a white powder. The powder was everywhere and covered everything around them. Nothing escaped it, not the cows the family had raised, or the vegetables in the garden, or the rainwater they stored in the absence of running water. Like other families who went through this experience, Genoveva’s family also dusted off the powder and consumed their vegetables and the stored water. The blast produced so much energy that it incinerated everything it touched and formed a fireball that rose to more than 12 kilometers into the atmosphere. The fireball created ash that snowed over the communities surrounding the blast site. The people did not know it then, but this ash that covered thousands of square miles was the radioactive fallout from the explosion. Dread gripped the communities in Tularosa Basin who either witnessed or experienced the phenomenon they could not make sense of. Meanwhile, the immediate reaction of the staff of the Manhattan Project, which created the bomb, was of “surprise, joy, and relief.” Paul Pino, Genoveva’s cousin, who was born nine years after the Trinity blast, says that his family, which lived 33 miles from the blast site, was one of many who were unaware of what had transpired on that day. In the days and months leading up to the blast, U.S. government officials did not notify anyone who lived in the region about the imminent nuclear bomb test. Nobody in the Tularosa Basin was evacuated to safety. In the aftermath of the nuclear test, officials began to cement a false narrative into the consciousness of the nation; the region was remote and uninhabited. Tens of thousands of people, in fact, lived in the Tularosa Basin in 1945. For a long time, the people of the basin believed that the blast was an ammunition explosion. “We were lied to by the government,” said Pino. It takes 24,000 years for half of the radioactive plutonium used in the Trinity bomb to decay. The people of the region have inhaled and ingested radioactive particles for 75 years because of environmental contamination. Those in power refuse to accept responsibility and take any corrective action. To this day, there have been no cleanup efforts. Radiation exposure has caused high rates of aggressive cancers, thyroid disease, infant mortality, and other health abnormalities in generations of families in the Tularosa Basin region. The scale of the health impact cannot be determined accurately as long-term epidemiological studies have only been undertaken recently. The findings of the latest research studies by the National Cancer Institute were published in September 2020 in the journal Health Physics. “There were 10 of us; now only one is surviving,” Genoveva says, speaking of herself. She has lost everyone in her family to cancer. In a country without universal health care, debt from medical expenses has brought economic ruin to the communities near the Trinity site. “All the pain and suffering we have had to endure, and not a speck of help from the government,” Pino says. “Meanwhile, it has spent trillions on thousands of nuclear weapons.” Genoveva’s story is not an exceptional one. It is the story of tens of thousands of families in the United States. More than 1,000 nuclear bomb tests have been conducted in the U.S. between 1945 and 1992. A total of 100 above-ground tests were conducted at the Nevada test site from 1951 to 1962. The winds carried radioactive fallout for thousands of kilometers. Hundreds of millions of people living in the U.S. have been exposed to varying levels of radiation over the years, unknown to them. New Mexico was downwind of the Nevada test site, and the people living there continued to be exposed to radioactivity for decades after the initial exposure during the Trinity nuclear test. People from the impacted communities founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005 to fight for justice for the survivors and their descendants. Tina Cordova, one of the group’s cofounders, was shocked to find out that a few of the impacted states neighboring New Mexico were receiving financial compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act since 1990. The communities in New Mexico, however, were left out of the act. When asked why, Cordova responds with, “It is the billion-dollar question. I think we are being left out because we are mainly Mexican Hispanics, Natives, and Latinos. We are minorities and we are poor.” Cordova herself is the fourth generation in her family to have cancer. She has joined with others like her to educate and organize the affected communities, to fight to establish the truth. “In their [the government’s] rush to bomb Japan, we were sacrificed in the process. We were enlisted in the service of our country, unknowing, unwilling, and remain uncompensated.” |
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Hibakusha renew their push for the abolition of nuclear weapons
Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Abe Shizuko was reacting to the October 24 ratification of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The accord will take effect in January – although none of the world’s nuclear powers are members.
Nevertheless, hibakusha, which is what the atomic bomb survivors are called in Japan, see the treaty as a victory for their cause. “I take pride in the fact that the decision is a result of the united little voices of individual hibakusha,” says 93-year-old Abe.
On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb for the first time in human history. Its target was Hiroshima, where 18-year-old Abe was helping to dismantle buildings to prevent the spread of fires caused by air raids during World War Two. Abe was working just 1.5 kilometers away from ground zero. She suffered severe burns on the right side of her body and face, and has been through 18 surgeries.
“The operations were very painful and difficult. There wasn’t enough anesthetic back in those days, so doctors could not give me supplemental relief even if I started feeling pain. I tolerated the pain through a strong hope to restore my body,” Abe recalls.
The bomb left keloid scars on her face and the right side of her body. In photographs from when she was younger, Abe always looks down, or shows only her left side.
A-bomb survivors call the 10-year period following the world’s first atomic bombing “the blank decade.” That is because people who were injured had little to no medical or financial support. At the same time, they were exposed to severe prejudice and discrimination.
Abe says she was once nicknamed “Red Ogre” because of her scars. “My wound did not heal. My body weakened. I was in poverty. Many people stared at me only just to satisfy their curiosity, because they wanted to know what a hibakusha looked like. They did not feel sympathy for me. They bullied me. The suffering that I went through, and the emotional wound, will never go away.”
In 1956, Abe joined other atomic bomb survivors to form a delegation. They traveled to Tokyo to appeal to the then prime minister and government officials to offer relief for victims, and support their call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Those efforts led to the establishment of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization.
As the Cold War progressed, the hibakusha became disheartened. Even though they were speaking out about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the world was not listening. Nuclear experiments were being carried out repeatedly, and the arms race took off.
“It was really a difficult time for our campaign,” Abe remembers. “We felt as if we were yelling out while trying to survive in rough waves on a dark night.”
Abe carried a grudge against the US, but started to feel a change of heart almost 20 years after the bombing. In 1964, she went to the US and Europe for what was known as the Peace Pilgrimage. It was an opportunity for A-bomb survivors to speak about their personal experiences in front of audiences. Abe stayed at a private home with local hosts in the US, and she was deeply touched by their tender-heartedness.
“They listened attentively to my stories and said to me, ‘It must have been very hard for you. You’ve been through a lot. We’re so sorry for you,'” Abe recalls. “I realized we should never let anyone fall victim to nuclear weapons, regardless of what nationality you are. Americans or anybody.”
The voices of the hibakusha spread to all corners of the world, slowly but steadily.
These days, the average age of hibakusha is more than 83 years old, and there are fewer chances to hear their direct accounts. Some of them, like Taniguchi Sumiteru, played a direct role in the recent ratification of the UN treaty that bans nuclear weapons.
Taniguchi died three years ago, but he put the wheels in motion with a campaign that collected signatures to demand an international convention to ban nuclear weapons. He worked on that until the last moment of his life.
Taniguchi was 16 when he was exposed to the second atomic bomb that the US dropped on Japan. He was working as a postman in Nagasaki. A picture that shows the red burned flesh on his back shocked the world.
He delivered an impassioned speech at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the UN’s New York headquarters: “Please don’t turn your eyes away from me. Please look at me again. I have survived miraculously, but for me, to ‘live’ was to ‘endure the agony’. Bearing the cursed scars of the atomic bomb all over our bodies, we the hibakusha continue to live in pain.”
“For humans to live as humans, not even one nuclear weapon should be allowed to exist on earth. I cannot die in peace until I witness the last nuclear warhead eliminated from this world,” said Taniguchi.
Hibakusha and their supporters gathered at Nagasaki Peace Park shortly after last month’s treaty ratification to share their joy. Among them was Okuma Yuka, a member of an activist group that calls itself “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Messengers”.
Okuma took part in the signature-collecting campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons after being deeply shocked by the image of a young Taniguchi in the aftermath of the atomic bombing. Her great-grandmother was a hibakusha but didn’t talk much about her experience. The photograph of Taniguchi brought it home to Okuma that suffering had occurred in her own family.
“I believe the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is definitely an important step forward,” Okuma says. “I expect that this will become a good opportunity for us to move toward a world that is completely free of nuclear weapons.”
The nuclear launch authorizer’s guide to staying calm at election times
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The nuclear launch authorizer’s guide to staying calm on election night, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists By Matt Field | November 3, 2020 Their thumbs are calloused from refreshing Nate Silver’s twitter feed too many times. Their nerves are frayed from too much time spent figuring out what’s going on in places like Lackawanna County. (I know you know where it is.) Americans are heading into this Election Day full of anxiety and stress. For many, the stakes of today’s contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden couldn’t be higher. Anxiety-inducing information will be arriving in social media feeds, on TV screens, and on news websites at a furious pace later today. But it’s important for people to take a moment to breathe, a second to ease their worried minds. Perhaps they might consider a few tips from the annals of nuclear weapons history, insights from times when people, through relatively calm rationality, were able to avert the worst in the highest of high stress situations.
“The sirens sounded very loudly, and I just sat there for a few seconds staring at the screen with the word ‘launch’ displayed in bold red letters,” Petrov told the BBC in 2013. Petrov watched as his systems warned him of another four launches—for a total of five incoming Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. Only minutes remained before they would reach their targets. “The computers changed their alerts from launch to missile strike.” But Petrov decided not to trust the computer. He reported a false alarm to his superiors, forestalling a possible Soviet retaliatory strike. “But I myself was not sure until the very last moment,” he said. Making an educated guess, Petrov decided that the alerts were wrong. In a real war, the United States would launch a massive attack on Soviet defenses, Petrov had been told. “When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” he told The Washington Post. Petrov, who died in 2017, is often credited with preventing a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis and bad advice. For a little over a month in the fall of 1962, the world stood on edge as the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba–just 90 miles from the United States. Coming a little more than a year after the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion, in which US-trained Cubans made a miserably failed attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened at a time of sky-high tensions between the Cold War enemies. When US spy plane photos showed Soviet missile installations in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy had to do something. He’d taken a tough line on Cuba and the Soviet Union as a presidential candidate, after all. Kennedy’s advisors, including his brother Robert Kennedy, had a lot of suggestions. The advisors developed proposals, including a strike on the Soviet missile facilities or a full-on invasion of the island involving tens of thousands of troops. Luckily for the world, Kennedy didn’t invade, which could have ignited a nuclear war. He didn’t go with his brother’s idea to stage a false-flag attack on a US base to justify an invasion, either. According to a review of his book in The New Yorker, historian Martin J. Sherwin believes Adlai Stevenson, the US representative to the United Nations and a two-time presidential candidate, successfully urged Kennedy to negotiate. The Soviets pulled their missiles off the island, and the United States agreed not to try and invade Cuba again and pulled its own missiles from Turkey………. Tip: The web will be flooded with election-related disinformation today. There could be false claims about voting irregularities such as ballots being thrown away, or of people voting twice. Trump himself has been making false claims about a rigged election or voter fraud for much of the election cycle. When you see something that causes you to break out in cold sweats, check another source. The presidential elections are a high stakes event. It’s understandable to be nervous. But remember that first reports can be and often are incorrect. Through it all, try to maintain the calm of a Stanislav Petrov and the wisdom of Adlai Stevenson. You may not save the world from Armageddon, but just maybe, you’ll preserve your own sanity. https://thebulletin.org/2020/11/the-nuclear-launch-authorizers-guide-to-staying-calm-on-election-night/ |
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Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour revives the debate on the President’s unchecked nuclear authority
Trump’s Virus Treatment Revives Questions About Unchecked Nuclear AuthorityEven before the president was given mood-altering drugs, there was a movement to end the commander in chief’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. NYT, 12 Oct 20, By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad,
President Trump’s long rants and seemingly erratic behavior last week — which some doctors believe might have been fueled by his use of dexamethasone, a steroid, to treat Covid-19 — renewed a long-simmering debate among national security experts about whether it is time to retire one of the early inventions of the Cold War: the unchecked authority of the president to launch nuclear weapons.
Mr. Trump has publicly threatened the use of those weapons only once in his presidency, during his first collision with North Korea in 2017. But it was his decision not to invoke the 25th Amendment and turn control over to Vice President Mike Pence last week that has prompted concern inside and outside the government.
Among those who have long argued for the need to rethink presidents’ “sole authority” powers are former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, considered the dean of American nuclear strategists, who has cited the fragility of a nuclear-weapons control chain and the fear that it can be subject to errors of judgment or failure to ask the right questions under the pressure of a warning of an incoming attack.
Mr. Trump’s critics have long questioned whether his unpredictable statements and contradictions pose a nuclear danger. But the concerns raised last week were somewhat different: whether a president taking mood-altering drugs could determine whether a nuclear alert was a false alarm.
That question is a new one. The military’s Strategic Command often conducts drills that simulate actual but inconclusive evidence that the United States may be under nuclear attack. Such simulations drive home the reality that even a president asking all the right questions could make a mistake. But they rarely simulate what would happen if the president’s judgment was impaired.
“A nuclear crisis can happen at any time,” Tom Z. Collina, the policy director at the Ploughshares Fund, a private group that seeks to defuse nuclear threats, noted last week in an opinion piece. “If such a crisis takes place when a president’s thinking is compromised for any reason,” he added, “the results could be catastrophic.”
Traditionally, presidents have temporarily conveyed authority — including nuclear launch authority — to the vice president when they anticipated being under anesthesia. Ronald Reagan took that step in 1985, and George W. Bush did so in 2002 and 2007. There was no indication that Mr. Trump was unconscious, but there was reason to be concerned that the cocktail of drugs he was given could impair his judgment to make the most critical decisions entrusted to a president.
Last week in telephone interviews with Fox News and Fox Business Network, Mr. Trump said he was no longer taking experimental medications but was still on dexamethasone, which doctors say can produce euphoria, bursts of energy and even a sense of invulnerability. On Friday, he told Fox News he was off the drug, which he appears to have taken for less than a week.
But during that week, his prolific Twitter activity and rambling interviews led many to question whether the drugs had accentuated his erratic tendencies. His doctors’ refusal to describe with any specificity his condition or treatment only played up the concern.
“The history of obfuscating the medical condition of presidents is as old as the Republic,” said Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the nuclear command-and-control chain. “The issue here is that the dex” — shorthand for dexamethasone — “can make you paranoid and delusional.”
“We don’t know how much he was given,” Mr. Narang said. “And if he gives an order in the middle of the night, and no one is there to stop him, we are dependent on his military aide not to transmit the order or the duty officer at the national military command center to stop it.”………….
The “sole authority” tradition is unusual among the world’s nine nuclear powers; even Russia requires two out of three designated officials to sign off on a nuclear launch. While the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war, the speed of bombers and missiles made clear during the Cold War that there would be no time to convene Congress or mount a defense. As a result, Congress began delegating to the president all powers to use nuclear weapons during Harry S. Truman’s administration. He is the only president who has ordered a nuclear strike……..
“The last finger I would want on the nuclear button,” said Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, “is that of a president on drugs.”……… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/us/politics/trump-nuclear-weapons-coronavirus.html
After 4 decades of Plowshares Actions, It’s Nuclear Warfare that Should Be on Trial — Not Activists
Most of the Kings Bay Plowshares still await sentencing. Mom was sentenced to time served by video conference in June — a surreal and dislocating experience that is now more and more common in our criminal justice system. Her co-defendants opted to postpone sentencing in hopes that it could be in person, but it is unclear if that will happen.
After 4 decades of Plowshares Actions, It’s Nuclear Warfare that Should Be on Trial — Not Activists, Forty years ago, the Plowshares Eight sparked a movement of nuclear disarmers that continues to take responsibility for weapons of mass destruction.
Before him were eight activists, including two priests and a nun. As Judge Salus tried to preside over the government’s prosecution of them for their trespass onto — and destruction of — private property, the eight were trying to put nuclear warfare, nuclear weapons, nuclear policy and U.S. exceptionalism on trial.
That was 40 years ago this week — ancient history by some measures. And no one reading this will be surprised to find that the eight were found guilty and the human family is still threatened by almost 15,000 nuclear warheads. So, four decades later, why isn’t nuclear warfare on trial?
They are the crime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians 75 years ago. They have littered the landscape with radioactive waste. They have cost the United States more than $5 trillion from the public coffers. They are the apocalyptic nightmare on hair-trigger alert that haunt our children’s dreams.
On September 9, 1980, my father, Philip Berrigan, along with his brother Daniel, John Schuchardt, Dean Hammer, Elmer Maas, Molly Rush, Sister Anne Montgomery, and Father Carl Kabat, gained entry into the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Once inside the complex, they poured blood over two nuclear weapons’ nose cones, and used household hammers to dent the metal. They came to be known as The Plowshares Eight. Continue reading
Bob Halstead has done a great job defending Nevada from nuclear waste dumping at Yucca Mountain
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Nevada grateful for Halstead’s many years fighting nuclear waste, Las Vegas Sun , Monday, Sept. 7, 2020 On this Labor Day, t
 he Sun salutes a recently retired Nevada leader whose three decades of tireless public service unquestionably made a difference in our state.
Bob Halstead, who stepped down last month as the executive director for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, will be long remembered for his staunch defense of the state against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project. It’s scary to think where Nevada might be today if not for Halstead and his guard-dogging against the federal government’s attempts to shove the nation’s high-level nuclear waste down our throats.
Halstead was the state’s foremost expert on the project, a walking encyclopedia of its many flaws. His credibility, geniality and commitment allowed him to work with Republican and Democratic governors, Nevada congressional delegates, state legislators and local officials alike. That helped forge a unified front on the project that continues to this day. Outside of a few misguided officials, it’s difficult to find a Nevada leader who wants anything to do with Yucca Mountain. Halstead also spearheaded the state’s response to the feds’ 2018 secret shipments of weapons-grade plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site, among other efforts. Along the way, he became a nemesis of the Department of Energy, beating them back with legal and scientific challenges and poking their arguments full of holes…………. It’s certainly been an impressive fight, and a long one. It dates to 1987, when Congress passed the so-called “Screw Nevada” bill that designated our state as the national waste repository site — without our consent. Since then, the project has been killed and resurrected repeatedly, most recently when the Trump administration pushed for funding to restart the licensing process. When President Donald Trump finally capitulated, it was a high point for Halstead after a career of bedeviling pro-Yucca presidents, bureaucrats and Congress members who were intent on shipping waste out of their own districts and dumping it on Nevada. But as Halstead has noted, the fight isn’t over. It won’t be until there’s legislation that permanently shuts down the site. With Halstead’s departure, that means the current and next generations of Nevada leaders will have to take up the cause just as fervently as he did. We simply can’t let down our guard on this monstrosity, which would result in more than 110,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste being shipped into the backyard of Las Vegas and stored there. Transporting the material is dangerous, especially for Las Vegas, given that one of the main routes takes shipments directly through the heart of the city. Think about the effects of an accident or a terrorist attack on a shipment going through the middle of Las Vegas. As for storage, seismic activity in the region makes Yucca Mountain a terrible place to put this waste. A leak could contaminate groundwater for thousands of years — and keep in mind that we’re talking about enough material to cover a football field about seven yards deep. There’s nothing close to scientific proof that the waste could be safely stored in the repository for the tens of thousands of years it will remain radioactive. Halstead knew this, and for 30 years he refused to yield on it……..https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/sep/07/nevada-grateful-for-halsteads-many-years-fighting/ |
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Arctic tragedy: the loss of Russian sailors in nuclear submarine accidents
Russia’s ‘slow-motion Chernobyl’ at sea, FUTURE PLANET | OCEANS By Alec Luhn, 2nd September 2020 By tradition, Russians
always bring an odd number of flowers to a living person and an even number to a grave or memorial. But every other day, 83-year-old Raisa Lappa places three roses or gladiolas by the plaque to her son Sergei in their hometown Rubtsovsk, as if he hadn’t gone down with his submarine during an ill-fated towing operation in the Arctic Ocean in 2003.“I have episodes where I’m not normal, I go crazy, and it seems that he’s alive, so I bring an odd number,” she says. “They should raise the boat, so we mothers could put our sons’ remains in the ground, and I could maybe have a little more peace.”
After 17 years of unfulfilled promises, she may finally get her wish, though not out of any concern for the bones of Captain Sergei Lappa and six of his crew. With a draft decree published in March, President Vladimir Putin set in motion an initiative to lift two Soviet nuclear submarines and four reactor compartments from the silty bottom, reducing the amount of radioactive material in the Arctic Ocean by 90%. First on the list is Lappa’s K-159. ……………..
‘Cursed August’
Sergei Lappa was born in 1962 in Rubtsovsk, a small city in the Altai Mountains near the border with Kazakhstan. Though it was thousands of miles to the nearest ocean, he cultivated an interest in seafaring at a local model shipbuilding club, and after school he was accepted into the higher naval engineering academy in Sevastopol, Crimea. Tall, athletic and a good student, he was assigned to the navy’s most prestigious service: the Northern Submarine Fleet.
With the reactors off, Lappa and his skeleton crew of nine engineers operated the boat by flashlight. As the submarine was towed near Kildin Island at half past midnight, the cables to the bow pontoons broke in heavy seas, and a half-hour later water was discovered trickling into the eighth compartment. But as headquarters struggled with the decision to launch an expensive rescue helicopter, the crew kept trying to keep the submarine afloat. At 02:45am Mikhail Gurov sent one last radio transmission: “We’re flooding, do something!” By the time rescue boats from the tug arrived, the K-159 was on the bottom near Kildin Island. Of the three sailors who made it out, the only survivor was senior lieutenant Maxim Tsibulsky, whose leather jacket had filled with air and kept him afloat.
Yet another nuclear submarine had sunk during the “cursed” month of August, Russian newspapers wrote, but the incident caused little furore compared to the Kursk. The navy promised relatives it would raise the K-159 the next year, then repeatedly delayed the project.
Even after 17 years of scavenging and corrosion, at least the bones of the crew likely remain in the submarine, according to Lynne Bell, a forensic anthropologist at Simon Fraser University. But the families have long since lost hope of recovering them.
“For all the relatives it would bring some relief if their fathers and husbands were buried, not just lying on the bottom in a steel hulk,” Gurov’s son Dmitry says. “It’s just that no one believes this will happen.”
The situation has now changed, however, as Russia’s interest revives in the Arctic and its crumbling Soviet ports and military towns. Since 2013, seven Arctic military bases and two tanker terminals have been built as part of the Northern Sea Route, a shorter route to China that Putin has promised will see 80 million tonnes of traffic by 2025. The K-159 is lying underneath the eastern end of the route………….https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200901-the-radioactive-risk-of-sunken-nuclear-soviet-submarines
Hiroshima survivor Koko Kondo met the man who dropped that atomic bomb
Hiroshima’s atomic bomb changed Koko Kondo’s life, but so did meeting the man who dropped it, ABC News,By Tracey Shelton, 6 August, 20, Eight-month-old Koko was in her mother’s arms the day the world’s first nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima, bringing their family home crashing down on them on this day 75 years ago.
Key points:
Between 90,000 and 166,000 victims died within months of the Hiroshima bombing
Koko Kondo met pilot Robert Lewis on the set of This is Your Life
More than 150 denshosha volunteers are carrying on the memories of survivors
She was almost 40 years old before her mother finally sat her down and told her the full story of how she had inched through the rubble in darkness, with little Koko wrapped in her arms, towards a small pocket of dusty sunlight.
“She first pushed me out [through the opening], then next, she was able to get out … but the fire was all over the place according to my mother,” said Koko Kondo, who is now 75.
Ms Kondo’s father — Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who was visiting a parishioner across town — said in a US television interview “the whole city was on fire” as he ran through the streets to find his family.
He described people running in silence with skin hanging from their bodies “like a procession of ghosts”
In the sky above, pilot Robert Lewis was part of the United States Air Force crew who dropped the atomic bomb known as Little Boy that day, unleashing around 13 kilotons of force on the city below, where Ms Kondo’s family and about 290,000 other civilians lived, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Estimates on how many people died from the bomb either instantly or in the following months range between 90,000 and 166,000, but the Little Boy would go on to claim the lives of thousands more as the effects of radiation took their toll.
After looking back to see the once-flourishing city “disappear”, Captain Lewis wrote in his log book “My God, what have we done?”…….
While Ms Kondo said most people avoided speaking of the bombing in the decades that followed, her father made it his mission to help the injured, rebuild the city and ensure the world never forgot.
Her family had suffered from radiation sickness and Ms Kondo was subjected to years of tests and examinations to study the effects of radiation exposure.
One of Ms Kondo’s earliest memories — at around two or three years old — was of a group of teenage girls attending a sermon at her father’s church.
“Some girls could not close their eyes. Some girls — their lips were all melted with their chins so they could not close [their mouths],” she told the ABC.
While her manners did not permit her to ask questions, she would listen to her parents’ conversations and learned that the destruction and pain that surrounded her was caused by a single US B-29 bomber.
Ms Kondo said her childhood became consumed by hatred and thoughts of revenge.
“Someday when I grow up, I am definitely going to find the people who were on that B-29 bomber to do the revenge,” she said.
“That was my plan, that was my thinking. But life is interesting.”
When Koko was 10, her mother and siblings received a phone call from the then popular US television program This is Your Life.
They were immediately flown to the United States for an episode featuring the work of her father, who had taken a group of young survivors to the US for plastic surgery……
As Hiroshima mission pilot Robert Lewis was introduced, Koko glared at him with all the hatred a 10-year-old could muster.
“I was so shocked!” she recalled.
“What could I do? I wanted to run to the middle of the stage and give him a punch, a bite or a kick.”
But as he recalled his memories of that day, she saw tears begin to well in his eyes.
“I thought he was a monster, but monsters don’t have tears.”
Ms Kondo said she realised she had lived her short life full of hate for a man she knew nothing about……..
the life of this man was not easy, she said, and he “suffered greatly” not only with the weight of his involvement in the bombing, but he was also “harassed” for speaking about it publicly.at 75, she is among the youngest of a dwindling number of survivors who can tell the world first hand of the horrors these weapons unleashed……….
“My concern is today nuclear weapons are much, much stronger. We have to abolish them now,” urged Ms Kondo. ….
If these stories were lost, “probably our planet would be gone”, she said.
Doctoral candidate Tomoko Kubota is one of more than 150 denshosha — a designated keeper of the memories of a Hiroshima or Nagasaki survivor.
As a denshosha volunteer, she spent three years training and learning from survivor Sadae Kasaoka, so in the future she can “give testimony” on her behalf by sharing her “experiences, the reality of the atomic bombing, and desires for peace”.
That story includes how, at 12 years of age, Ms Kasaoka lost her mother and watched her father die — within days of the blast — in agony from horrific burns and wounds that became infested with maggots.
For other survivors, the memories were too painful to talk about, Ms Kasaoka said, while discrimination against those who did speak out had silenced many over the years…………. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-06/atomic-bomb-survivors-75-years-after-hiroshima-nuclear-attack/12501636
1 This Month
1 June Webinar – The High Cost of Nuclear Power – Register
6 June – WEBINAR- Get Inspired by Protests Against Military Bases!
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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