Tokyo’s Games Are Harming the Nuclear Weapons Ban

a two-week Olympic media blitz that normalizes nuclear disasters and shrugs at rising nuclear dangers, which illustrates why –

we need a new drive for mass nuclear literacy. With arms control in retreat, an informed citizenry could be our last, best line of defense.

Tokyo’s Games Are Harming the Nuclear Weapons Ban Movement  https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tokyo-olympics-nuclear-weapons/

By paying lip service to the Fukushima disaster and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, these games are downplaying the growing danger of nuclear catastrophe.

By Alyn Ware
The Olympics are supposed to be a tangible symbol of global cooperation and peaceful competition. But the games carry a lot of baggage—not only from the pandemic but also from the Fukushima disaster and Japan’s nuclear politics.

As Covid cases spread in the Olympic Village and in Tokyo, protesters continue to demand the Olympics be canceled, and they continue to be ignored. But the tone-deafness of these Olympics goes back further—to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In 2019, then–Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dubbed the Tokyo Olympics the “Recovery Games,” meant “to showcase the affected regions of the tsunami” and the nuclear meltdown of 2011, which continues to pose threats today.

That’s why some Olympic events are being held in Fukushima’s Azuma Stadium, and why Olympic torch runners have been routed through Fukushima prefecture, hitting what the official Olympic website calls “places of interest” near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It started at J-Village, a former logistics hub for crews working to remediate the stricken reactors, now a sports complex, where Greenpeace detected a radiation hot spot in late 2019. It passed through Ōkuma and Futaba, where the plant is located, and other nearby towns long abandoned after the disaster.

This is intended to project an image of recovery and normalcy to the world. But it’s government propaganda, deaf to citizens’ concerns, and blind to ongoing threats. Fukushima Daiichi continues to leak radioactivity. New radiation hot spots and other impacts are being discovered all the time.

This sort of Olympic spin tactic has been used before. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the government sought to portray Japan as a modern industrial nation with its own nuclear research program. Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was dropped, lit the Olympic flame. A scant year and half after the Cuban missile crisis, this gesture soft-pedaled the dangers of nuclear technology, nuclear weapons, and the burgeoning arms race.

Today, the tone-deafness continues. This month, on the anniversary of the Trinity nuclear tests that enabled the atomic bombings of Japan, IOC President Thomas Bach went to Hiroshima to lay a wreath at a memorial, prompting an angry response. “President Bach using the image of ‘a peaceful world without nuclear weapons’ only to justify holding of the Olympics by force under the pandemic is a blasphemy to atomic bombing survivors,” a coalition of civic groups wrote. “An act like this does nothing but do harm to the global nuclear weapons ban movement.”

Billions watching the games are imbibing the idea that, protests notwithstanding, Covid, Fukushima, the atomic bombings, and rising nuclear dangers today pose no impediment to normalcy. This should be countered with factual context and truth-telling.

Nuclear Games, a new documentary available online, attempts this by contrasting the Olympic ideals of peace and humanity with our history of nuclear violence and inhumanity (full disclosure: My organization Basel Peace Office is one of several NGOs helping with the project). It uses manga and interactive content to counter Olympic spin and teach mass audiences, including young people, Nuclear History 101: the Cuban missile crisis, Chernobyl, the victims of uranium mining and nuclear testing, the North Korean nuclear program.

We urgently need remedial education on nuclear issues. Most millennials believe nuclear war will occur within the next decade, yet they also rank nuclear weapons as the least important of 12 global issues. They’re both justifiably anxious and badly misinformed.

Achieving basic nuclear literacy is indispensable now. Nuclear dangers are more acute than in 1964, the risk of nuclear war is growing, and the arms control regime is failing. This year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead to 100 seconds before midnight—closer to the zero hour than during the Cuban missile crisis.

Nuclear weapons states are turning away from arms control and embarking on a second Cold War–style arms race. As China builds missile silos and Russia builds new types of nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals, the United States is spending billions to “modernize” its arsenal, and other nuclear powers are following suit.

To be sure, there is pushback. Some 1,200 policy-makers, celebrities, academics, and civil society leaders issued a joint letter to presidents Biden and Putin flagging growing nuclear dangers and urging them to adopt a no-first-use policy to defuse nuclear tensions and facilitate disarmament. US Senators Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and their colleagues on the Nuclear Arms Control Working group recently called on Biden to guide the Nuclear Posture Review towards a pledge of no first use and the elimination of new types of nuclear weapons.

But such things can hardly compete with a two-week Olympic media blitz that normalizes nuclear disasters and shrugs at rising nuclear dangers, which illustrates why we need a new drive for mass nuclear literacy. With arms control in retreat, an informed citizenry could be our last, best line of defense.

July 31, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A-bomb survivor activist, 89, calls Japan’s failure to back nuclear ban ‘disgraceful’

A-bomb survivor activist, 89, calls Japan’s failure to back nuclear ban ‘disgraceful’  https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210729/p2a/00m/0na/034000c

July 30, 2021 (Mainichi Japan)   TOKYO — The world took a major step toward a nuclear-free world when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons completely banning the use and storage of atomic arms went into effect in January.

Nuclear powers and countries like Japan which are under the U.S. nuclear umbrella have not signed the treaty, only going as far as joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but the influence of the ban treaty on the NPT is enormous.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that top-level meetings concerning both treaties have not been held as planned, grinding international discussion of them to a halt. The pandemic has also thrown cold water on citizens’ anti-atomic weapons activism, forcing events to be minimized or canceled outright.

With the 76th anniversaries of America’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fast approaching, what do hibakusha — people exposed to the effects of the bomb — still alive today think of these dilemmas?

“This is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear bombs in wartime, and yet it can’t ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I think it’s so pitiful, so disgraceful,” said Terumi Tanaka, the 89-year-old co-chair of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. Anger laced his calm tones, obvious even over the online video conference.

In response to the nuclear arms ban treaty going into effect, Tanaka began a petition drive to urge the Japanese government to join the treaty. But half a year has passed now with him unable to go out in the streets due to the pandemic………..

Countries with nuclear weapons won’t attend the conference of the signatories, and only countries without the arms will need to seek ways to ban them. “How do we get nuclear-armed countries involved? I think a time is coming where a great effort will have to be put in (to activism),” he said.

Getting nuclear powers and those under the nuclear umbrella like Japan to take part is no simple task. But while the coronavirus has prevented certain forms of activism, and spread with apparent ease across borders, Tanaka sees a silver lining in the situation, saying, “It’s presented the opportunity to realize that the conflicts countries have between each other are meaningless.”

With this year marking the 65th anniversary of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations’ founding, Tanaka had in mind that it would mark a sense of closure. Its general meeting is held every June, but due to the state of emergency declared in Tokyo, it has been turned into an on-paper event this year.

“It was very disappointing. We’d needed to do a full review of our activism so far,” Tanaka said regretfully. The average age of hibakusha now is over 83. The generation of people with clear, unshakeable memories of that time like Tanaka, who was 13 when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, are gradually but steadily leaving this world.

“We experienced that sound with our bodies. The people who will make up the core of the activism going forward were very young children when they were exposed to the bomb, so they have few memories of the time involving their five senses. But, they might at some point remember what was for them a strange experience. In that sense, those people can be said to have experienced it first hand, too,” he said.

In March, Tanaka ended the international campaign he has pursued for five years to see an earlier implementation of the ban treaty. At the end of May, he resigned as chair of the Saitama Prefecture hibakusha association. After days spent passionately involved in anti-nuclear activism, Tanaka is thinking of using the time he has now to write about the life he spent giving himself to his work.

“Nuclear weapons are so cruel it seems they don’t even qualify for the name ‘weapon’. This testimony must, even when all the hibakusha are gone, be passed down for as long as the human race exists,” Tanaka said.

(Japanese original by Kayo Mukuda, Tokyo City News Department)

July 31, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment