Patrick Lawrence: The Nihilism of Antony Blinken
It is not, or not only, the extent of Blinken’s incompetence, which even this carefully staged presentation cannot obscure. We knew he was not up to the job Biden gave him from his first months on the seventh floor at State. It is his, Blinken’s, moral vacancy that must disturb us most. He is one of those hollow men Eliot described in his famous poem of this name. This is a man who professes “values”—“our values,” as he puts it—but has none, who stands for nothing other than the rank opportunity uniquely available with access to power. I have never heretofore thought of Antony Blinken as at heart a nihilist. But on his way out the door, this seems the most truthful way to understand him.
Blinken’s approval of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, couched in the cotton-wool language to which Blinken always resorts when he wants to turn night into day, failure into success.
January 13, 2025 By Patrick Lawrence , ScheerPost
Readers write from time to time thanking me for keeping up with The New York Times so they don’t have to do so themselves. I understand the thought, and they are most welcome in all cases. But we have now the case of The Times’s lengthy interview with Antony Blinken, published in the Sunday Magazine dated Jan. 5. Yes, I have read it. And this time I propose others do the same. This is one of those occasions when it is important to know what Americans are supposed to think — or, better put, the extent to which Americans are not supposed to think.
It is sendoff time for the outgoing regime. You can imagine without my help what kind of piffle this is engendering, if you have not already noticed.
USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, Susan Page, threw President Biden a seven-inning game’s worth of softballs this week, producing a Q & A all about “legacy” and “inflection points,” the glories of American hegemony (“Who leads the world if we don’t?”) and how Joe could have defeated Donald Trump last November but was, after all, “talking about passing the baton” even when everything we read indicated he had no intention of doing so.
……………………. Journalism with American characteristics, no other way to name it. Not a single question about the Gaza crisis, genocide, Ukraine, China. Not even a mention of Russia. And what in hell, now that I think of it, will fill the shelves in a Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Presidential Library? This is really my question.
O.K., USA Today is a comic book—“McPaper,” we used to call it—and it is folly to expect anything more than fatuous pitter-patter out of Joe Biden (or anyone interviewing him) at this late stage in the proceedings. But The Times is not a comic book, its day-to-day unseriousness notwithstanding, and Blinken purports to gravitas and authority. Herein lies the problem. In his lengthy exchange with Lulu García–Navarro, Biden’s secretary of state renders a sober-sounding account of the world as the retiring regime now leaves it that is so shockingly far from reality as to be frightening.
“Today as I sit with you, I think we hand over an America in a much, much stronger position, having changed much for the better our position around the world,” Blinken asserts at the outset of this interview. “Most Americans,” he adds a short time later, “want to make sure that we stay out of wars, that we avoid conflict, which is exactly what we’ve done.” Go ahead, let your jaw drop. Blinken’s 50 minutes with The Times are an assault on reason, on truth. And as such they are an incitement to ignorance, precisely the condition that lands this nation in the incalculable trouble Blinken proposes we pretend is not there.
It is not, or not only, the extent of Blinken’s incompetence, which even this carefully staged presentation cannot obscure. We knew he was not up to the job Biden gave him from his first months on the seventh floor at State. It is his, Blinken’s, moral vacancy that must disturb us most. He is one of those hollow men Eliot described in his famous poem of this name. This is a man who professes “values”—“our values,” as he puts it—but has none, who stands for nothing other than the rank opportunity uniquely available with access to power. I have never heretofore thought of Antony Blinken as at heart a nihilist. But on his way out the door, this seems the most truthful way to understand him.
This is the man who swiftly made an utter mess of U.S.–China relations when, two months after taking office, his first encounters with senior Chinese officials blew up in his face during talks in an Anchorage hotel conference room. Sino–American ties have been one or another degree of hostile ever since. This is the man who, a year later, led the way as Biden provoked Russia’s self-protecting intervention in Ukraine. He, Blinken, has ever since refused negotiations. This is the man who, a year after that, began his continuing defense of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It has been Blinken and Nod in action in each case.
This is the man who—a couple of notable moments here—celebrated World Press Freedom Day in London in May 2021, while Julian Assange was in a maximum-security prison a few miles away. “Freedom of expression and access to factual and accurate information provided by independent media are foundational to prosperous and secure democratic societies,” Blinken had the nerve to declare, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as he did so. This is the man who perjured himself last May, when, under oath, he told Congress the State Department had found no evidence that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. (I take this occasion to praise Brett Murphy once again for breaking this story in ProPublica.)
Now we can settle in and listen to Blinken converse with his interlocutor from The Times.
Blinken on relations with China:
“We were really on the decline when it came to dealing with China diplomatically and economically. We’ve reversed that…. And I know it’s succeeding because every time I meet with my Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, he inevitably spends 30 or 40 minutes, 60 minutes complaining about everything we’ve done to align other countries to build this convergence in dealing with things that we don’t like that China is pursuing. So to me, that is the proof point that we’re much better off through diplomacy.“
This account of the regress of the U.S.–China relationship on Blinken’s watch is beyond bent. First, there is no record of Wang Yi, China’s distinguished foreign minister, ever complaining to Blinken or any other U.S. official about Washington’s alliances in East Asia. China’s complaints have primarily (but not only) to do with the Biden regime’s incessant assertion of American hegemony in the Pacific, its provocative conduct on the Taiwan and South China Sea questions, and its efforts to subvert an economy with which the U.S. can no longer compete.
Second, not even Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, with which Washington has indeed strengthened military ties, are now “aligned” against China. They, along with all other East Asians, can read maps, believe it or not. And the whole of the Pacific region will favor balanced ties with the U.S. and China as long as you and I are alive. Drawing East Asians together in some kind of Sinophobic “convergence” is a long dream from which the Washington policy cliques simply cannot awaken.
Finally and most obviously, if antagonizing another major power is a measure of diplomatic success, the nation such a diplomat purports to represent is in the kind of trouble to which I alluded earlier.
Footnote: It has been a sad spectacle these past three years as a parade of Biden regime officials, Blinken chief among them, has marched to Beijing and failed one by one to repair the damage done in Anchorage. In their dealings with Blinken, Wang and Xi Jinping, China’s president, have treated Biden’s top diplomat as if he were a junior high school student who flunked geography.
Blinken on Russia and Ukraine:
“So first, if you look at the trajectory of the conflict, because we saw it coming, we were able to make sure that not only were we prepared and allies and partners were prepared, but that Ukraine was prepared. We made sure that well before the Russian aggression happened, starting in September and then again December, we quietly got a lot of weapons to Ukraine to make sure that they had in hand what they needed to defend themselves, things like Stingers, Javelins that were instrumental in preventing Russia from taking Kyiv, from rolling over the country, erasing it from the map, and indeed pushing the Russians back….
In terms of diplomacy: We’ve exerted extraordinary diplomacy in bringing and keeping together more than 50 countries, not only in Europe, but well beyond, in support of Ukraine and in defense of these principles that Russia also attacked back in February of that year. I worked very hard in the lead up to the war, including meetings with my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva a couple of months before the war, trying to find a way to see if we could prevent it, trying to test the proposition whether this was really about Russia’s concerns for its security, concerns somehow about Ukraine and the threat that it posed, or NATO and the threat that it posed, or whether this was about what it in fact it is about, which is Putin’s imperial ambitions and the desire to recreate a greater Russia, to subsume Ukraine back into Russia. But we had to test that proposition. And we were intensely engaged diplomatically with Russia. Since then, had there been any opportunity to engage diplomatically in a way that could end the war on just and durable terms, we would have been the first to seize them. “
Where to begin? Give me a sec to catch my breath.
Blinken and his colleagues anticipated Russia’s invasion before it started in February 2022 because the Biden regime provoked it to the point Moscow had no other choice. Washington spent the autumn of 2021 arming Kiev, just as Blinken recounts, but Blinken makes no mention of the two draft treaties the Kremlin sent Westward that December—one to Washington, one to NATO in Brussels—as the proposed basis for negotiating a durable new security settlement between Russia and the Atlantic alliance. This was dismissed out of hand as a “non-starter,” the British-ism the Biden regime favored at the time. Blinken skips over this opportunity to develop productive diplomatic channels like a mosquito across a pond.
His idea of diplomacy, indeed, was limited to gathering one of those coalitions of the willing (or coerced) the American imperium has long favored, in this case to back the proxy war to come. There was not then and has not been since any serious effort to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine. Blinken seems actually to believe (or he pretends to believe) that there was never any question of Moscow’s legitimate security concerns: It was all about the Kremlin’s plan to “erase” Ukraine in the cause of the Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions. Somehow this proposition was tested and proved out, and I would love to know how.
I am reminded once again of that moment, a few months into the war, when Blinken pulled aside Sergei Lavrov for a private exchange after formal talks at the Kremlin. As I wrote subsequently, when he asked Moscow’s long-serving foreign minister if it was true Russia wanted to reconstruct the Czarist empire, Lavrov stared, turned, and left the room—no reply, no handshake, no farewell, just an abrupt exit. How could a diplomat of Lavrov’s caliber possibly entertain such a question? We are left with two alternatives, readers. Either Tony Blinken is extremely dim-witted to misinterpret Russia’s position this badly, or Tony Blinken is a very formidable liar.
My conclusion: He is both.
Footnote: Blinken has not spoken to Lavrov since that pitiful occasion in mid–2022 — or to any other senior Russian official so far as we know. And the Biden regime has on two occasions, most famously in Istanbul a month after the Russian invasion began, actively scuttled talks between Kiev and Moscow that could have ended the war.
We come to Blinken on Israel, Gaza, and the Palestinians.
Blinken spent a great deal of his time with García–Navarro explaining his views of the Gaza crisis. And for the most part he stayed with the tedious boilerplate with which we are already familiar. The Biden regime supports Israel’s right to defend itself. He has dedicated himself to making sure the Palestinians of Gaza “had what they needed to get by.” The impediments to a ceasefire and a return of hostages are all on Hamas, not the Netanyahu regime.
Has Israel committed war crimes? Do we witness a genocide? Have the Israelis blocked food aid? You can’t expect straight answers out of Blinken on these kinds of questions, and García–Navarro got none. What she got was Blinken’s approval of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, couched in the cotton-wool language to which Blinken always resorts when he wants to turn night into day, failure into success. Yes, he allowed, the Netanyahu regime could have made some minor adjustments at the margin and the slaughter would have looked better. But there is no erasing Blinken’s ratification of Israeli terrorism, his judgment that it has been a success — or García–Navarro’s failure to call him on this, a topic to which I will shortly return.
There is one remark Blinken made in this sendoff Q & A that has stayed with me ever since I watched the video of it and then read the transcript. It concerns the Gaza crisis, but it expands in the mind like one of those sponges that grow large when wetted. “When it comes to making sure that Oct. 7 can’t happen again,” Blinken said, “I think we’re in a good place.”
I can hardly fathom the implications of this extravagantly thoughtless assertion. There is no understanding of the human spirit in it. It takes no account of the enduring aspirations of the Palestinians people, I mean to say, and so displays the shallowest understanding of the events of Oct. 7, 2023. It presumes, above all, that the totalized violence of uncontrolled power is some kind of net-positive and can prevail in some lasting way, and that there is no need to trouble about what is just, or what it ethical, or what is irreducibly decent, or a commonly shared morality, or, at the horizon, the human cause as against (in this case) the Zionist cause.
This sentence takes us straight to Antony Blinken’s nihilism. As he leaves office he mounts not only an assault on reason, as I argued above, or our faculties of discernment, but altogether an assault on meaning. The working assumption is that he or she who controls the microphones and megaphones is free to say whatever it is of use to say. It does not require any relationship to reality, only to expedience. This is what I mean by nihilism.
“I don’t do politics,” Blinken flippantly tells García–Navarro early in their time together. “I do policy.” García–Navarro lets this go, as she does so much else. It is prima facie ridiculous, a hiding place in which García–Navarro allows Blinken to take shelter. Policy is politics: They are inseparable, no exceptions. In this case, Blinken cannot possibly expect the world beyond America’s shores to take seriously his assessment of the world as the Biden White House leaves it. This interview is all politics all the time: It is strictly for domestic consumption, intended not only to salvage a reputation — one beyond salvaging in my view — but to continue the grinding business of manufacturing consent. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Watch the video of Lourdes “Lulu” Garcia-Navarro’s time with Blinken. As is easily detected, she reads from a script and remains resolutely faithful to it regardless of what Blinken says. She purports to be otherwise, but she is a supplicant. She pretends to challenge Blinken on this or that question, but it is all faux, pose. None of Blinken’s lies, misrepresentations, and plain disinformation come in for serious scrutiny. It is merely on-to-the-next-question.
This is not journalism. It is spectacle, a theatrical reenactment of journalism — another case of journalism with American characteristics. It is not the creation of meaning, either: It is the destruction of meaning. I have already noted my term for this. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The saving grace of García–Navarro’s encounter with Tony Blinken, and a little to my surprise, lies in the comment thread appended to the published piece. There are 943 comments at this writing. And there are some voices of approval, certainly.
But my goodness are the critics many. Here are a few straight off the top of the thread:
Jorden, California.
Blinken has tarnished the office of Secretary of State. Silly is not the word, not even irresponsible but diabolical. Just bad on so many levels…. The Biden administration will mark the sudden decline of American hegemony …. U.S. foreign policy needs a much needed injection of realist logic now.
From “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Wisconsin:
For readers who want to further marvel at the creature that is Tony Blinken, watch his performance of “Rockin’ in the Free World” from last winter in Ukraine. It is truly cinematic in its irony as he facilitates U.S.–backed genocide. Could not write it better. That’s when I realized how much I viscerally hate this guy, how pathological his lack of self-awareness is[.]
And from David in Florida:
Yes, it’s called being delusional or incompetent or utterly negligent! Good job Blinkin! You and Biden undermined the final support of the Democratic Party. Sure you and your overlords will be fine with I’ll[sic] gotten gains. The rest of us won’t.
……………………………………….more https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/13/patrick-lawrence-the-nihilism-of-antony-blinken/
Jimmy Carter hailed as ‘action’ hero for stopping nuclear meltdown at 28
Jimmy Carter hailed as ‘action’ hero for stopping nuclear meltdown at 28 https://nypost.com/2021/12/16/jimmy-carter-is-action-hero-for-stopping-nuclear-disaster/
By Hannah Sparks, December 16, 2021 Who needs action movies when there are real-life superheroes like Jimmy Carter among us?
A viral Twitter thread is reminding the world that the 39th US President James Earl Carter Jr., now 97, actually rescued Ottawa, Ontario, from nuclear destruction as a 28-year-old way back on Dec. 12, 1952.
“Do you remember the world’s very first nuclear meltdown? That time the US President, an expert in nuclear physics, heroically lowered himself into the reactor and saved Ottawa, Canada’s capital?” asked Canadian physicist University of Ottawa professor Jeff Lundeen in his now-viral thread, originally posted Tuesday but officially trending two days later.
Sounds like schlocky action movie, but it actually happened!”
Lundeen’s revelatory tweet to his modest 1,078 followers now boasts nearly 50,000 likes, more than 20,000 retweets and hundreds of cheerfully shocked comments. He included data from the Ottawa Historical Society and a snippet of a 2011 report documenting Carter’s heroics, and he followed up with several other media sources that recount the historic tale.
As the story goes, the Plains, Ga., native planned his entire life to join the Navy — and did so when he received his appointment to the Naval Academy in 1942. After graduating with distinction, Carter spent two years completing his service ship duty before signing on to the Submarine Force. Following a series of relocations and promotions, the young lieutenant would request to join Captain Hyman G. Rickover’s nuclear sub program, where they were developing the world’s first atomic subs.
Rickover then sent Carter to work for the US Atomic Energy Commission, where he served on temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch. Meanwhile, a few months later, an accidental power surge at Chalk River Laboratories in Ottawa caused fuel rods within a nuclear research reactor to rupture and melt — risking a full nuclear meltdown.
It was the first such incident of its kind, and Carter’s team of 23 men was ordered to clean it up.
I
n a scene straight out of modern-day blockbusters, the operation would require the brave men to descend into the core by rope and pulley so they could deconstruct the reactor bolt by bolt. The lab had set up a duplicate reactor as a training field for Carter’s team, who would get only one shot at the real thing. Each man would have to descend into the core and complete their high-flying tasks in 90-second spurts, as exposure to toxic radiation within the reactor posed a high risk to their long-term health.
Their plan went off without a hitch. The core was shut down and then rebuilt. From there, Carter went on to become the engineering officer for the USS Seawolf, one of the first submarines to operate on atomic power. By 1961, he retired from the Navy and Reserves, and, in 1963, ran for his first political office.
For those who admire the single-term Democratic president, Lundeen’s tweet was just another reminder of Carter’s selfless service — and good jokes.
One top Twitter response included a quote from the president, who visited Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power plant in 1979, during their disastrous partial meltdown.
When asked by media if he thought it too dangerous to visit the radioactive site, he reportedly quipped, “No, if it was too dangerous they would have sent the vice president.”
Toshiyuki Mimaki: Let’s save humanity from nuclear weapons
An interview with Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor and co-president of the Japanese foundation Nihon Hidankyo, Toshiyuki Mimaki, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. Mimaki reflects on his meeting with Pope Francis in Japan in 2019 and calls on world leaders to commit to eliminating nuclear weapons.
By Alessandro Gisotti, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/news/2024-12/mimaki-nihon-hidankyo-nobel-peace-prize-elimination-nuclear-arms.html
Shattered buildings. A landscape wiped clean. So much destruction that the sea became visible where once a vibrant city stood. This is the indelible memory carried by a three-year-old boy who witnessed an unthinkable and catastrophic event—one that, tragically, did occur. Toshiyuki Mimaki shares this harrowing memory with L’Osservatore Romano.
Now 82 years old, Mimaki has never stopped reflecting on August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima, his hometown. That moment not only changed the course of human history but also took the lives of tens of thousands of people.
On December 10, Mimaki accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo as co-president of Nihon Hidankyo, a foundation established in 1956 dedicated to nuclear disarmament. Nihon Hidankyo unites the hibakusha—survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
The foundation’s mission is rooted in the power of testimony, relying on the gentle but impactful strength of storytelling. The Norwegian Nobel Committee acknowledged this effort, stating, “We all have a duty to continue the mission of the hibakusha. Their moral compass is our legacy. Now it is up to us. The fight for disarmament requires persistent and vocal advocacy.”
As the International Day of Peace approaches, Toshiyuki Mimaki reflects on his role as a custodian of the legacy of those who came before him—the hibakusha who founded Nihon Hidankyo. Survivors like him aim to ensure the world never forgets the tragedy of that fateful August morning.
“When I was three years old,” Mimaki recounts, “my mother, younger brother, and I were exposed to the bomb’s radiation while searching for my father, who worked for the Hiroshima railway. Countless lives were lost, and buildings were consumed by flames to the extent that you could see all the way to the sea. My younger brother is now undergoing treatment for brain cancer.”
Despite the pain of revisiting such memories, sharing these experiences is central to the hibakusha mission: ensuring that the horror of nuclear weapons is never repeated. This mission becomes ever more urgent as the remaining survivors of the bombings near the end of their lives.
“Hiroshima has taken steps to preserve these testimonies,” Mimaki explains. “The city has established programs to educate young people, training them to become messengers who can carry forward our stories for future generations.”
Mimaki expresses deep gratitude for Pope Francis’s dedication to nuclear disarmament. He had the opportunity to meet the Pope during his visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in November 2019. “I met the Pope when he came to visit us,” Mimaki recalls. “He gave me a medal in a red case, and I asked him to work toward abolishing nuclear weapons. I still treasure a photograph from that day.”
Despite the global appeal for disarmament, discussions about the potential use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of atomic conflict have intensified in recent years. For Mimaki, who still carries the scars of that catastrophic day, the thought of nuclear weapons being used again is unimaginable.
“If nuclear weapons were ever used again,” he warns, “it would mean the end of humanity. This is why I implore leaders of nations with nuclear arsenals to commit to their complete elimination.”
Mimaki is particularly alarmed by the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. “Russian President Putin,” he observes with concern, “has lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, making them deployable at any moment. It’s a terrifying situation. I urge everyone to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and see the Atomic Bomb Museum. Witness firsthand the devastating impact nuclear weapons have on human life.”
Japan’s fishing town of Suttsu faces nuclear waste dilemma amid population decline
Residents of Suttsu worry that, despite potential economic benefits, a nuclear waste facility will harm the community and leave a legacy of radioactive waste
Jonathan Vit 29 Dec 24, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3292482/japans-fishing-town-suttsu-faces-nuclear-waste-dilemma-amid-population-decline
It was a place Kyoko Tsuchiya could finally call home. As a child, her father was frequently transferred across Japan for his job at the national phone company. Later, as an adult, Kyoko fell in love with a man who worked for the post office. After they married, she continued to move around, rarely staying long enough in one place to truly feel at home.
Suttsu, with its unique charm, was different. This small town, nestled among scenic landscapes, is where Kyoko’s husband, Kazuyuki, grew up. Now in retirement, the couple decided to return to provide care and support for his elderly father.
Located on Hokkaido, Japan’s ruggedly beautiful northern island, the seaside fishing town hugs the windswept western coast. There, they opened a small inn called “Pension Mellow” which sits perched on a quiet hilltop overlooking the sea.
Kazuyuki could watch the fishing boats through binoculars from the kitchen window. When he spotted a friend’s boat, he would buy fresh seafood for his guests. One evening, he proudly served octopus sashimi made from a large octopus pulled from the frigid sea earlier that day.
“I was finally able to put down roots here,” Kyoko said. “I wanted a place where I could settle down and live a relaxed life. That’s how it was until 2020. Now, I don’t know …”
On Thursday, August 13, 2020, residents of this small town found themselves at the centre of a national controversy that attracted news helicopters and television crews to their usually sleepy streets.
Japan’s Nuclear Waste Management Organisation (Numo) was searching for a town willing to host a large underground facility to store the country’s nuclear waste.
However, there were stipulations: it could not be near a seismically active fault line or a volcano, could not contain valuable natural resources like coal or aquifers, and had to be within 20km (12.5 miles) of the coast for safe waste transport.
Any town meeting these requirements could volunteer to undergo studies to evaluate its suitability for the nuclear waste facility.
“In Japan, we have been using nuclear power for over half a century,” said Kenji Yamashita, a press officer with Numo. “As long as we have nuclear power plants, waste will always be produced. So, in every country, it is necessary to find a place to dispose of it.”
Japan currently sends its nuclear waste to a facility in Aomori, the prefecture just south of Hokkaido. The construction of that reprocessing and temporary storage centre has faced delays due to protests from local residents and anti-nuclear activists.
Finding a long-term storage site has been equally challenging. Some towns withdrew their interest due to local opposition before studies could start.
The study is non-binding, meaning a town can start the process without completing it. Additionally, the study is accompanied by substantial subsidies – up to 9 billion yen (US$57.6 million) paid out over the course of the investigation.
This offer was too attractive for Suttsu’s mayor, Haruo Kataoka, to ignore. Like many other towns across Japan, Suttsu has seen a dramatic population decline over the past half-century, having lost more than half of its residents since the 1970s. Nearly half of Suttsu’s population is 65 or older. The local junior school is so small that entire grades fit into a single classroom. A mere seven students make up the school’s first-grade class.
“There’s no doubt this is an ageing town,” Kazuyuki said.
Mayor Kataoka declined to speak with This Week in Asia for this story, but local residents said the six-term mayor has repeatedly tried to find new ways to revitalise the town’s shrinking economy.
Suttsu is home to a large wind energy farm – white windmills dot the landscape and are now featured on signs greeting visitors as they drive into town. It also built a modern town centre, a museum showcasing local history and an elderly care home on a bluff overlooking the town. Few projects delivered the promised financial returns for Suttsu, explained Takashi Saito, a former town council member and relative of the mayor.
“There are a lot of public buildings around town,” Saito said. “It costs a lot of money to maintain and manage them. When you pull back the lid on it, the town has a lot of debt.”
Saito explained that, although he opposes the construction of a nuclear waste facility in town, he understood the mayor’s reasons for pursuing the studies. Suttsu had changed greatly since his childhood, with empty streets and many businesses in the shopping district permanently closed.
“There’s no one walking around the town today,” Saito said. “The town feels lonely now.”
Blinken Atrocious in a Dangerous World
Through his various sojourns, the point was always clear. Israel was to be mildly rebuked, if at all, while Hamas was to be given the full chastising treatment as killers without a cause.
November 15, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/blinken-atrocious-in-a-dangerous-world/#google_vignette
It is hard to credit one of the least impressive Secretary of States, the United States has ever produced with any merit other than being a plasterwork that, from time to time, moved with caution on the world stage for fear of cracking. On the stage, Antony Blinken’s brittle performances have been nothing short of unimpressive, notably in pursuing such projects comically titled “Peace in the Middle East.” Each time he has ventured to various regions of the world, the combatants seem keener than ever to continue taking up arms or indulging in slaughter.
A sense of Blinken’s detachment from the world can be gathered from his Foreign Affairs piece published on October 1, intended as something of a report on the diplomatic achievements of the Biden administration. It starts with the sermonising treacle that is all a bit much – the naughty states on the world stage, albeit small in number (Russia, Iran, North Korea and Chin
The Biden administration had, in response, “pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.” This served to counter those challengers wishing to “undermine the free, open, secure, and prosperous world that the United States and most countries seek.” Then comes the remark that should prompt readers to pinch themselves. “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.”
An odd assessment for various reasons. There is the continued war in Ukraine and Washington’s refusal to encourage any meaningful talks between Kiev and Moscow, preferring, instead, the continued supply of weapons to an attritive conflict of slaughter and such acts of industrial terrorism as the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.
There has been the relentless watering down of the “One China” understanding over the status of Taiwan, along with continued provocations against Beijing through the offensive pact of AUKUS with Australia and the UK. That particularly odious pact has served to turn Australia into a US military garrison without the consent of its citizens, an outcome sold to the dunces in Canberra as utterly necessary to arrest the rise of China. Along the way, an arms buildup in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific has been encouraged.
With such a view of the world, it’s little wonder how blind Blinken, and other members of the Biden administration, have been to Israel’s own rogue efforts at breaking and altering the international system, committing, along the way, a goodly number of atrocities that have seen it taken to the International Court of Justice by South Africa for committing alleged acts of genocide.
Through his various sojourns, the point was always clear. Israel was to be mildly rebuked, if at all, while Hamas was to be given the full chastising treatment as killers without a cause. When the barbarians revolt against their imperial governors, they are to be both feared and reviled. In June this year, for instance, Blinken stated on one of his countless missions for a non-existent peace that Hamas was “the only obstacle” to a ceasefire, a markedly jaundiced explanation given the broader programs and objects being pursued by the Israeli Defence Forces. Hamas has been accused of being absolutist in its goals, but one can hardly exempt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the charge. Not for Blinken: “I think it is clear to everyone around the world, that it’s on them [Hamas] and that they will have made a choice to continue a war that they started.”
On the issue of aid to Gaza’s strangled, dying population, Blinken has been, along with his equally ineffectual colleague in the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, cringingly ineffective. Their October 13 letter sent to their Israeli counterparts made mention of several demands, including the entry of some 350 aid trucks into Gaza on a daily basis, and refraining from adopting laws, now in place, banning the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). Each demand has been swatted back with a school child’s snotty petulance, and aid continues being blocked to various parts of Gaza.
On October 24, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action) “urgently” called on the Secretary of State “to stop wasting his time with failed diplomatic visits and to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon.” Those at AJP Action must surely have realised by now that Blinken would be utterly rudderless without those failed visits. Indeed, Osama Abu Irshaid, Executive Director of the organisation, went so far as to say that “Blinken’s diplomatic theatre is enabling Netanyahu’s war crimes.” To arm and fund Israel “while requesting a ceasefire” was a policy both “hypocritical and ineffective.” Such is the nature of that sort of theatre.
In the meantime, the tectonic plates of international relations are moving in other directions, a point that has been aided, not hindered, by the policy of this administration. Through BRICS and other satellite fora, the United States is finding itself gradually outpaced and isolated, even as it continues to hide behind the slogan of an international rules-based order it did so much to create. This is not to say that the US imperium has quite reached its terminus. If anything, the Biden administration, through the good offices of Blinken, continues to insist on its vitality. But US hegemony long left unchallenged is, most certainly, at an end.
Mordechai Vanunu, the scientist kidnapped and jailed for 18 years for revealing nuclear secrets
Metro Danny Rigg, Oct 6, 2024
The scientist who exposed Israel’s nuclear secrets is still banned from leaving the country or speaking to foreigners nearly 40 years since he was kidnapped by Mossad.
Since the 1960s, Israel was suspected of having nuclear weapons, something it refuses to admit or deny to this day.
But it wasn’t just one or two. Israel had a whole arsenal of them – as many as 200, developed in an underground factory beneath the Negev desert – making it the world’s sixth biggest nuclear power.
‘It has almost certainly begun manufacturing thermo-nuclear weapons, with yields big enough to destroy entire cities’, The Sunday Times reported, based on photos and information from Mordechai Vanunu, on October 5, 1986.
A Moroccan-born Jewish man who spent eight years as a nuclear technician in the Dimona secret bunker, Vanunu had grown increasingly sympathetic to Palestinian rights and opposed Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon.
By the time the story broke, however, the 31-year-old had disappeared. He had left his London hotel in what police described as ‘unexplained circumstances’ on September 30.
At first a friend feared he had been kidnapped from his London hotel, which wasn’t entirely far from the truth.
Israeli intelligence had got its hands on him through a honeytrap designed to avoid souring its relationship with the British government.
In an apparent case of cabin fever after weeks of work on the story, Vanunu ‘began to get impatient’, Andrew Neil, then-editor of The Sunday Times, said.
‘He wandered off and made himself vulnerable.’
So he flew off for a holiday to Rome with Mossad agent Cheryl Bentov, who posed as an American tourist called Cindy to lure him from the safe house right into a taxi waiting outside the airport with two more agents inside.
‘We sat in the back’, he later told the BBC, ‘she used the time for kissing me, to divert my attention by a lot of kissing.’
Once there he was overpowered, drugged and shipped back to Israel to be tried for espionage and treason.
He revealed the truth by flashing words written on his palm and shouting ‘Italy’ to reporters outside a Jerusalem court before police covered his mouth that December.
‘I feel an injustice was committed against him’, his brother Asher said outside a guarded courtroom when Vanunu was jailed in 1988.
‘The trial was not conducted legitimately. No one was inside to see what was going on.’
The kidnapping prompted newspapers that previously ignored The Sunday Times article to start reporting his claims about Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Mr Neil told Sky News: ‘The Telegraph said it was all rubbish. It was only when we learned that Israel was so worried about the story it had sent its secret agents to kidnap Vanunu on British soil in a honeypot trap involving a blonde who said she was from California.’
Vanunu’s decision to snap 57 photos on two rolls of film before quitting his job after eight years in the nuclear weapons plant still costs him his freedom.
Even after spending 11 years in solitary confinement during his 18-year prison sentence, Vanunu lives with heavy restrictions imposed by Israeli courts.
He is so hated by his fellow citizens, his parents disowned him and a crowd gathered outside Shikma Prison to chant ‘Death to traitors’ when he was released in 2004.
But Vanunu remained defiant, saying in an impromptu press conference: ‘To all those calling me a traitor, I’m proud and happy to do what I did.’
Since then, he has faced a one-year ban on leaving the country, talking to foreigners, or approaching embassies or borders, which has been renewed every year.
He must also inform the security services where he lives and who he plans to meet, and have his internet and phone activity monitored.
Vanunu has been repeatedly arrested and jailed for violating these conditions of his release.
Norway has him permission to move there to join his Norwegian wife, but this would require Israel to allow him to leave……………………………………………
On the first day of each month, Vanunu has posted the same message on X: ‘One more year without freedom since 1986-2024, now I am waiting for my freedom, freedom to leave Israel, I will continue to wait until my freedom comes, Born to be free, See you in freedom.’
That was until restrictions were renewed again in July, when Vanunu, who turns 70 next week, said: ‘NEXT POST WILL BE FROM FREEDOM ONLY.’
Israel is now believed to have at least 90 nuclear warheads along with fissile material stockpiles for up to 300 more, but it has never publicly tested them.
An escalating conflict with Iran, which has its own nuclear ambitions, is fuelling fears that Israel’s war in Gaza, which has spread north to Lebanon, will explode into all-out regional war, if not World War 3.
In his first interview after his release in 2004, Vanunu defended his actions, saying: ‘I felt it was not about betraying; it was about reporting. It was about saving Israel from a new holocaust.’ https://metro.co.uk/2024/10/06/scientist-kidnapped-jailed-18-years-exposing-israels-nuclear-secrets-21733868/
The Madness of Antony Blinken
it would be a NATO attack on Russia, dressed up as a Ukrainian one. It would mean the U.S. and Britain were at war with Moscow, something Blinken seems to want and said was going to happen.
Blinken has emerged as the undisputed leader of who George H.W. Bush called the “crazies in the basement.”
Two years after the Pentagon shot down his ploy for a no-fly zone against Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. “top diplomat” has been at it again pushing an even more insane idea, writes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/20/the-madness-of-antony-blinken/
On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then also backed the no-fly zone. But within days the Pentagon shot down the idea as it engaged in a consequential battle with the State Department and members of Congress to prevent a direct NATO military confrontation with Russia that could unleash history’s most unimaginable horrors.
A no-fly zone “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
President Joe Biden was caught in the middle of the fray. Pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and the press corps was unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war.
Biden ultimately sided with the Defense Department, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin backed him up:
President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”
(The administration plan was, and apparently still is, to bring down the Russian government through a proxy counteroffensive and an economic and information war, not a direct military one.)
Blinken, who stepped out of line to speak above the heads of the president and the Pentagon, lost that round. It’s surprising he kept his job. But he survived and now he’s come back for more.
Relentless
Blinken’s recklessness emerged yet again last week when he peddled a story — eagerly picked up by The Guardian and The New York Times — that Biden would approve a British request to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.
The Guardian story on Sept. 11 said:
“The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private.”
Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had ‘from day one’ been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. ‘We will continue to do this,’ he emphasised.”
To fire British Storm Shadows, Ukraine would have to depend on British technical soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to actually launch them and on U.S. geolocation technology. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz revealed those British soldiers are already in Ukraine
In other words, it would be a NATO attack on Russia, dressed up as a Ukrainian one. It would mean the U.S. and Britain were at war with Moscow, something Blinken seems to want and said was going to happen.
The next day Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that launching such missiles into Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
Nevertheless, The New York Times ran a story on the same day with the headline: “Biden Poised to Approve Ukraine’s Use of Long-Range Western Weapons in Russia.”
The Guardian added:
“British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Starmer meets Biden in Washington DC.”
Blinken’s words evidently raised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s hopes that he would satisfy his desire to strike Russia with his nation’s arsenal of long-range missiles, despite Putin saying that meant direct war with NATO.
Blinken and the British are trying to lead us to the brink.
Sanity in Arlington
Except that the Pentagon, the purveyor of the most monstrous violence in world history, has pulled the world back from it.
For at least the second time — publicly known — the Department of War secured peace from neocon recklessness fronted by Blinken.
Starmer was sent back on his chartered British Airways flight from the White House meeting licking his wounds. He’d evidently been led by Blinken to believe that it was a done deal: the U.S. would let Britain attack Russia with its long-range missiles using U.S. technology — even if the U.S. wouldn’t allow its own long-range ATACMS to be used.
The Times of London reported that Biden withholding approval “surprised British officials who had listened closely to hints from Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, that America was edging towards authorising Storm Shadow, an Anglo-French weapon which relies on American GPS guidance systems.”
Starmer’s mania to strike Russia illustrates the British elite’s continuing pathological hatred of Russia, extending back centuries, compared to a perhaps more tempered, though determined, American geostrategic rivalry with Moscow.
Biden’s Limits With the Neocons
Biden has proven himself a supreme warmonger, his advocacy for the illegal invasion of Iraq and his complicity in the genocide in Gaza as the most egregious examples.
Like the two presidents before him, Biden allowed neocons to worm themselves into positions of power in his administration. But the extent to which Biden himself is a neocon, as opposed to a traditional warmonger, is subject to question.
As a creature of Washington of more than half a century, he seems to respect the military’s judgement about military matters and, on his good days, understands that even America has limits.
Barack Obama let Hillary Clinton, the “Queen of Warmongers,” bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his. And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.)
Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the U.S. into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.
As a careerist, Blinken said what he had to say to get to where he is. Obama in 2015 wisely decided against arming Ukraine after the Nuland and Biden-led 2014 coup because he did not want to antagonize Russia, for whom he said Ukraine was a vital interest, while it was not for the U.S. Obama also feared U.S. arms would fall into the hands of “thugs” — meaning neo-Nazi Azov types, whom Obama was well aware of.
Blinken at the time was Obama’s deputy secretary of state. To support the president’s position, he told a conference in Berlin:
“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door. It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”
But once he was freed of the restraints of Obama, he joined Biden’s aggressive Ukraine policy at the top of the State Department. From that position, and with a power vacuum in the White House because of Biden’s dementia, Blinken has been openly pushing the neocon agenda, laid out plainly in the 2000 report of the Project for a New American Century.
And what is that agenda? In another age, before it became a dirty word, it would have been proudly proclaimed as imperialism. It contains all of the hubris and sense of invincibility and impunity of any empire in history.
PNAC plainly promulgates that no power or alliance of powers will be allowed to rise up to stand in the way of the neocons’ mad quest to harness American power to achieve world domination. An alliance of powers such as that of China, Russia and the BRICS countries, which has only accelerated in opposition to unhinged, neoconservative adventurism.
No matter the many disasters piling up, notably Iraq, Palestine and now Ukraine, the neocons are undeterred and unrestrained. It’s about power and murder but it is made palatable to themselves with flowery language about America saving the world for democracy.
Their belief in their own supremacy, cloaked in an American flag, remains fanatic, no matter the death and destruction they cause. They do not understand that American power has limits and to test that, they risk everything.
In 2019, Blinken teamed up with arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan to write a Washington Post op-ed arguing for more aggressive use of U.S. power abroad and against U.S. domestic trends towards non-interventionism.
With Kagan’s wife Nuland out of the Biden Administration and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan crucially siding with the realists, Blinken has emerged as the undisputed leader of who George H.W. Bush called the “crazies in the basement.”
That was 30 years ago. The neocons are in the penthouse now and only the restraint of the Pentagon and Sullivan’s persuasion brought Biden back from the brink.
Chernobyl Roulette by Serhii Plokhy review – gripping account of wartime chaos at Ukraine’s nuclear plant
Luke Harding, Mon 2 Sep 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/sep/01/chernobyl-roulette-by-serhii-plokhy-review-gripping-account-of-wartime-chaos-at-ukraines-nuclear-plant
The Ukrainian historian compellingly chronicles the singular courage and selflessness of atomic power station employees held hostage by Russian troops in 2022
Luke Harding, Mon 2 Sep 2024
On 24 February 2022, workers at the Chornobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine woke to the sound of explosions. A battle was going on, not far from the contaminated exclusion zone. By late afternoon, the Russians had arrived. A column of military vehicles pulled up at a checkpoint and an officer got out. Moscow, he said, was now in charge.
The plant’s 300 personnel – specialist operators and firefighters, plus troops from Ukraine’s national guard – became prisoners. Over the next few weeks, they kept the station’s systems going, working in cramped conditions and living side by side with their armed Russian masters. The enemy had invaded from Belarus. Its main force trundled onwards towards Kyiv.
Chernobyl Roulette by the Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy is a gripping account of the extraordinary events inside the plant (Plokhy spells the power station with an “e”). It is a tale of bravery and selflessness, reminiscent of the sacrifice demonstrated by the Chornobyl employees who went through the 1986 nuclear disaster, when reactor No 4 blew up. Some of those on duty in 2022 were involved in the original Soviet-era clean-up.
They included Valentyn Heiko, the 59-year-old shift foreman who was taken hostage with his colleagues. He proved to be a subtle and resilient leader. Heiko met the Russian commanders and told them they would have to follow Ukrainian safety rules and behave in a “civilised manner”. If they didn’t, he promised to unleash a radiation incident, killing them and everyone else. This was blackmail. And a bluff. It worked.
According to Heiko, some of the Russians were polite and rational. About a third of the soldiers, though, were brainwashed and often drunk. The occupiers moved into the fourth floor of the administration building. The station got crowded. There was a shortage of food, cigarettes and razors. The captive nuclear operators – unable to go home to the nearby town of Slavutych – grew beards and puffed on butts.
There were small acts of resistance. Liudmyla Kozak – one of 17 imprisoned women – refused a demand to wear a white armband. The Russians warned her she might be shot. Kozak found a white medical cap, embroidered it with a blue and yellow patch and wore that instead. An order was given to turn off the radio, which brought news of the Russian army’s setbacks around Kyiv. Staff switched it on anyway.
After three weeks, Heiko and his stressed and exhausted workmates could scarcely function. Astonishingly, 46 colleagues volunteered to replace them. The old shift exited the plant, travelled by bus through Belarus and crossed the Dnipro River in a fishing boat. Heiko carried the station’s Ukrainian flag with him. The new team went in the same way – uncertain if or when they would return.
The Kremlin’s occupation of the nuclear plant was an act of astounding recklessness. Soldiers dug trenches in the red forest, one of the world’s most toxic places. It is unclear if they suffered lasting health damage, their heads “full of sawdust”, as one gleeful Ukrainian official put it. Plokhy suggests this might be wishful thinking. Overall, though, radiation levels went up, as thousands of tracked Russian vehicles churned up deadly dust.
In the south of the country, meanwhile, another Russian unit captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe’s biggest. The attackers fired rocket-propelled grenades at civilian infrastructure and damaged a reactor. Two and a half years on, the Russians are still there. Its turbine halls are stuffed with military kit and weapons. From the territory, they regularly bombard nearby Ukrainian towns with Grad missiles.
Last month, Russian soldiers started a fire in a cooling tower – an apparent warning, after Ukraine’s surprise counter-invasion of Russia’s Kursk region. Since the beginning of Moscow’s all-out attack, Vladimir Putin and his minions have issued a string of mass destruction threats directed at Kyiv and the west. State TV hosts talk about nuking London, Berlin and Paris.
The Chornobyl 2 story at least had a happy ending. On 30 March 2022, Russian servicemen fled north, as part of a pull-out from the Kyiv region. They departed with numerous items stolen from the plant: radiation dosimeters, computers and cars. In the town of Chornobyl, military looting parties carried off sacks of household goods. They even took ancient stuff: black-and-white TVs and video recorders.
The Ukrainian workers who put duty before personal survival narrowly averted another Chornobyl crisis. In Plokhy’s view, Moscow’s 2022 violent takeover of two atomic energy stations should serve as a “wake up call to the world”. It was, he argues, an act of nuclear terrorism carried out by a large nuclear power – a rogue one. The distinction between tactical nuclear weapons and civil nuclear facilities looks increasingly blurred, he says.
How the international community should respond to these alarming developments is less clear. Plokhy calls for a reform of the laws governing nuclear state behaviour and of the body that is supposed to administer them – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). When Russian tanks entered Chornobyl, the IAEA, led by Rafael Grossi, issued no condemnation of the Kremlin. Nor did it call on the occupiers to get out, appealing instead to “both sides”.
Plokhy is the author of several previous nonfiction books on Ukraine. These include Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, which won the 2018 Baillie Gifford prize, and The Russo-Ukrainian War, an account of the conflict and its origins, published last year. Chernobyl Roulette is equally compelling. It salutes the singular men and women who stepped up – as their predecessors did before them – when protocols and governments failed.
‘True horror’: Japan’s Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor campaigns for a nuclear-free world
Bun Hashizume, 93, who has written poems about her descent into ‘hell’ after the bombing, has travelled the world to spread her message
Norman Aisbett, SCMP, 3 Aug 24,
What I feel the most about these days is human stupidity,” says 93-year-old Bun Hashizume, from her home in the Japanese temple city of Kamakura.
“I was a victim of the first atomic bomb in human history and I have advocated throughout my life for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but the world leaders still do not understand their true horror.
“Even my poems cannot describe it.”
Rewind to 8.15am on August 6, 1945 in the final throes of World War II.
A US atomic bomb named “Little Boy” was dropped from a B-29 aircraft and exploded at low altitude over the city of Hiroshima. With a blast force equal to 16 kilotons of TNT, it destroyed most buildings and caused mass death and injury.
Then aged 14, Hashizume was a war-mobilised school student working in the four-storey reinforced-concrete Savings Bureau building about 1.5km from the hypocentre of the blast.
Looking back, she recalls a third-floor window being filled “with a sudden flash of light that was so bright I thought the sun had fallen at my feet. A thousand rainbows all at once seemed to explode before my eyes”. And how, after being briefly unconscious and bleeding heavily from a head wound, she staggered downstairs among other workers looking “like a parade of ghosts with wildly dishevelled hair and sooty bodies”.
Once outside the building, it was a regular employee, Tomoyanagi, who “half-carried” her to a nearby Red Cross Hospital, where more shocking scenes and high drama followed.
Hashizume is today the author of The Day the Sun Fell – Memoirs of a Survivor of the Atomic Bomb – translated by Susan Bouterey – which closely details her and her family’s horrific experiences and also explains her present-day opposition to “dangerous” nuclear power plants, which she emphasises during this Australian writer’s long-distance interview with her, via a Japanese interpreter-admirer.
Her drive was such that, at age 70, she began her solo pilgrimages to many countries over 15 years to “become a citizen of the world” and share her anti-nuclear views. With only her aged pension to buy airline tickets and stay in youth hostels, she spoke to anyone or group willing to listen, including schoolchildren. Everywhere, people were also touched by her genuine personal warmth and quiet charm. A small booklet she handed out was entitled, “Fellow Humans! Let Us Foster Love and Wisdom.”
Right now, though, she is homebound due to A-Bomb-related health issues that have plagued her life. She tells of having endured “lifelong” rheumatism, chronic kidney disease, thyroid cancer and more. The past 20 years have also brought numerous breaks of radiation-weakened ribs, collarbones and three compressed fractures of her spine after a fall in Norway in 2003.
She is unable to go outside alone. There are twice-weekly visits to a hospital and three transports per week to a rehabilitation clinic. “Otherwise I’m on my bed reading the newspapers, with care from my eldest son and his family, who live with me.”
Her activist spirit nevertheless endures. She cites recent-times threats of nuclear strikes by North Korea if threatened; by Russia amid the Ukraine war; and an Israeli cabinet minister’s suggestion to nuke Hamas in Gaza The minister was promptly sacked by his embarrassed government which has never admitted that it has nuclear weapons – and subsequent high tensions and conflict between arch-enemies Israel and Iran.
{I believe that nuclear weapons should never be used, stockpiles should be completely abolished, and the Japanese government should join and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as soon as possible,” she says. “It’s no wonder they are being been used as a threat.” She further notes that nine nations have nuclear weapons, but the warheads of only two nations – Russia (5,890) and the US (5,224) – “are enough to destroy all life on Earth several times over”.
A major disappointment for her was the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop28) in Dubai when 23 nations including the US and Japan declared they would triple the generation of their nuclear power plants to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
“It is shocking that Japan joined this dangerous proposal despite the fact that the world’s pervasive emphasis on economic growth, baseless absolute trust in science and technology, and limitless pursuit of energy collapsed in Fukushima in 2011,” she says…………………………………………
After Tomoyanagi left to find her own family, a 16-year-old boy Yoshiaki Iida, who was unknown to Hashizume, helped her outside just before flames engulfed the whole building.
However, she later heard that her brother, Hideo, seven, had died after his back caught fire in an instant when hit from behind by the scorching A-Bomb blast in a school playground. Her other family members survived but with bad injuries and other health problems. Younger sister Shizuko, nine, had been evacuated to a temple when she was struck by the blast wave. Years of radiation sickness caused her suicide at age 19. Older sister Mitsuko, 19, suffered “ghastly” facial wounds at her grandmother’s house.
What does Hashizume remember most after the explosion? She replies: “The complete silence and the smell of burnt corpses that filled the air.”………………………………………………………………………………………………
The Day the Sun Fell – Memoirs of a Survivor of the Atomic Bomb by Bun Hashizume (translated by Susan Bouterey) is published by Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd and also available on Kindle. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3273031/true-horror-japans-hiroshima-atomic-bomb-survivor-campaigns-nuclear-free-world
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12 February – Webinar The Big Push: New Nuclear Projects in Canada
Thursday, February 12, 7 pm Eastern | 2nd of 4 sessions in the 2026 Nuclear Waste Online webinar series
Join a webinar on the push for new nuclear generation in Canada. Go to Northwatch.org to register or use the registration link https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZfWOf1GITqSRIZX8CB-A9w
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