PERSONAL STORIES « nuclear-news

Hiroshima survivors warn G7 leaders about using nuclear bombs

As the G7 summit takes place in Japan, survivors of the 1945 atomic bomb caution leaders about the human cost of nuclear weapons.

Aljazeera, By Laura Goehler, 19 May May 2023

Hiroshima, Japan – “It looked like a bright orange light, like the first sunrise of the year,” says Sadae Kasaoka, remembering the moment when the first nuclear bomb to ever be used was dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Now 90, she was 12 years old that August day at the tail end of World War II, but she still remembers it vividly.

Sadae was home alone with her grandmother. When the blast hit, she was pushed against the wall by the massive force of the explosion and covered in broken glass. The two then fled into an air raid shelter for safety.

Sadae pauses, her voice trembling as she goes on to recall the events of August 6, 1945. “A neighbour told us the whole city was on fire,” she says.

For hours she did not know whether her parents had survived. When her brother brought her father’s body home, he was alive, but so severely burned that she could not recognise him.

“He was all black. His eyes were popping out. Finally, I recognised him by his voice. He said ‘Give me water’. And he asked me to go looking for my mother,” Sadae says, taking a breath. “Someone told me you shouldn’t give them water, so I did not give him any water, but that is something I still regret deeply.”

The exact number of deaths from the uranium bomb remains unclear to this day, with a large gap between the lowest and highest estimates. The City of Hiroshima reports that by the end of 1945 up to approximately 140,000 people – out of a population of 350,000 – had died either in the explosion itself or from the effects of acute radiation poisoning. Most were civilians.

Days later, on August 9, a larger plutonium bomb was then dropped on Nagasaki – some 400km (248 miles) away from Hiroshima. According to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), around another 74,000 people lost their lives there by December 1945. Many of those who survived suffered from long-term illnesses.

The first and last atomic bombs ever dropped on a civilian population, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks are often seen as a uniquely horrible moment in human history. But with countries building up weapons capabilities and threats of nuclear options in Russia’s war against Ukraine, many fear that humanity is not doing enough to avoid repeating itself. With the Group of Seven (G7) summit taking place in Hiroshima this week, some survivors see it as an opportunity to remind world leaders what the real costs are.

‘All my friends died’

Toshiko Tanaka grew up in Hiroshima. When the explosion hit, the then-six-year-old suffered burns as well as exposure to radiation, but miraculously survived.

Today the 84-year-old uses a stick to help herself walk, but otherwise seems to be in good health. However, the traumatic memories of that fateful day will forever be imprinted in her mind.

It was a school day, Toshiko remembers. On their way to class, she and a friend noticed a plane overhead. When someone yelled “enemy”, Toshiko looked up to the sky. Then she saw the light.

“I instinctively covered my face,” she says, recalling that she used her right arm to protect herself. That night she developed a high fever. “I don’t remember much. I lost consciousness.”

One of her most vivid memories from that time was the smell of burning corpses in the days after the explosion. The authorities had started cremating the bodies of those who died.

“I was traumatised,” she says. “All my friends from school died and for a very long time I couldn’t speak about what happened.”

When she was 70, Toshiko went on a boat trip organised by the Japanese non-profit Peaceboat, an initiative inviting survivors of the atomic bomb on a journey around the world telling their stories. That is when she realised she had to speak up and finally share her testimony, she says.

Today she wants everyone to know how dangerous nuclear weapons are to mankind and the unimaginable suffering they cause. “I want our leaders to see what happened in Hiroshima and imagine what would happen to your family, to your friends, if a bomb was dropped on them.”

Toshiko started travelling to the US and learned a little English to tell her story; she’s made 10 such trips in the past seven years.

She speaks as a “hibakusha” – a Japanese term for those affected by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the last count in 2021, an estimated 42,000 hibakushas were still living in Hiroshima, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health. The average age then was 84. Soon what happened in Hiroshima will pass beyond living memory.

……………………………………………………… Daniel Högsta, the interim executive director of ICAN, wants to see leaders of the G7 commit to a “credible, actionable plan” on nuclear disarmament, one that involves a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. “Anything less than that would be insulting to the hibakusha,” he tells Al Jazeera. “It would also be a failure of leadership.”

“I want them to really pay attention to what happens when you use a nuclear weapon,” she says. “There is a war in Ukraine now and this summit should not be a place where you make military preparations.” She wants this meeting to be about finding a way back to peace.

For Toshiko, the visit could not be more crucial at a time when some say the world is closer to a nuclear war than it has been in decades………………………………………………….. more https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/5/19/hiroshima-survivors-warn-g7-leaders-about-using-nuclear-bombs—

May 21, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference | 1 Comment

A Tribute to Daniel Ellsberg — limitless life

By Haig Hovaness, World BEYOND War, May 7, 2023 https://worldbeyondwar.org/a-tribute-to-daniel-ellsberg/ Presented during the May 4, 2023, Vietnam to Ukraine: Lessons for the US Peace Movement Remembering Kent State and Jackson State! Webinar hosted by the Green Party Peace Action Committee; Peoples Network for Planet, Justice & Peace; and Green Party of Ohio.
A Tribute to Daniel Ellsberg — limitless life

Presented during the May 4, 2023, Vietnam to Ukraine: Lessons for the US Peace Movement Remembering Kent State and Jackson State! Webinar hosted by the Green Party Peace Action Committee; Peoples Network for Planet, Justice & Peace; and Green Party of Ohio

Today I will pay tribute to Daniel Ellsberg, a man who has been called one of the most significant whistleblowers in American history. He sacrificed his career and risked his freedom to bring to light the truth about the Vietnam War and spent subsequent years working for peace. In March Dan posted online a letter announcing that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is likely to die this year. This is a fitting time to appreciate his life’s work.

………………………………………………. In 1969, Ellsberg made the decision to leak the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by the Department of Defense. The study showed that the government had lied to the American people about the progress of the war, and it revealed that the government had been involved in secret operations in Laos and Cambodia.

After fruitless attempts to interest members of Congress in the report, he provided the documents to the New York Times, which published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the papers were significant and damaging to the US government, as they revealed that successive administrations had systematically lied to the American people about the progress and objectives of the war.

The Pentagon Papers showed that the US government had secretly escalated its military involvement in Vietnam without a clear strategy for victory. The papers also revealed that government officials had deliberately misled the public about the nature of the conflict, the extent of US military involvement, and the prospects for success.

The publication of the Pentagon Papers was a turning point in American history. It revealed the government’s lies about the war and shook the American people’s faith in their leaders. It also led to a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of the press to publish classified information.

Ellsberg’s actions had serious consequences. He was charged with theft and espionage, and he faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. But in a stunning turn of events, the charges against him were dismissed when it was revealed that the government had engaged in illegal wiretapping and other forms of surveillance against him. The dropping of charges against Ellsberg was a significant victory for whistleblowers and the freedom of the press, and it underscored the importance of government transparency and accountability……………………

The release of the Pentagon Papers overshadowed Ellsberg’s parallel efforts to expose the dangerous consequences of America’s nuclear weapons planning. In the 1970s, his attempts to release classified materials on the danger of nuclear war were frustrated by the accidental loss of a trove of classified documents related to the nuclear threat. Eventually he was able to reassemble this information and publish it in 2017 in the book, “The Doomsday Machine.”

“The Doomsday Machine,” is a detailed exposé of the US government’s nuclear war policy during the Cold War. Ellsberg reveals that the US had a policy of using nuclear weapons preemptively, including against non-nuclear countries, and that this policy remained in effect even after the end of the Cold War. He also revealed that the U.S. had regularly threatened adversaries with use of nuclear weapons. Ellsberg exposed a dangerous culture of secrecy and lack of accountability surrounding US nuclear policy, He revealed that the US had developed plans for a “first strike” nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, even in the absence of a Soviet attack, which he argues would have led to the deaths of millions of people. Ellsberg further revealed that the US government had delegated authority to use nuclear weapons far more widely than was known to the public, greatly increasing the danger of accidental nuclear war. He argued that the poorly managed nuclear arsenal of the United States constituted a “doomsday machine” that represented an existential threat to humanity. The book provides a stark warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the need for greater transparency and accountability in nuclear policy to prevent a catastrophic global disaster……………………

Today, the U.S. government continues to prosecute whistleblowers aggressively. Many have been jailed and some, like Edward Snowden, have fled to avoid rigged trials. Julian Assange continues to languish in prison awaiting extradition and possible lifetime imprisonment. But, in the words of Assange, courage is contagious, and leaks will continue as government misdeeds are exposed by principled people. The voluminous information Ellsberg photocopied over many hours can be copied today in minutes and distributed worldwide immediately over the Internet. We have already seen such leaks in the form of classified U.S. information on the war in Ukraine contradicting optimistic U.S. public claims. The exemplary actions of Dan Ellsberg will inspire countless future acts of courage in the cause of peace……………………

more https://limitlesslife.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/a-tribute-to-daniel-ellsberg/
—

May 8, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment

The mind of Oppenheimer, inventor of nuclear bomb who turned pacifist

WION News, New Delhi, By: Kshitij Mohan Rawat Apr 28, 2023,

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

J Robert Oppenheimer was a physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first nuclear bomb. He witnessed the destructive power of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite his role in the creation of the most destructive force the world has ever seen, he became an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic, Oppenheimer, promises to explore the scientist’s complicated life and legacy.

In the early morning of July 16, 1945, J Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist, and director of the Manhattan Project, watched as the world’s first nuclear bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert. The blast was so powerful that it lit up the sky like a second sun, and Oppenheimer later recalled that he thought of a verse from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita just then: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” It was one other verse from the scripture that he spoke of and has come to be deeply associated with him. Lord Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, is in his universal form, and proclaims to Arjun: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The technology that Oppenheimer helped develop served as the basis of Little Boy and Fat Man, two atomic bombs that laid waste to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The bombings effectively ended World War II, as Imperial Japan surrendered. [Ed. note – Japan was going to surrender already, anyway]

Oppenheimer had been instrumental in the development of nuclear weapons, but witnessing the destructive power of the bomb he helped invent made him question the morality of what he had done. In the years that followed, he became an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament, a stunning transformation that actually came very quickly after the destruction in Japan.

Who was J Robert Oppenheimer?

……………………….Oppenheimer was appointed as the director of the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, where the bomb was designed and built. He oversaw a team of thousands of scientists, engineers, and support staff, and he worked tirelessly to ensure that the bomb was ready for use as soon as possible.

Oppenheimer, the unlikely apostle of peace

Only 11 days after the bombings in Japan, Oppenheimer urged then-US president Harry S. Truman to ban nuclear weapons. But the president was by now worried about Soviet Union’s aggression [although Russia was USA’s ally in WW2 losing 20 million soldiers] and paid him no heed. Oppenheimer also told Truman that he (Oppenheimer) had blood on his hands.

……………………Oppenheimer had become disillusioned with the technology he had helped create. He began to publicly speak out against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and he became an advocate for arms control and disarmament.

He strongly opposed the development and test of the H-bomb, a weapon with far greater destructive power than the original atomic bomb, in 1952. But his opposition to the bomb did not go down well with the government. It was the time of McCarthyism, after all — a time of intense anti-communist suspicion and persecution of dissenting voices. He was removed from the Atomic Energy Commission.

In 1954, Oppenheimer’s political views came under scrutiny when he was accused of being a security risk by the US government. During the height of the Cold War, Oppenheimer’s past associations with left-wing political groups and his vocal opposition to nuclear testing made him a target of suspicion for many in the government.

Despite his contributions to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was ultimately stripped of his security clearance and barred from further government work. In the years that followed, Oppenheimer continued to speak out against nuclear weapons, and became a prominent voice in the anti-nuclear movement.

The threat of nuclear weapons in the present time

The devastating impact of nuclear weapons is something that cannot be understated, with the potential to annihilate entire cities and leave a lasting impact on the environment for years to come. A full-fledged nuclear war would obliterate all life from earth Moreover, the rise of non-state actors and terrorist groups has added a new dimension to the threat of nuclear weapons………………

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer’s story will be explored on the big screen with Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic of the scientist, titled simply Oppenheimer. The film, which is set to star Cillian Murphy in the role, promises to be a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of Oppenheimer’s life and legacy. The film also features Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett, and Kenneth Branagh in the cast. https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-explained-i-the-mind-of-oppenheimer-inventor-of-nuclear-bomb-who-turned-pacifist-587081

April 30, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment

Chernobyl: Survivors reflect on nuclear accident, Russian occupation

Survivors of one of the world’s worst ever nuclear accidents at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 have been reflecting on the events of that fateful day 37 years ago, as current employees consider the challenges of working at the plant which was seized by Russian troops following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Looking back on two of the most difficult periods since the plant opened in 1977, Chernobyl employees shared their personal stories with UN News on the International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day.

Ground zero

Evgeny Yashin was a 40-year-old chemist at the Chernobyl plant when the nuclear power reactor accident unfolded in April 1986, resulting in massive evacuations, the deaths of 31 people, and long-term illness for thousands of others.

“Everyone was talking about the explosion of the reactor’s emergency cooling system,” he told UN News, recalling a fateful bus ride to work on the day of the accident. “But, passing by the fourth power unit, it became clear to us that it was much more serious than expected; the wall of the reactor had completely fallen out and a glow could be seen, resembling a steel foundry oven. We took action immediately.”

Mass evacuations

At that point, the scale of the accident was neither expected nor assessed, he said, adding that protocols were not in place because it had been inconceivable that this could happen to the reactors. As a shift supervisor of 300 employees at Chernobyl’s chemical workshop, his team’s main task was to prepare demineralized water, receive radioactive liquid waste, store it, and process it.

“We prepared the water to extinguish the reactor, walked knee-deep in water, and organized pumping,” he said. “Water appeared to be flowing endlessly, the system was launched at full capacity, and more and more water was required.”

On 27 April, Pripyat inhabitants were evacuated along with some of the plant’s staff, he said, remembering buses driving across the city, stopping in front of houses to collect evacuees. Relatives could neither call, warn them nor discuss the evacuation route, he said, recalling that he found his family had moved out of the area.

‘Very few of my colleagues are still alive’

In early May, the remaining staff were experiencing serious side-effects, as doctors monitored their health via frequent blood tests, he said, adding that some were taken “out of the zone” to rest.

“I feel the consequences on my health even now,” said Mr. Yashin, who has cancer. “Very few of my colleagues are still alive. I am surprised that I myself am still alive.”

Meanwhile, disputes remain about who is to blame, he said.

“I am 100 per cent sure that the designers could not have foreseen such a development,” he said. “The station personnel took all measures to localize the accident’s consequences, but could not prevent it.”

Since then, each year, on 26 April, residents of the city of Slavutych gather at a monument to the Chernobyl victims, lighting candles and remembering those tragic events, Mr. Yashin said. While he no longer works at the plant, his granddaughter, Tatiana, is an engineer who handles spent nuclear fuel at the facility, where it is stored alongside thousands of tons of radioactive waste…………………. more https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1136067

April 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Belarus, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

Daniel Ellsberg is still fighting — Beyond Nuclear International

For Ellsberg there was “no greater cause” than confronting the evils of nuclear weapons
Daniel Ellsberg is still fighting — Beyond Nuclear International

Legendary whistleblower keeps giving in his final months

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Most of us who have been around long enough in this movement probably have their own Daniel Ellsberg story. With the 91-year old famous whistleblower’s recent announcement that he has terminal pancreatic cancer, with just months to live, many were re-telling theirs. It was an apt outpouring of admiration, respect and love. So much so, that April 24-30 is now Daniel Ellsberg Week.

……………………………………….Thus I came to learn that one of the great heroes of our time, who was prepared to sacrifice a lifetime of freedom for a just cause, was indeed a man of quiet humility and one who has filled that lifetime that he views as some sort of unexpected bonus, with endlessly generous gifts of writing, insight, analysis and conviction.

His recent book — The Doomsday Machine, confessions of a nuclear war planner — is essential and definitive and nightmare-inducing. In other words, desperately important.

“In public, he has been a beacon of integrity and truth, willing to say and do what the warmakers and nuclear-holocaust planners find completely unacceptable,” RootsAction co-founder and director Norman Solomon told Common Dreams columnist, Brett Wilkins. ”In private, his thoughtful kindness and daily commitment to humanity are central to his being. And I want to emphasize right now that nothing in the world is more important to read and heed than Dan’s monumental book The Doomsday Machine.”

……………………………………………………………………….When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars…………………………

………………………………………………….I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance.

…………………………………………………..China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war–let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out–are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere…………………………………………………….. more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/04/23/daniel-ellsberg-is-still-fighting/

April 24, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment

Spotlight on Dr. Helen Caldicott

by WS Editors | Mar 28, 2023, https://washingtonspectator.org/spotlight-on-dr-helen-caldicott/

It’s been nearly 40 years since If You Love This Planet won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary.

The film is comprised of a lecture given to students by the celebrated nuclear critic Dr. Helen Caldicott, president at the time of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

With the growing intensity of the conflict in Ukraine, and the corresponding potential for the deployment of nuclear weapons, Dr. Caldicott’s decades-old warning against the use of the atomic bomb is fresh and resonant.

Caldicott analyzes the medical and geo-physical consequences of the detonation of a modern nuclear weapon, explains why there is no surviving a nuclear war, and exposes the folly of superpower arguments on behalf of maintaining tactical nuclear superiority. The film ends with her call for citizen action, and this timeless and poetic plea:

“If you love this planet, and you watch the spring come, and you watch magnolias flower, and you watch the wisteria come out, and you smell a rose, you will realize that you are going to have to change the priorities of your life. If you love this planet.”

Four decades after “If You Love this Planet” was released, Helen Caldicott, now 85, sat down for this interview at her home in Australia. She notes the absence of progress toward the eradication of nuclear weapons, and decries the failure of the nuclear states to eliminate the greatest threat to human survival.

Arguably the most articulate and forceful advocate for disarmament and abolition in the nuclear era, Dr. Helen Caldicott has devoted the last forty two years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to prevent environmental destruction.

In 1971, Dr. Caldicott played a major role in Australia’s opposition to French atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific; in 1975 she worked with the Australian trade unions to educate their members about the medical dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle, with particular reference to uranium mining.

While living in the United States from 1977 to 1986, as President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, she helped invigorate an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. The international umbrella group (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She also founded the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the US in 1980.

Dr. Caldicott has received many prizes and awards for her work, including the Lannan Foundation’s 2003 Prize for Cultural Freedom and twenty one honorary doctoral degrees. The Smithsonian named Helen Caldicott one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.

April 1, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

Cry from soldier, unrecognised victim of depleted uranium radiation

Depleted uranium, used in some types of ammunition and military armour, is the dense, low-cost leftover once uranium has been processed….

A high-ranking official from Veterans Affairs says a handful of vets mistakenly believe their bodies have been damaged by depleted uranium…..

the Federal Court of Canada has found depleted uranium to be an issue. The court ruled the Veterans Affairs Department must compensate retired serviceman Steve Dornan for a cancer his doctors say resulted from exposure to depleted uranium residue.

Poisoned soldier plans hunger strike at minister’s office in exchange for care, Montreal CTV.ca Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press, 30 Oct 11, MONTREAL — An ex-soldier who says he was poisoned while serving overseas is planning to go on a hunger strike outside the office of Canada’s veterans affairs minister until he gets medical treatment.

Or until he dies.

Continue reading →

March 24, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, depleted uranium, health, PERSONAL STORIES, Uranium | 2 Comments

Fukushima victims feel left out

By WANG XU in Tokyo , 2023-03-13 http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202303/13/WS640e7be0a31057c47ebb4040.html

Editor’s note: On Saturday, Japan marked the 12th anniversary of the massive earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster with a minute of silence, as global concerns grew ahead of the planned release into the Pacific Ocean of nuclear-contaminated water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant. China Daily reviews how locals are still suffering from the disaster and their opposition to the controversial discharge plan.

After catastrophe, only a handful of evacuated residents prefer to return

For the past 12 years Honoka, now 85, has been one of thousands of Japanese who have taken part in protests outside the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo.

Their bone of contention: the handling of contaminated water in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, eastern Japan, wrecked by an earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people and triggered the meltdown of three nuclear reactors as well as the release of large amounts of radiation.

The dark 12th anniversary of that disaster was marked on Saturday.

Honoka, who requested not to be fully identified, said she was moved by the resilience and determination of Fukushima people and thus volunteered to join them to raise broader awareness about the challenges and hardships they face. She is not from Fukushima, she said.

“Many of them were forced to leave their homes in the aftermath of the disaster, unsure of when, or if, they would be able to return.”

The national government’s handling of the disaster had left her feeling betrayed, she said.

“The government abandoned the people of Fukushima when they needed it most.”

Nevertheless, over the years there has been a concerted drive to rebuild Fukushima and bring back those who left it. Now one of the major concerns is what to do with the nuclear-contaminated water in the plant, and in particular official plans to start releasing it into the Pacific Ocean.

The toxic water has been used to cool the highly radioactive, damaged reactor cores, and there is enough of it to fill 500 Olympic-size swimming pools. The government has said it plans to start discharging the water this spring or summer.

“Dumping the toxic water is contrary to a government pledge of rebuilding my hometown of Fukushima, because it threatens a double blow to our community,” said Hisae Unuma, one of the 160,000 people evacuated from the region and who has been among those pushing for the government to scrap its discharge plan.

Many evacuees such as Unuma have refused to return to their hometowns even though the government has lifted evacuation orders and spent huge amounts of money on rebuilding local facilities and housing.

The Board of Audit, which reviews national government spending, says Japan has spent about 1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion) a year on handling the disaster, and how much the total will be for dealing with its aftermath is unknown.

The Reconstruction Agency says about 80,000 residents have been evacuated from Fukushima prefecture since 2011, and just 16,000 of them have returned home.

In the Tsushima district of Namie town, which once had a population of 1,400, and where reconstruction work has just finished, fewer than 10 residents are reported to have said they plan to move back this spring.

For those who have returned or never left, life promises to be far from ideal, because the agriculture and fishing industries, once the lifeblood of the region, have been devastated by the disaster.

As the Fukushima plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, moves closer to discharging the nuclear-contaminated water, local opposition has intensified.

“The government gave us a promise and is now doing exactly the opposite,” said Tetsu Nozaki, head of Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations, referring to an agreement reached by it, the national government and TEPCO.

“The treated water must not be released without the consent of all those involved.”

March 15, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima continuing, PERSONAL STORIES | 1 Comment

How US and Ukraine’s far-right made pro-peace Zelensky a ‘no peace’ president

the exalted version of Zelensky promoted to NATO state audiences today is a sharp contrast to the pro-peace candidate that Ukrainians overwhelmingly elected four years ago.

it is no wonder that the same US political establishment that sabotaged Zelensky’s peace mandate now holds him up as a hero.

In October 2019, as he took steps to implement Minsk in the face of far-right protests and US hostility, Zelensky assured Ukrainians that he was “the president of peace,” and that “ending this war is of utmost importance to me.” He added: “I, the president, am not ready to sacrifice our people. And that is why I choose diplomacy.”

Elected in 2019 to bring peace to Ukraine, a Zelensky aide now declares that “there is no peace with Russia, and Ukraine must arm itself to the teeth.”

Aaron Maté https://mate.substack.com/p/how-us-and-ukraines-far-right-made?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=100118&post_id=105251040&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email 26 Feb 23,

Volodymyr Zelensky marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by rejecting any negotiations with the Kremlin.

“There is nothing to talk about and nobody to talk about over there,” Zelensky declared.

The Ukrainian President delivered the message just two weeks after his French and German counterparts urged him, at a meeting in Paris, “to start considering peace talks with Moscow,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

But as an adviser explained to the New York Times, Zelensky is now “more at peace with himself,” and therefore has no need to entertain the possibility of peace with his neighbor.

He has a clear understanding what Ukraine should do,” the adviser said. “There is no ambiguity: There is no peace with Russia, and Ukraine must arm itself to the teeth.”

Zelensky’s “clear understanding” of the need to reject peace with Russia and turn his country into a NATO arms depot is a resounding victory for the Ukrainian far-right and its US government allies. As I wrote here last year, these two powerful forces, aligned by their converging interests in prolonging the post-2014 war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, sabotaged the peace platform that Zelensky was elected on in April 2019. As Adam Schiff put it, the US has used Ukraine’s civil war “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

The commemoration of the first anniversary of Russia’s cross-border invasion to end Schiff’s bipartisan “fight” has yielded more insight into how the US, in concert with its ideological allies in Ukraine’s powerful far-right, helped convert Zelensky from pro-peace candidate to “no peace” president.

In a fawning profile, the Washington Post approvingly recounts how Zelensky shifted from naively “thinking peace with Putin was possible” to now believing that “victory is the only answer.” Although the Post attempts to cast Zelensky’s “transformation” as the result of “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat,” the details tell a different story.

The Post describes a summer 2019 exchange between the then-rookie president and the top US diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor. At the time, Zelensky was “expressing curiosity” about the Steinmeier Formula, a German-led effort to revive the stalled Minsk Accords. Minsk, reached in 2015, called for granting limited autonomy to the rebellious Donbas regions in eastern Ukraine in exchange for their demilitarization. Ukraine’s far-right, the driving force behind the 2014 Maidan coup that triggered the ensuing Donbas war, had opposed Minsk’s implementation at every turn.

Zelensky, Taylor recalls, “hoped” that the Steinmeier initiative “might lead to a deal with the Kremlin.” The Ukrainian president “pointed to a document explaining the formulation, thinking that somewhere in the details of the legalese a workable compromise with Moscow might be found.”

But Washington knew better: no compromise with Moscow could be allowed. “No one knows what it is,” Taylor told Zelensky of the German plan. “Steinmeier doesn’t know what it is… It’s a terrible idea.”

The Steinmeier plan was in fact a simple idea, and a welcome one to anyone interested in bringing peace to Ukraine. For his part, Taylor was never shy about advocating war. In a December 2014 letter to The Washington Post, Taylor denounced an opinion article that had opposed sending US arms to Ukraine and advocated an agreement between NATO and Russia to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. Backers of such steps, Taylor wrote, are “advocating that the West appease Russia.… Now is not the time for appeasement.”

This explains why Taylor was similarly hostile to the “terrible” plan named after former German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The Steinmeier Formula called for holding local elections in the rebel-held Donbas areas under Ukrainian law and international supervision. If OSCE monitors certified the results, then Ukraine would regain control of its eastern border and enact a special status law granting the rebellious Donbas regions limited autonomy.

But this road map, along with a similar initiative from French diplomat Pierre Morel, “got nowhere because of opposition in Ukraine,” former UK diplomat Duncan Allan observed for the UK government-funded think tank Chatham House. When Zelensky tried to revive it in late 2019, Allan added, “[a]nother sharp reaction in Ukraine forced him to back down.” As the New York Times now notes in passing, “a backlash at home — with street protesters in Kyiv accusing him of treason for surrendering land — steered the Ukrainian president to a political formula in which he rejected concessions” with Russia.

Specifically, that “backlash” in Ukraine included not only violent protests but outright threats to Zelensky’s life.

“Zelenskyy said he was ready to lose his ratings, popularity, position,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Yarosh, commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army and former senior Ukrainian military advisor, said shortly after Zelensky’s May 2019 inauguration. “No he would lose his life. He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the [Maidan] Revolution and the [Donbas] War.” (Two years after threatening to hang the president from a tree, Yarosh was given a repeat appointment as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian military subsequently claimed that the appointment was withdrawn).

Despite the internal and external opposition, Zelensky departed a meeting with Putin in December 2019 feeling “hopeful”, the Post reports. “Within weeks, Russia agreed to a broader prisoner exchange and offered Ukraine a $3 billion gas arbitration settlement as well as a new gas transit deal.”

But on top of the far-right backlash at home, Zelensky’s peace initiative faced direct hostility from Ukraine’s patron in Washington. After warning Zelensky against pursuing a “terrible” European-brokered peace plan, William Taylor soon became a hero of Trump’s first impeachment over Ukraine. At the impeachment proceedings, which kicked off in October 2019 just as Zelensky was trying to follow through on his peace mandate, Taylor was summoned to assure Congress and a Russiagate-crazed media class that Trump’s pause on weapons subsidies for the Ukrainian fight against the Russia-backed Donbas rebels endangered “our national security.” (For his services, the New York Times lauded Taylor as “a septuagenarian Vietnam veteran with a chiseled face and reassuring gray hair,” while the Washington Post declared him to be a “meticulous note taker.”)

The prevailing imperative to use Ukraine “to fight Russia over there” (Schiff) meant that Zelensky had no chance to pursue the “terrible” Minsk agreement that Taylor and other influential proxy warriors opposed.

“The reality is that Ukraine depends on political, diplomatic, economic and military support from the West, and particularly from the United States,” Samuel Charap of the Pentagon-tied RAND Corporation wrote in November 2021. Up to that point, “Ukraine has shown little desire” to “[implement] its obligations under the Minsk II agreement,” and the US had “not yet used its influence to push for progress on the Donbas conflict.” If the Ukrainian government could be pushed “toward complying”, Charap noted, that “might actually invite de-escalation from Russia” while saving Ukraine “from calamity.”

But by then, Zelensky had decided to side with the forces that had sabotaged him. According to the Post’s account, citing David Arakhamia, the leader of Zelensky’s faction in parliament: “By early 2021, Zelensky believed that negotiations wouldn’t work and that Ukraine would need to retake the Donetsk and Luhansk regions ‘either through a political or military path.’” As a result, “[t]he Kremlin disengaged.”

Zelensky’s early 2021 decision that “negotiations wouldn’t work” explains why, in early 2022, he shunned all opportunities to prevent Russia’s looming invasion. At the final talks on implement Minsk, a “key obstacle,” the Washington Post reported, “was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists.” When Germany proposed a last-minute deal in which Ukraine would “renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal,” Zelensky turned it down, according to the Wall Street Journal. After rejecting diplomacy, Zelensky’s government then significantly increased its shelling of the Donbas, a potential step toward trying to “retake the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” via the “military path” that the Washington Post has newly confirmed.

And as the recent disclosures of former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet underscore, the US went from sabotaging Zelensky’s peace mandate before the Russian invasion to blocking diplomatic efforts in the period since.

As a result, the exalted version of Zelensky promoted to NATO state audiences today is a sharp contrast to the pro-peace candidate that Ukrainians overwhelmingly elected four years ago.

By now choosing to reject diplomacy, President Zelensky has shown that he is more than willing to sacrifice his people for the sake of his NATO state patrons’ desired proxy war against Russia. Accordingly, one year into the catastrophic Russian invasion that it helped provoke, it is no wonder that the same US political establishment that sabotaged Zelensky’s peace mandate now holds him up as a hero.

February 27, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, politics international, Reference, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Biden team has ‘deeply rooted hatred for Russia’ – US congressman

I know that Donald Trump is awful. And so is his Republican support team. Nevertheless, sometimes they say something sensible – something that needs to be said

Senior State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken are “dangerous fools,” Paul Gosar declared

Senior officials at the US State Department are attempting to get the country “involved in another world war” with Russia, Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar tweeted on Friday. Gosar, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, and former president Donald Trump, have all named Victoria Nuland as the most dangerous among this group in recent days.

Responding to an RT article on Musk accusing Nuland of “pushing this war” in Ukraine, Gosar declared that the billionaire “is correct.”

“Both Nuland and Blinken have a deeply rooted irrational hatred of Russia, and they seek to get the US involved in another world war,” he continued. “These are dangerous fools who can get us all killed.”

In a follow-up tweet, Gosar wrote that “as a non-soldier, Nuland is quite willing to endorse violence and war.” The Republican lawmaker then quoted the article, which stated that Nuland had “endorsed regime change in Russia, celebrated the US’ destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and called for the indefinite flow of arms into Ukraine.”

As assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs in 2014, Nuland helped to orchestrate the pro-Western coup that unseated democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovich. Nuland traveled to Kiev and promised military aid to the rioters, and was recorded plotting to install a successor to Yanukovich.

As Biden’s secretary of state, Blinken has promised to keep weapons flowing into Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” and advised Kiev in December not to seek the kind of negotiated settlement that would liken to a “phony peace.”

Gosar has been a persistent critic of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy since Russia’s military operation began a year ago on Friday. However, although the Republican Party now controls the House of Representatives, there is little the Arizona congressman can do to change the administration’s course. A significant bipartisan majority supports continued military aid to Ukraine, with only 11 Republicans, Gosar included, sponsoring legislation that would cut funding for Kiev.

These Republicans are all allies of former president Donald Trump. In a campaign video released on Tuesday, Trump blamed the situation in Ukraine on Nuland and “others like her” in the Biden administration. Nuland, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO,” adding that the conflict would have “never happened if I was your president.”

February 25, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, politics international, psychology and culture | Leave a comment

Pentagon-Funded Plymouth University Cancels Anti-War Academic: the militarization of higher education.

Pentagon-Funded Plymouth University Cancels Anti-War Academic: Reflections on How the US Empire Conquered Higher Education, CouterPunch BY T.J. COLES 17 Feb 23,

The US Empire is in the final and most dangerous stages of its quest for what the Pentagon calls “full spectrum dominance.” Having invaded and fought proxy wars in the oil-rich Middle East, it is now trying to break nuclear-armed Russia in another proxy war before attempting “regime change” in nuclear-armed China. We need not tarry on the potential consequences. Professor Noam Chomsky called it 20 years ago: this is hegemony or survival. Which one do you choose?

As the Empire races towards its biggest bet, using humanity and all other species on the planet as gambling chips, anti-war comment is tolerated less and less. For those who want to know what happened to me, see the Annex of this article for the leaked emails and background. Meanwhile, consider what is taking shape.

DELETING THE ENEMY

Critics of Western imperialism are silenced by the Empire’s witting and unwitting minions in increasingly knee-jerk ways. Google, which was developed with CIA money, has de-ranked anti-war websites, driving traffic to state-corporate outlets that promote imperialism. After buying YouTube, it then went on a de-platforming spree, banning and de-monetizing “conspiracy theorists,” left and right, who dare deviate from the increasingly narrow orthodoxy of acceptable thought.

Under the new McCarthyism of RussiaGate, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has used the pretext of countering foreign disinformation to suspend and terminate political accounts. In 2020, following an evidence-free CNN report alleging that it was a front for the sanctioned nation of Iran, the FBI and Department of Justice seized the US domain for the website of the American Herald Tribune, founded by Dr. Anthony James Hall, who retired from his Canadian university, Lethbridge, following pressure from the Zionist Lobby and from individuals who accused him of being a “conspiracy theorist”—a cheap smear tactic employed against me by a cabal of staff at Plymouth University.

Meanwhile, the Twitter Files have exploded the myth that “social media” are independent corporate actors. Likewise, journalist Dr. Alan Macleod has documented the dozens of former spies now employed to police content at Facebook.

SHAME IS THE GAME

The opinions of self-described fact-checkers—like the Poynter Institute—are amplified by state-corporate media which engage in public humiliation rituals in the hope that retailers will pull magazines, academic institutions will fire staff, digital providers will demonetize accounts, and web hosts will drop entire sites and/or content……….

As governments contract out censorship to “fact-checkers,” critics of Empire are demonetized. Consortium News and Mint Press have seen their PayPal accounts frozen. PayPal’s pro-Trump co-founder, Peter Thiel, has made many millions of dollars from Pentagon contracts. Between 2007 and ’19, US taxpayers gave his Palantir Technologies $1.5 billion via the Department of Defense, particularly to spy on Afghans and Iraqis.

ACADEMIC OBLIVION

The above examples show how the US military and intelligence continue to influence the infrastructure through which much of today’s information travels. Another target is academia. But how serious is the problem?……………………………………………………..

THE MILITARIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Universities serve a variety of purposes, one of which is the development of new weapons for the US military. In the past, white voices critical of Empire would be tolerated as long as their non-university work did not grind the gears of Empire. That’s how Professor Chomsky, for instance, was able to get arrested protesting mass murder in Vietnam while receiving Pentagon money to undertake his linguistics research.

The technological origins of “full spectrum dominance” can perhaps be traced back to the outgoing Reagan and incoming George H.W. Bush administrations, under whom the Pentagon founded the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative to further integrate with education and develop tools for things like the so-called Star Wars program (Strategic Defense Initiative). One consequence is that higher education became significantly influenced—maybe not full-spectrum dominated—by the eternal war machine.

By 2015, the Department of Defense (DoD), which in more honest times was called the Department of War, was investing $250 million of taxpayer money in universities. In that year, the DoD decided to look for international partners, of which the Britain was a natural first-choice. The Pentagon’s Basic Research Office Director, Robin Staffin, said: “we decided it was time to formalize cooperation between the U.S. and the U.K.”

DARPA is the Pentagon’s taxpayer-funded innovation arm. It used to stand for the Advanced Projects Research Agency, but PR experts realized that they’d better prefix it with the word “Defense.” In 2016, venture capitalist-turned-DARPA Director, Arati Prabhakar, said: “DARPA is reliant on research universities as one part of this huge ecosystem … [We] draw from the deep foundational research, almost always at places like great universities.”

For instance, the DoD recently said that the universities of Alabama-Huntsville, Florida International, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, and others, have received funding to develop solutions for—are you ready?—“monitoring the health and status of hypersonic aeroshells” (heat shields for space systems, which are core elements of “full spectrum dominance.” The “health and status” of ordinary Americans, who still don’t have free coverage, is less important). Other projects include thermodynamic ducts for hypersonic vehicles sponsored by the usual suspects, like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

FUNDING PLYMOUTH UNIVERSITY: DARPA’S DRIVE…………………………………………………

CONCLUSION

As universities continue designing weapons of mass murder, thought criminals in Western countries continue to face deplatforming and public shaming. Are their personal fates as severe as those of dissident academics in US-UK-supported regimes, like Saudi Arabia? Of course not. But that is not the point. An obvious chilling effect is created in which scholars striving for social justice and indeed the survival of the planet are silenced. The witting an unwitting minions of Empire are too obtuse to realize that by issuing penalties for expressing opinions, those penalties may one day be imposed upon them.

ANNEX (HISTORY, EMAIL EVIDENCE, REBUTTAL):

MY STORY……………………………………………………………………………….as I have lost my University position as a result of my political views, it is worth considering exactly what I write for Nexus (article by article) and that my articles give a left-wing voice to the so-called conspiracy research community, which is often dominated by right-wingers and apolitical people.

As one can see below, the bulk of my work for Nexus consists of critiques and exposés of US military and intelligence agencies. …………………………………………………………

T. J. Coles is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and others) and Fire and Fury: How the US Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia (both Clairview Books). https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/17/pentagon-funded-plymouth-university-cancels-anti-war-academic-reflections-on-how-the-us-empire-conquered-higher-education/

February 20, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, PERSONAL STORIES, UK, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘The day the desert wind cried’: French nuclear tests cast long shadow in Libyan Sahara

Middle East Eye, By Samira Elsaidi, 29 January 2023

Between 1960 and 1966, France detonated 17 bombs in the Algerian Sahara. In neighbouring Libya, the deadly effects are felt to this day

“I search for words that do not exist. My father passed away on the day the desert wind cried, and his absence is still there, like a loud mute cry, like a void that words cannot fill.”

Abed Alfitory is 64-years old now. But he still remembers his father’s death and the events that led to it.

Alfitory is from Fezzan, the largely desert region of southwestern Libya. It is here, deep in the Sahara, that he spent 20 years collecting material for his book Desert Cry, motivated by the loss of his father’s sight in 1960 and his death a few years later.

Speaking to Middle East Eye from his home in al-Zighan, the professor of philosophy at Sabha university told Middle East Eye that his childhood had come at a great cost, that he struggled amidst hard conditions and that he had been haunted by his father’s blindness.

Later, Alfitory discovered what had caused his father’s condition. He learnt, too, that he was not alone.

Many people in Fezzan had been struck down by respiratory diseases and ophthalmia in 1960. The acute eye infection was so prevalent then that it became known as the “year of ophthalmia”.

This was followed by the “year of smallpox”, the “year of the yellow wind” and the “year of gnawing”. The people of the Fezzan began to get cancer in greater numbers. Acid rain fell. The land was afflicted. What had happened?

Explosions in the Sahara

On 13 February 1960, France conducted its first nuclear test at Reggane, an oasis town in southern Algeria. The war for the North African country’s independence had been ongoing since 1954 and French President Charles de Gaulle was keen to show the world that France belonged at the top table of military powers.

To that end, the first French atomic bomb, named Gerboise Bleue after the blue of the tricolour flag and a small desert animal in the Sahara, was detonated in the Algerian desert. It released over four times the amount of energy as that of the US bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

A few months later, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was in France for an official visit, a second French bomb was detonated in the Sahara.

Between 1960 and 1966, four years after Algeria gained its independence, France detonated 17 bombs in the Sahara, including four in the atmosphere near Reggane. Witnesses to the tests described them as the most brutal thing they’d ever seen in their lives.

Four underground explosions in the Algerian Sahara “were not totally contained or confined”, according to a French parliamentary report.

Most famous of these was the Beryl incident, during which nine soldiers and a number of local Tuareg villagers were heavily contaminated by radioactivity.

The impact of France’s nuclear testing programme in Algeria was immediate and has been ongoing.

Following the first explosion in 1960, radioactive fallout landed in newly independent Ghana and in Nigeria, which was in its last days as a British colony.

Secret defence documents cited by Le Parisien in 2014 revealed that much larger areas than had been claimed by the government had been affected.

In fact, contrary to Paris’s assertions, radiation from the first bomb alone had covered a region that ran from Algeria to Libya to Mauritania and on to Mali and Nigeria. The impact even reached as far north as Spain and Italy…………………………………… more https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/france-libya-algeria-nuclear-tests-still-haunt-desert-cried

January 29, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AFRICA, PERSONAL STORIES, weapons and war | Leave a comment

This man may have saved the world from nuclear war. His story is a heart-pumper.

Even if you don’t know who Petrov was, he might be the reason you’re alive today.

James Gaines https://www.upworthy.com/this-man-may-have-saved-the-world-from-nuclear-war-his-story-is-a-heart-pumper-rp 4 Jan 23

In the 1980s, Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air Defense Forces. He was in charge of watching the computers at one of the Soviety Union’s nuclear early warning centers. If the Americans wanted to start a nuclear war, Petrov would be one of the first to know.

At this time, the United States and the Soviet Union were embroiled in the Cold War. Each had stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and a nuclear war, though horrific, often seemed imminent

Suddenly, in the early morning of Sept. 26, 1983, a siren started to scream. If Petrov’s computer was to be believed, the Americans had just attacked the Soviet Union.

The word “LAUNCH” appeared in bold red letters across Petrov’s computer’s screen. Then it happened again and again — five missiles in all.

Petrov need to react. If a nuclear attack really was incoming, the Soviets only had a few minutes to save themselves and launch a nuclear counter attack of their own.

It was Petrov’s job, his duty, to alert his superiors — but something seemed off.

Petrov sat there, trying to figure out what to do. If the Americans were attacking, why were there only six bombs? Why not the thousands they were capable of? Why weren’t there corroborating reports from ground radar? Plus this particular computer system was new and unproven. It could be a malfunction.

Did Petrov really think this was enough evidence to potentially start a full-scale nuclear exchange? Kill millions of people? It was a heavy weight to bear.

“Nobody would be able to correct my mistake if I had made one,” Petrov later told the BBC.

After a few pregnant minutes, Petrov made his decision.

He picked up the phone and, though he couldn’t know for sure, told his superiors it was a false alarm. His level-headed thinking may have saved millions of lives.

He was right. It was a malfunction.

For his efforts, Petrov’s reward would be a long time coming. In the immediate aftermath, he actually got reprimanded by his superiors. It wouldn’t be until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the world learned just how close we all came to destruction and the one man who saved it.

January 5, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, Russia, weapons and war | Leave a comment

She’s Spent a Decade Fighting to Ban Nuclear Weapons. The Stakes Are Only Getting Higher

Time BY NAINA BAJEKAL , JANUARY 4, 2023

March 2017 was an exhilarating time for Beatrice Fihn. The executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was at the U.N. in New York City for talks with more than 120 countries to negotiate a treaty on banning nuclear weapons. One moment still stands out: Nikki Haley, then U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and a group of diplomats from several NATO countries held a press conference outside the General Assembly to protest the talks.

“It was such a hilarious role reversal,” Fihn tells me when we meet for lunch in New York this fall, referring to all the times nuclear-disarmament activists have been outside the corridors of power. “Now, we were in the driver’s seat.”

Fihn, 40, has been trying to shift these dynamics ever since she took the helm of the Geneva-based ICAN nearly a decade ago. In 2017, the charismatic Swedish lawyer was thrust into the spotlight when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for ICAN’s work to draw attention to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and its efforts to establish the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Now ratified by 68 countries, mostly in the Global South, the ban treaty entered into force in January 2021—the first international legally binding agreement to ban nuclear weapons and associated activities, from testing to development.

However, since then, Fihn feels like things have backslid. Vladimir Putin’s threats have reminded the world that nuclear war is not just a Cold War–era concern. In a March poll, 7 in 10 Americans said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increased the possibility of nuclear weapons being used anywhere. Polls in Poland and France reflected similar concerns. “There’s so much happening and it’s hard to keep up—a lot of anxiety and awfulness,” Fihn says. Growing great-power competition—from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear tests to China’s rapidly expanding arsenal—raises the stakes for Western democracies, she argues. “Nuclear weapons make us vulnerable to dictators that do not answer to their people.”

Though Fihn announced in November that she would step down as ICAN’s executive director at the end of January, she plans to remain involved and is optimistic about this moment, pointing to progress made after crises in the 1960s and 1980s when the world came to the brink of nuclear war. “People are talking about nuclear weapons more than they have since the ’80s. We have to use this to build a bigger movement—to double or triple in size—so we can set the stage for when the war in Ukraine is over,” she says. “Tomorrow just needs to be bigger than today.”………………………………………………………………………………

The ban treaty offers, in Fihn’s view, a way for countries to express their condemnation of a system that gives a handful of nations a monopoly on nuclear weapons while the rest will only bear their consequences. “Instead of just waiting for them to come to the table, our goal is to change the landscape,” Fihn says. “What can Jamaica do? What can Fiji do? How can they play a role rather than just waiting for the nuclear-armed states to be ready?”

ICAN also brings in ordinary citizens from countries that hold nuclear weapons, where public support for them is low. A 2019 poll of U.S. and Japanese residents found that a majority—64.7% and 75% respectively—wanted their governments to join the ban treaty; a 2020 poll of six NATO states not including the U.S. found overwhelming support for the same…………………………..

Fihn is undeterred. She was 6 months pregnant with her second child when she assumed her role. “I was worried that it would be too much,” she says, “and it’s been really hard, but I’m proud that I dared to take the job.” From Geneva, she has spent years trying to build a broad coalition of students, artists, lawyers, doctors, environmental activists, and racial-justice activists. ICAN now counts 652 partner organizations in 110 countries.

The Nobel Prize offered them a massive boost. “We weren’t heads of state, or big celebrities. We were just random people doing some petitions, seminars, panels, emailing parliamentarians, nagging politicians, holding meetings.

There are no TV shows about negotiators for a reason,” she laughs.

Though Fihn’s husband has often been the main caregiver, her 8- and 11-year-old kids have joined her for some of these meetings. That means they’ve heard more about nuclear weapons than she perhaps wishes. “I never want to lie to them, but I want to make sure it’s manageable for a child,” she says. “I always try to emphasize that nobody has used them since 1945 and that we just want to get rid of them to make sure there are no accidents.”

Nuclear weapons, Fihn says, are “pretty simple: big bomb goes boom.” What she wants to talk about is what happens afterward: the radiation, the firestorms; the cancers, the miscarriages, the stillborn babies; the collapse of health and food systems. What to do with hundreds of thousands of dead bodies. “I hate that our work is often called naive,” Fihn says. “We’re the ones actually talking about what happens if a bomb goes off. Thinking that we can just wait forever and someday the nuclear-weapon states will just agree? That’s naive.”

Fihn believes that amplifying survivors’ stories is critical to building a movement against nuclear weapons. During the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, she shared the stage with Setsuko Thurlow, an ICAN campaigner who was 13 when the U.S. attacked Hiroshima. “The first image that comes to mind is of my 4-year-old nephew, Eiji,” Thurlow said, “his little body transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh…To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons.”

Fihn has also been successful in highlighting their effects on marginalized communities, from U.S. nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands to British ones on Indigenous lands in Australia. “Her work really opened the door to a much wider understanding of what nuclear-weapons testing has meant in different countries,” says Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a leading anti-nuclear campaigner in Britain………………………………………………………….

more https://time.com/6243350/beatrice-fihn-interview-ican-nuclear-war/—

January 4, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

Atomic Bomb Effects Cover-up Reported in New York Times

https://www.wanttoknow.info/atomicbombcoverup— 25 Dec 22

The below article is an excellent example of how even the New York Times has twisted the facts and manipulated public opinion in order to support a deeper agenda. This revealing story covers the bombing of Hiroshima back in 1945, yet the same deceptive techniques of distortion and manipulation continue to be used today to support the profit-making war machine.

The New York Times itself acknowledged government and media complicity in hiding the effects of the Atomic bomb in an Aug. 3, 2005 Reuters article they published titled “U.S. Suppressed Footage of Hiroshima for Decades.” Read this revealing article on the Times website on this webpage.

[Note: Since this message was originally posted in 2004, the New York Times removed the article at the above link. A web search shows that no other major media have this revealing story posted. Thankfully, you can still read a copy of this Reuters article on a foreign news website.]

Here’s a quote from this Reuters article, “In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. authorities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of devastation wrought by the new weapons.” The below article goes into greater detail on the depth of deception. Please help to inform others by sharing this revealing news with your friends and colleagues and exploring the “What you can do” section below.

Hiroshima Cover-up:
How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Aug. 10, 2004

At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and and describe radiation sickness.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show. “When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”

Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.

Reporters whose dispatches [conflicted] with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”

U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

Four days after Burchett’s story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.

Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began. Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”

Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.” Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”

But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.

William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.” Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, “his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence,” as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: “After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as ‘hoax or propaganda.’ The Times’ Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett’s reports, and parroted the government line.” Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing – which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers – were written by none other than Laurence.

“Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Atomic Bill” Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials – he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.

In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: “Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural.”

Laurence was good at keeping his master’s secrets – from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence’s dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing – and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, “Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.”

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)

W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.” He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”

Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.” W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.

The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.

The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times “regretted the lapses” of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty’s “credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty’s award, concluding that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the articles that won the prize.

As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of “uncritical parroting ” – as long as it is from the United States?

It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped.

The original of the above article published on Aug. 10, 2004 is available here.

Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show “Democracy Now!.” This is an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, written with her brother journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence. Democracy Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than 240 stations.

Important Note: A profound 22-minute video features interviews of a number of “atomic soldiers” who were ordered to watch the nuclear bomb blasts from as close as a mile away. They were sworn to secrecy under a penalty of a $10,000 fine (roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars) or 10 years in jail and instructed never to talk to their wives or their fellow soldiers about anything they saw or experienced. Don’t miss this incredible film, available on this webpage, that the U.S. government doesn’t want you to see.

December 25, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, media, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

1 This Month

To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com/

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

Archives
- February 2026 (115)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (258)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
- April 2025 (305)
- March 2025 (319)
Categories
- 1
  - Arclight's Vision
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
  - business and costs
    - employment
    - marketing
  - climate change
  - culture and arts
  - ENERGY
    - renewable
      - decentralised
      - energy storage
  - environment
    - oceans
    - water
  - health
    - children
    - psychology – mental health
    - radiation
    - social effects
    - women
  - history
  - indigenous issues
  - Legal
    - deaths by radiation
    - legal
  - marketing of nuclear
  - media
    - investigative journalism
    - Wikileaks
  - opposition to nuclear
  - PERSONAL STORIES
  - politics
    - psychology and culture
      - Trump – personality
    - public opinion
    - USA election 2024
    - USA elections 2016
  - politics international
  - Religion and ethics
  - safety
    - incidents
  - secrets,lies and civil liberties
    - civil liberties
  - spinbuster
    - Education
  - technology
    - reprocessing
    - Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
    - space travel
  - Uranium
  - wastes
    - – plutonium
    - decommission reactor
  - weapons and war
    - Atrocities
    - depleted uranium
  - Women
- 2 WORLD
  - ANTARCTICA
  - ARCTIC
  - ASIA
    - Burma
    - China
    - India
    - Indonesia
    - Japan
    - Malaysia
    - Mongolia
    - North Korea
    - Pakistan
    - South Korea
    - Taiwan
    - Turkey
    - Vietnam
  - EUROPE
    - Belarus
    - Bulgaria
    - Denmark
    - Finland
    - France
    - Germany
    - Greece
    - Ireland
    - Italy
    - Kazakhstan
    - Kyrgyzstan
    - Russia
    - Spain
    - Sweden
    - Switzerland
    - UK
    - Ukraine
  - MIDDLE EAST
    - Afghanistan
    - Egypt
    - Gaza
    - Iran
    - Iraq
    - Israel
    - Jordan
    - Libya
    - Saudi Arabia
    - Syria
    - Turkey
    - United Arab Emirates
  - NORTH AMERICA
    - Canada
    - USA
      - election USA 2020
  - OCEANIA
    - New Zealand
    - Philippines
  - SOUTH AMERICA
    - Brazil
- ACTION
- AFRICA
  - Kenya
  - Malawi
  - Mali
  - Namibia
  - Niger
  - Nigeria
  - Somalia
  - South Africa
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
  - thorium
- Reference
  - Reference archives
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope