Lesson from Nagasaki: Lighten up on Dark Tourism

“I see those people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the news every year and I wonder why they just can’t let it go. Hasn’t it been long enough already?”

These words were spoken to my wife recently by a Japanese co-worker when we returned from Nagasaki. This attitude might seem startling to peace activists in Japan and throughout the world who participate in memorial events every year on August 6th and 9th, but it is a sobering reminder that many people in Japan and throughout the world have let the memory fade, not even knowing what they don’t know about the perils of nuclear weapons as they exist in today’s world.

In a consumer society based on employment in a military economy, the institutions people pass through in their formative years do very little to teach history, political consciousness or the meaning of citizenship. Whatever lessons exist are delivered as tedious, obligatory lectures, followed by multiple choice tests. Lessons might also have come from elders in the form of scoldings about how tough things were during the war, how “you youngsters” have no idea and so on. The only thing worse than no history lessons is bad history lessons. Japanese people, in particular, may be inured to them because of an overdose of obligatory exposure to the rituals of remembrance.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki also invoke uncomfortable feelings of shame about losing the war, and shame about responsibility for it. The hibakusha and all the memorials in the two bombed cities evoke these conflicted feelings, so many Japanese would rather turn away, just as many Americans would rather turn away for inverse reasons.

While living in Japan I have met people who talked about visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they never mentioned the atom bomb. The only thing they wanted to talk about was the local foods they ate, or maybe a visit to Dejima, the old Dutch and Portuguese trading post in Nagasaki that used to be the most famous thing about the city. They talked about these visits like they would talk about a visit to any other place. Likewise, residents of the two cities have millions of good reasons to appreciate everything that happened before the war and after it, all the things that make their cities just like other cities. No one wants their city to be just about that one traumatic thing that happened one day long ago.

I had lived in Japan for many years before I visited either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, partly because I had other priorities, and partly because it just felt a little strange to visit a place just for that. I knew the history quite well, but I still questioned my motives. I finally went when I had someone to visit there, someone who just happened to be a historian who specialized in the cultural impacts of nuclear technology. 

That was Robert Jacobs, who was interviewed on a local Hiroshima English language podcast shortly after President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016. During the interview he shed some light on why people are becoming less reluctant to visit traumatized places and engage in what has recently become known as “dark tourism:”

I met a religious studies scholar… who said… dark tourism has replaced religious pilgrimage... Going to places where history happened, especially traumatic history happened… gives your life more authenticity... This has been on the rise, and it’s partly a way to infuse our lives with meaning and connection to a world that is often at a distance from us…  to infuse your own life with a deeper sense of the importance of peace because you’ve been to some place where peace is so important. It’s an emotional and a spiritual renewal to go to places like that, and the use of the word “dark” doesn’t mean that there is a dark meaning. It just means that it’s sites of historical trauma. People go there not to gawk at trauma or death but because these are the sites that resonate in our mythology of the world we live in. Religious sites don’t resonate so much the way that they used to, but people like to visit places that give their lives a sense of being connected to mythic things. In our lives the mythic things are often large historical tragedies, and in coming to a place like Hiroshima... “dark” just implies a place where a dark thing happened, but the motives of the people who come here are to increase their sense of connectedness and their sense of meaning... People will invoke having been to Hiroshima as a means of having authority. They will say, “I’ve been to Hiroshima… I can tell you about how bad nuclear weapons are...” These are empowering reasons that people visit… The phrase “dark tourism” certainly doesn’t imply that the motives of people are in any way dark. [1]

There could be a downside to claiming authority just because one has visited a place where something bad happened. It depends on what one learns about the entire context of the traumatic event. Visitors to Hiroshima could leave with widely divergent interpretations of what happened there in 1945. In the end there is much to be said for a pilgrimage to a local library in order to connect and infuse one’s life with a deeper connection to history.

I can say that my visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved something that was missing in all that I knew about what happened there in August 1945. No matter how much I had learned from books and films and second-hand reports, it didn’t become fully real in a certain sense until I could confirm it with my own senses, when I stood at ground zero, walked through the cities, visited the museums, and talked to eyewitnesses to the events. That’s what is meant by “connection.”

One of the great things about both cities is the streetcars. They still run down the routes that existed in 1945, and though they must have been rebuilt and refurbished many times since then, they haven’t been modernized. They look, and feel, and sound just like the streetcars of old, and they are the means by which most visitors get from the central train stations to the atomic bomb memorial sites.

On August 8th I rode the streetcar in Nagasaki with my wife and son, from downtown to the Urakami district where the museum and hypocenter are located. As we got closer the streetcar became very crowded, as groups of students were in town to attend the annual memorial the next day. I was standing, and my wife and son were sitting. A white-haired woman in her late eighties got on. She was stooping over a cane, but she pushed her way through the crowded aisle with considerable force. I tapped my son and told him to give up his seat. She took it with quick smile of gratitude then immediately began to talk to my wife:

Everyone’s going to the Peace Park today. That’s good. Good to see so many young people here… I wasn’t here that day. I was living down the line in Sasebo, but I had been called up to work in a factory here. For some reason I didn’t have to go to work that day. But then later I was told to get to Nagasaki and report for work. I got down to Sasebo station, and when that train from Nagasaki came in, people just fell out of it and collapsed right there on the platform, never got up again. Piles of them, blackened and sick. They just spilled out of the train car. I’ve never seen people in such a horrid state. Every city was getting bombed. We expected it, but obviously something very strange had happened in Nagasaki. I didn’t ride the train that day, but I went later… Sorry, I’m talking a lot, but I have to. Tomorrow the prime minister will come and make his speech again. So useless. We are really disappointed in him. I never used to talk to strangers like this, but now I talk to everyone because we have to. There are so few of us left.

Obviously, this is a translation and a paraphrase of a conversation recalled by my wife and related to me when we got off the streetcar. The reader may think I’ve embellished it, but this was the gist of it: the determination to tell the story, the need to condemn the present direction of the country, and thus the loss of all concern about what anyone might think about the unsolicited sharing of these stories with strangers on a streetcar. Looking back on it now, it seems to be the best way to explain to that smug, ignorant co-worker why people can’t and don’t have to “just get over it.” The experience also taught me why people should dare to be “dark tourists” and take in everything they see and hear when they visit places of historical trauma, whether it’s Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Wounded Knee. In this case, there was nothing like getting the story firsthand on a Nagasaki streetcar.

Our short visit to the city had other highlights. I was invited to join a study tour led by the historian of American University, Peter Kuznick (co-author of The Untold History of the United States), and there I met his students and others from Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University. A famous spokesperson for the  hibakusha community was also there, 71-year-old Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who has devoted her life to speaking about the atomic bombings in both Japanese and English. Her father was Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, [2] a Methodist minister who was portrayed in John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the first report that exposed American audiences to the horror of what had happened on the ground on August 6th, 1945. [3][4] Reverend Tanimoto began a campaign to have nations dedicate August 6th as World Peace Day, and Koko, who was only eight months old at the end of the war, continued her father’s mission as she grew older.

Another hibakusha, Kazutoshi Otsuka, spoke to the study group about the life he has devoted to telling the world about the necessity of abolishing nuclear weapons. He was ten years old at the time of the blast, and survived because he was at the edge of the zone of worst damage and was indoors at the time. He emerged from the debris that had fallen over him to find the city in ruins, utterly transformed from what it had been just a short time ago. The downtown area had been spared, but in Urakami almost all the buildings and thousands of people had just vanished. The last human voice he heard before the blast was his friend calling from outside, “The cicadas are singing. Let’s go catch some.” Did he die instantly in the blast? Did he run home and get caught in the fires? Did he die more slowly from radiation? Mr. Otsuka searched for his friend for a long time afterward, but it became obvious that he had vanished on the wind just like the last words he had spoken. For seventy-one years, while he has told his story to all who will listen, Mr. Otsuka has carried with him those simple words of invitation from his friend to enjoy a summer day.

The most famous icon of the atomic attacks is the Hiroshima Dome, one of the few structures left standing, but one which was almost demolished in the rush to rebuild the city and erase all signs of what had happened there. Those who wanted it saved had a hard time convincing city hall that it would be worthwhile to preserve it. There is nothing similar in Nagasaki, except for some portions of the walls of Shiroyama Elementary School near the hypocenter. Like the dome in Hiroshima, its position directly under the blast allowed it to be not completely demolished by the lateral blast force. After the fires were out, the remnants of the school on a small hill stood as the only desolate reminder of all that had been in this section of the city called Urakami. However, it wasn’t as photogenic as the Hiroshima Dome, and Nagasaki is more out of the way and receives fewer visitors, so it never became an iconic symbol of the atom bomb. In any case, the rebuilt school still functions as a school, so it wouldn’t be able to deal with a constant stream of visitors.

The original wall with the new school built around it.

We learned that every year on August 9th the school holds a remembrance ceremony for students, the community, and any visitors who wish to attend. The students all come back for a day from their summer vacations and dress up in formal attire in the 30-degree humidity. It is a mourning ceremony, so the adults wear black funeral suits and dresses.

My wife and I decided to get up early on the 9th and take our son to the ceremony. We had attended many Japanese school ceremonies with our children before, and this one was just like all the rest, but so different from all others as well.

A steep staircase leads up to the school, and Koko Tanimoto was already there at the top, beaming a welcoming smile to us. There was something from her father in that smile because she made it feel like we were being welcomed to church on a Sunday morning. We walked around the grounds and looked inside the restored section that holds artifacts and memorials for the disappeared. In a grove of trees just off the sports ground they still sometimes find bone chips a few inches down in the soil.

After the ceremony, a teacher talks to a group of students about the grove. 

In his speech at the ceremony, the principal said everything one would expect at such an occasion, going over the events of that day and the weeks and months that followed, and the eventual rebuilding of the school and the city. Several times he mentioned “passing the baton,” stressing to the children their heavy responsibility to carry on the memory that all other graduates of the school have carried into their adult lives.

Shiroyama Elementary School, in the days after the bombing.

Around the third time I heard that word baton, I began to feel uneasy about it. I started to wonder how many people had gone through that school wondering “Why us?” They didn’t drop the bomb. They didn’t ask for this burden, and they must wonder why the whole country and the whole world is not doing more to pass this baton to future generations. I didn’t visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or make friends in the peace movement, suffering from any delusions that it is easy to change the world. I think most of my fellow travelers and the hibakusha feel the same. We know what we are up against, and we know how badly the masters of war have betrayed us. The hibakusha’s commitment to peace makes for a paradoxical taboo against expressing anger and rage, but I suspect the survivors have reached old age bitterly aware that the world has done far too little to act on their call for the elimination of nuclear weapons. It must feel like cruel mockery as they reach their later years. There were many hopeful periods, such as the thaw between Khrushchev and Kennedy that was emerging just before JFK’s assassination, or the end of the Warsaw Pact in the late 1980s, but each time, to borrow a line from Leonard Cohen, the holy dove was caught again, bought and sold, and bought again. [5]

There must have been very many angry hibakusha over the decades, people who kept their rage contained within them, people who drank, people who became outcasts or extremists, but the openly angry people never got invited to official ceremonies. One can only speculate about the motives of the anonymous person who threatened to bomb Shiroyama Elementary School and other schools in Nagasaki in August 2016 (at least there was an advance warning), but it speaks to a very perverse disdain that exists in some people toward the victims rather than the perpetrators. [6]

Overt anger has been kept out of sight, but an acceptable outlet for covert anger is mainstream politics, where those in the ruling party dream of restoring the glory of the empire and their notion of “national honor” while accumulating plutonium from “the peaceful atom” and biding their time under American subservience. This is how contemporary Japanese society developed its neurotic ambivalence about its history and place in the world.

The various forms of anger have been reported by other writers who know the experiences of hibakusha well. Shortly after President Obama’s speech in Hiroshima, the journalist and filmmaker John Pilger had this to say:

… the cynicism of great power and great reckless power, in many respects is expressed at Hiroshima where… all the evidence shows that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as America’s first expressions of violent power in the Cold War that was then underway. So for Obama to go and talk about the atomic bombs as if God dropped them... He used the passive voice… and really quite vomitus language like “we must have the courage to care.” So [according to Obama] no one dropped the atomic bombs. The United States certainly didn’t kill all those hundreds of thousands of people. It didn’t cause all that suffering. It’s something that we should all express sympathy to. It was like a kind of high mass and the great divinity was there, but not the United States. That [the US] is not to blame. That’s been Obama’s role as a PR man extraordinaire, and he came into power and people fell on their knees… This was a kind of second coming. There was a problem for the last few years with re-igniting Afghanistan and Iraq, and destroying Libya and so on, but the fawning has begun again as Obama’s time in office nears an end, and for people, for journalists to report--as I say the deeply cynical action of Obama and the United States in Hiroshima the other day--to report it without the context of all those survivors–and I’ve interviewed many of them--of how angry they were… they’re polite people and they’re very elderly… but they were angry. [7]

Two months later The Mainichi reported more precisely on this anger in describing how the secretary-general of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations regretted his initial praise of Obama’s speech when he had time to read an accurate translation the next day:

Terumi Tanaka, 84, was in attendance on May 27 this year when Obama was making what was the first visit of a sitting U.S. president to Hiroshima…

There was an interpreter for Obama’s speech, but the speech was not handed out on paper… Sentences from the latter part of the speech, such as his reference to a future in which “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known ... as the start of our own moral awakening,” had stuck with him, and he praised the sentence as “excellent words.” He noted, however, that he was “disappointed” that Obama had said, “We may not realize this goal (of a world without nuclear weapons) in my lifetime.” The next morning… Tanaka opened a page containing the Japanese translation of the speech. It began, “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.” Tanaka was stunned. “Death did not ‘fall from the sky.’ This is making the death abstract. This is absolutely unacceptable,” Tanaka thought. While on board the train he opened his laptop and began to write his “Essay of Regret.” As he typed, erased and retyped, he says, “I began to get angry and stopped midway. They ‘created’ the death. As a sign of apology, I want them to eliminate nuclear weapons,” he says. [8]

Another expression of this anger came from Setsuko Thurlow, a hibakusha who has lived for many years in Toronto. She was received at the White House in June, where she met the man who wrote the Hiroshima speech and hand-delivered a message for the president in which she listed the concrete measures that need to be taken to make the speech amount to more than aspirational fluff:

1. Stop the U.S. boycott of international nuclear disarmament meetings and join the 127 countries that have endorsed the Humanitarian Pledge to create a new legal instrument and new norms for a nuclear weapons ban treaty as a first step in their elimination and prohibition.

2. Stop spending money to modernize the US nuclear arsenal, a staggering $1 trillion over the next three decades, and use this money to meet human needs and protect our environment.

3. Take nuclear weapons off high alert and review the aging command and control systems that have been the subject of recent research exposing a culture of neglect and the alarming regularity of accidents involving nuclear weapons. [9]

Much more could be said by the hibakusha community about issues not relating directly to disarmament, such as the worsening mistrust between the nuclear powers and the proliferation of conventional military power that leads so many nations to favor the “cheap and easy” asymmetrical nuclear deterrent. [10] The obstacles to peace are stacked high, and anger seems to be the only logical response. But I will hold onto the memory of  Koko Tanimoto smiling at the top of those stairs at Shiroyama, greeting the late pilgrims like me who’ve finally decided to make this simple journey.

Notes

[1] J.J. Walsh, interviewer, “Professor Bo Jacobs on the Obama Visit,” Get Hiroshima, May 30, 2016, 18:00~

[2] “Hiroshima Survivor Meets Enola Gay Pilot,” This is Your Life, 1955. The full interview with Reverend Tanimoto can be viewed on YouTube.

[3] Robert Jacobs, “Reconstructing the Perpetrator’s Soul by Reconstructing the Victim’s Body: The Portrayal of the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ by the Mainstream Media in the United States,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Issue 24, June 2010.

[4] Tadatoshi Akiba, L. Wittner and T. Taue, “Why Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day Events Matter,” Asia Pacific Journal, August 1, 2007.

[5] Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” The Future, Columbia Records, 1992.

[6] “‘Hibakusha’ talks scrapped after Nagasaki bomb threat,” Asahi Shinbun, August 18, 2016.

[7] Afshin Rattansi, interviewer, “ISIS in Fallujah & World War III with John Pilger (Episode 350 of Going Underground),” Russia Today, June 4, 2016. What John Pilger described as a “passive voice” construction could more accurately be called a usage of an intransitive verb which conceals the agent of the action. The speech writer had various syntactical choices available: President Truman ordered the bombs to be dropped or The crew of the Enola Gay dropped the bomb, The bomb fell or, at the level of greatest possible abstraction, Death fell from the sky.

[8] Terumi Tanaka, “Hibakusha: A-bomb sufferers’ group official regrets praising Obama speech,” The Mainichi, August 2, 2016.

[9] To Barack Obama from Setsuko Thurlow, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, August 6, 2016.

[10] Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 101. Many who favor nuclear deterrence believe that it has prevented a third world war that would have been fought with a massive arsenal of conventional weapons, with millions of casualties. In this argument, a nuclear arsenal is preferable, and it comes at a bargain price for nations large and small. Rhodes’ book argues for abolition of nuclear arms, but he noted how their “low cost” (not considering what economists call “externalities”) became a rationale for their development: “Nuclear warheads cost the United States about $250,000 each: less than a fighter bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol boat, less than a tank.”

An Overview of the Nuclear Age: From Cold War I to Cold War II

I was recently asked by a weekly news program to submit some notes and ideas for a thirty-minute program on the history of America’s nuclear weapons program, from 1945-2016. I got a bit carried away and ended up writing the text that follows. This text doesn’t appear in the program that was produced, but I was told that it helped shape, to some unknowable degree, the topics covered in the interview with historian Peter Kuznick. With or without my influence, the interview provided an excellent introduction to the special relationship between Japan and America. A second installment is forthcoming.

Imperial Japan, the Bomb & the Pacific Powder Keg

On May 27th, 2016, Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, the first time an American president had ever visited the city while still in office. His speech there was a sermon that de-personified the attacks and exculpated the president who authorized them. He spoke only abstractly about how “death fell from the sky” seventy-one years ago. With his mind on domestic pressure not to say anything that resembled an apology, President Obama strenuously avoided mentioning the nation and the individuals who were responsible for the decision to drop atomic weapons on civilian populations. Additionally, he made no specific proposals about moving forward in nuclear disarmament.
 

In American public perceptions, there is still the common belief that the bombs “ended the war” and saved a greater number of both Japanese and American lives. A new National Parks museum called The Manhattan Project National Historical Park, with three venues at Hanford, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, is hoping to tone down the triumphal, one-sided aspect of previous texts and exhibits (like the Smithsonian exhibit in 1995). They are now considering incorporating the views of Japanese victims and American victims whose health was damaged by the production and testing of nuclear bombs. [1]

Nonetheless, the triumphalist perspective persists as a stubborn meme in American culture, even though the debate among historians is essentially over. Historians such as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, with his book Racing Against the Enemy, [2] have shown that it was the Soviet entry into the war that provoked the Japanese to surrender on August 15, 1945, one week after Stalin declared war on Japan. If the surrender hadn’t come then, Japan’s circumstances were so dire that it would have come soon without the need of an American invasion. This argument was made by several high military officials in the weeks before the bombs were used, but by this time a billion 1945 dollars had been spent on the Manhattan Project, and everyone involved in making the bombs feared the political fallout of not using them. Then there was the motive to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that America possessed this new weapon and was willing to use it.

Seventy-one years later, there are now nine countries that possess nuclear weapons: USA, Russia, China, France, UK, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel, the only one of the nine that maintains a stance of ambiguity—refusing to declare whether it has nuclear weapons, even though it is known beyond doubt that they do. In total the nine countries have about 15,000 weapons, with 93% of them held by the US and Russia, with about 7,000 each. Each side has over one thousand on “hair-trigger alert” status in which they are vulnerable to accidental launch or an overly hasty decision to launch with incomplete or inaccurate information held by those who would have to make the fatal decision.

In 1946, America took control of many of the Pacific islands it had occupied during the war. Nuclear weapon tests began in July with the tests in the Marshall Islands on the Bikini Atoll, which prompted a French fashion designer to launch a swimsuit design we all know today. It was described that summer as a “weapon of mass seduction” and “une bombe anatomique,” but for Marshall Islanders there were no jokes to be made. They were relocated within the island chain to small atolls that were already occupied and crowded. In spite of the relocations, many of the still-inhabited islands were showered with fallout. US military personnel were also exposed, and some of the irradiated ships were hauled back to Guam and the US mainland for scuttling or dismantling. Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay is one of the places where this contamination remains a problem to this day. [3]

In 1949, the Soviets tested their first nuclear device in Kazakhstan, and after that the arms race and the global paranoia of mutually assured destruction accelerated into high gear. By the mid-fifties, both nations were testing hydrogen weapons which were thousands of times more powerful than the bombs used in 1945. The public knew little about what was going on, but the Castle Bravo 15-megaton H-bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, on March 1, 1954, went horribly wrong for military planners. The yield was larger than predicted, and fallout landed on several Japanese fishing boats that were outside the zone of exclusion. The ship called Lucky Dragon No. 5 arrived back in Japan with the crew suffering from radiation sickness. The captain died shortly after his return. The lid of secrecy surrounding nuclear testing was blown off because Japanese media covered the story intensely, and from there the story went global. Throughout the season tuna caught in the Pacific continued to test positive for radiation. This incident triggered the anti-nuclear movement throughout the world, leading eventually to a ban on atmospheric testing in 1963 signed by the US, UK and USSR.

Britain and France had their own arsenals, with their own testing programs in Australia, Christmas (Kirimati) Island, French Polynesia and Algeria. China and France did not sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty and tested in the atmosphere until 1974 and 1980 respectively. India and Pakistan conducted all their tests underground. In this century, only North Korea still conducts tests, while the others make do with sub-critical tests and computer simulations.

In 1950, the US had about 1,000 nuclear weapons. By 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USSR and the US each had thirty thousand. Fearing many of their weapons would be hit in pre-emptive strikes, or that they would miss their targets, they planned for massive redundancy and overkill with bombs that had yields big enough to render life impossible in areas the size of the Boston to Washington corridor. One positive result of the Cuban Missile Crisis was that it moved both sides to sober up. They installed a “hotline” so that leaders could communicate directly during a crisis. The process of détente, a general term for the relaxing of tensions between the two powers, lasted from the late 1960s to the 1980s, and it helped somewhat to inhibit enthusiasm on both sides for involvement in conflicts in the developing world. 

Newcomers to disarmament studies are confronted with a bewildering list of acronyms for all the bilateral and international treaties related to nuclear weapons. Since the early 1960s there has been the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and all the US-Soviet/Russia agreements: SALT I, SALT II, START I, START II, START III Framework, SORT, New START, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and others. [4]

The most significant may be the 1968 United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty, which most of, but not all of, the world’s nations have signed. [5] The key stipulation of the treaty is that because non-nuclear states have agreed not to pursue the possession of nuclear weapons, the states that do possess them are obligated to work in good faith and a timely manner to eliminate their own arsenals. The Marshall Islands (now an independent country), with the support of other Pacific island nations affected by nuclear tests, brought a case to the International Court of Justice in 2014, charging all nine nuclear armed countries with failing to act on their obligations to disarm. Even the non-signatories (India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) were targeted because the Marshall Islands case argues that they are still obliged to act under customary international law.

Presently, only Britain, India and Pakistan have addressed the charges. The other nuclear powers chose to not respond to the suit at all. [6] Herein lies a fundamental contradiction of possessing nuclear weapons. Nuclear armed nations participate in drafting international treaties on nuclear proliferation and sign them, but possessing nuclear weapons means they can choose when they do not wish to obey international law.  There is no enforcement authority that can make a nuclear-armed state do what it does not want to do, and this of course is the reason the weapons are coveted. No one has used a nuclear bomb in warfare since 1945, but the possessors know that the value of nuclear weapons is in what is called their “non-explosive uses”–their ability to deter, intimidate, and hold leverage over others.

Another clause in the Non-Proliferation Treaty guarantees signatories the right to use nuclear energy if they agree to not pursue the development of nuclear weapons. A large segment of the global civilian population finds this unacceptable, believing that because every nuclear energy program produces fissile material, nuclear energy can never be de-linked from proliferation. Nuclear energy also produces nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, so they involve the some of the same unacceptable hazards as weapons. However, the UN agency that is tasked with guarding against nuclear weapons proliferation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is also the global watchdog and promoter of nuclear energy. It even has veto power over the research agenda and conclusions of the World Health Organization on matters related to the health effects of radiation.

In the early 1980s, popular anti-nuclear movements reached critical mass. In a very different sort of “Manhattan Project,” 1,000,000 anti-nuclear protesters gathered in Central Park, New York in June 1982 to demand a world free of nuclear weapons. Christian evangelical groups were a reliable source of support for Republicans, but their support of the anti-nuclear cause worried Ronald Reagan. In his 1983 “evil empire” speech to evangelicals, he warned them about going soft on their godless adversary. He had put the world on notice during his first administration that he would take a hard line against the atheistic empire that he claimed was bent on global domination. He broke off détente, calling it a “a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” [7] and he announced the space-based anti-ballistic missile initiative that would become known as “Star Wars,” decisions which critics said went against the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Star Wars was never completed, but it served the purpose of striking fear into the leadership of the Soviet Union that strategic parity would be eliminated by an American advantage in space-based weapons.

While he came in like a hawk, Ronald Reagan proved himself to be a leader of puzzling contradictions. He turned out to be a different kind of cold warrior than many conservatives expected, especially as his re-election campaign approached. He remained hawkish on all other issues, and despised for them by his opponents, but nuclear disarmament was one issue where he charted a unique course. He rejected traditional hardliners who planned for a winnable nuclear war and declared himself to be dead serious about the elimination of nuclear weapons. He claimed to have been deeply affected by the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, and was known to exasperate his staff by commenting repeatedly that peace would be achieved if the human race faced an alien threat. Other strong fictional influences were the 1983 films War Games and  The Day After, a television movie which graphically depicted nuclear holocaust in the American heartland to an enormous prime-time audience of 100 million. [8] These were instances in which Reagan’s confusion of Hollywood and reality may have led to something good. By the mid-80s he became worried that his hawkish policy had spooked the Soviet leadership and alienated the American public which now wanted a return to détente and a reduction in the number of warheads. In November 1983 (the same month when The Day After was broadcast), the Soviets mistook the Able Archer NATO exercise for the real thing and readied their forces for a nuclear attack. [9] As Reagan faced re-election, he realized it was time to adopt a softer stance. A few weeks earlier, Stanislav Petrov, an officer at a Soviet early warning station was informed by a new computer system that five American missiles were incoming. Under protocol, he was supposed to inform the higher command, but he decided, correctly, that it was a false alarm. [10] It is a matter of speculation as to whether the Soviets would have launched on warning instead of waiting to confirm nuclear attacks. Some nuclear strategists, such as Robert McNamara believed it was tacit policy on both sides that no one would be insane enough to launch on warning. [11] These two near misses weren't revealed until years later, so American audiences watching The Day After were unaware of the ironic relationship between fact and fiction in November 1983.

In the ABC News discussion panel that followed the broadcast of The Day After, (November 20, 1983), Robert McNamara states at the 47:40 mark of the video that both sides clearly understood the madness of launch on warning, but they maintained a position of ambiguity on their policy. He believed they wouldn't launch on warning.

Reagan was able to resist hardliner opinion because, unlike a Democrat president, there was no opposition to his right when he decided to engage with Soviet leaders in arms reduction negotiations. Yet in spite of his intentions, and the credit for ending the Cold War that Americans would give him, nothing would have changed if his Soviet counterpart had been anyone other than Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1987, Reagan challenged Gorbachev in Berlin to “tear down this wall,” and David Bowie’s concert at the wall the same year did essentially the same thing. However, in spite of such Western political and cultural pressures (and self-congratulation for the achievement), the momentum for reform came from within the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was a sincere reformer and humanitarian, brutally honest about the failings of the Soviet system and the need for “new thinking” inside the USSR and in international relations. The Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Bloc collapsed for complex reasons, but mostly because Gorbachev made it clear he wouldn’t send in the tanks to prop up the old system. Once it was clear that the East European regimes were on their own, events followed their natural course. Gorbachev was preoccupied with internal problems, more focused on economic and political reforms that would turn the USSR into a multi-party, democratic socialist market system similar to Western European countries. [12] By the end of the decade, Reagan was saying that his “evil empire” comment of just a few years earlier was now irrelevant, as it applied to a bygone era. In 1987, the two superpowers signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Cold War’s most significant arms-reduction agreement. By the mid-90s, both nations managed to reduce their arsenals to about 7,000 weapons each, the level at which they still remain.

Many anti-nuclear activists decry the fact that arms reduction halted at this still-unacceptable level. Seldom discussed is the questionable theory that the US and Russia both halted progress at this level because they agreed that their massive arsenals would deter other nations from ever trying to gain equality and thus nuclear proliferation is actually discouraged by the existence of this absurdly large number of nuclear warheads (see the comments by General Brent Scowcroft in the video above, 39:00~). [13]

In the 1990s, as the secrecy of the Cold War era faded, the full impact of the nuclear project started to become apparent. Uranium miners, military veterans, nuclear workers, downwinders and aboriginal and minority groups near test sites—in all nations that built weapons—started to be more aware of the health impacts. Most ominously, it became clear that genetic damage had been passed onto the children and grandchildren of nuclear test veterans. [14]

Official recognition and compensation came to some groups during the Clinton administration when Hazel O’Leary, an outsider to the organization, took charge of reforming the Department of Energy. Americans might have been more aware of Clinton’s apology to victims unknowingly submitted to radiation experiments, but the news was pushed to the back pages on October 4th, 1995 by the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict. [15]

In recent years, Gorbachev has spoken often about the West’s broken promises to not expand NATO eastward, as well as other disastrous reversals of the trust that was built long ago. This month, 30 years after the historic 1986 Reykjavik summit with Reagan, Gorbachev noted the betrayal and disappointment that came after that hopeful time. [16] He said all attempts to resolve the numerous conflicts of the previous two decades militarily (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria) through a “cult of force” have solved no real problems, and only led to the erosion of international law and the glorification of force. He added, “There has been a collapse of trust in relations between the world’s leading powers that, according to the UN Charter, bear primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security.” He stated that the international community cannot make progress toward the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world until the world gets back to normal politics and international relations are demilitarized.

It is important to mention here that, in contrast to his image in the West as an inspired world leader, Gorbachev has always been despised by millions of people within the former Soviet Union who see him as a betrayer of the revolution. His opponents always said that his latter-day regrets were entirely predictable at the time he was making concessions to the United States. They criticized him at the time for not doing more to hold the union together and not preventing opportunists like Boris Yeltsin from destroying it. Considering the massive suffering that occurred in the former Soviet Union during the 1990s, and damage caused throughout the world by unchecked neoliberalism and American military interventions, there is a strong argument to be made that the disappearance of the Soviet Union was not something to be celebrated. Since many of its reforms had already been successful by the late 1980s, there is no reason to say the union had to disintegrate and socialism had to fail and succumb to the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years. 

In contrast to the days when the West found Gorbachev to be an international figure of great stature, his recent comments were reported only in a medium that the Obama administration considers to be a “Russian propaganda tool.” As a response, Obama counters with $100 million spent on nurturing Russian dissidents who are, supposedly, going to encourage a non-existent pro-American constituency within Russia to bring the country into line. [17] They fail to take note that the only significant opposition to Putin is in the nationalistic and belligerent parties that think he is too soft on America.

Amid this stalled progress caused by the deliberate antagonizing of Russia, President Obama's pledge to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009) is a dead letter. With so many congressional districts addicted to defense spending, Obama had to exchange the elimination of some aging weapons for the nuclear weapons modernization plan that will cost $1 trillion over thirty years.

Meanwhile the world sits on a toxic legacy of nuclear waste that will plague the planet long into the “deep future.” Seventy-four years after the Manhattan Project began, there are still no proven successful nuclear waste repositories, and that goes for both military and civilian waste. After all, how could anyone guarantee perfect containment for 100,000 years, with no fires, explosions, leaks or intrusions down in the hole?

In addition, sites throughout the country, like West Lake near St. Louis, and Niagara Falls, New York, are contaminated with wastes from weapons production. The large former weapons factories in places like Hanford, Washington, Rocky Flats, Colorado and Paducah, Kentucky (a partial list) present challenges that will stretch so far into the future that they might as well be called eternal. The promised cleanups that began decades ago are not going well. And the same goes for all nuclearized states.

Staff in America’s weapons labs were actually assigned science fiction creative writing tasks to get them to consider all that could go wrong with the WIPP nuclear waste storage site in Southeast New Mexico. Their writing of a scenario known as Free State of Chihuahua amounted to federal employees envisioning a future when the federal government no longer exists, a scenario in which New Mexico has reverted to its previous Mexican and Native American cultures, and impoverished inhabitants find the WIPP site and start salvaging the “valuable” scraps within. [18]

This example shows the extent to which the defense industry is the nation’s make-work program, engaged in elaborate plans to deal with a waste legacy of monstrous proportions while at the same time adding to it. The industry may not hire many science fiction writers, but it is often touted as the last sector of the American economy that manufactures something, that provides high-paying jobs to engineers and keeps the economy of states like New Mexico viable.

So is it the demand for jobs and economic spin-offs that leave our world bristling with thousands of nuclear missiles? Is it corporate lobbying and greed and the need to expand weapons markets that has led to Cold War II with the extension of NATO to Russia’s border? Can a popular “don’t bank on the bomb” campaign succeed? Would a boycott of weapons financers work, or does the deadlock need to be broken by political leadership that has higher aspirations than jobs and profits? Are there any political leaders on the horizon who can repair the broken trust and militarized politics that Gorbachev speaks of? President Obama finished his speech in Hiroshima by saying “we can choose a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.” Yes we can, or how about yes he can, for only he has the power to awaken morally to the implications of his administration’s reckless attempt to provoke and destabilize Russia, the indispensable nation in his stated ambition to lead the world toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Notes

[1] Joe Copeland, “At Hanford, a chance for a fuller telling of atomic history,” Crosscut, June 9, 2016.

[2] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University Press, 2006).

[3] Marisa Lagos, “Radiation levels at Treasure Island sites called no health threat,” SF Gate, August 28, 2014,

[4] U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control Agreements at a Glance, Armscontrol.org.

[5] The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) at a Glance, Armscontrol.org.

[6] Merritt Kennedy, “Tiny Marshall Islands Taking On 3 World Nuclear Powers In Court,” National Public Radio, March 3, 2016,

[7] “Ronald Reagan’s News Conference—January 29, 1981,” The American Presidency Project.

[8] Matthew Gault, “This TV Movie About Nuclear War Depressed Ronald Reagan: ‘The Day After’ made the president rethink nuclear proliferation,” War is Boring, February 19, 2015.

[9] Peter Beinart, “Think Again: Ronald Reagan,” Foreign Policy, June 2010.

[10] Colin Freeman, “How did one grumpy Russian halt Armageddon?” The Telegraph, May 11, 2015.

[11] ABC News Viewpoint: Discussion panel held immediately after the broadcast of The Day After, November 20, 1983. Robert McNamara states this point from the 47:40 mark of the video.

[12] Mikhail Gorbachev, Gorbachev: On My Country and the World (Columbia University Press, 1999) p. 34.

[13] ABC News Viewpoint: Discussion panel held immediately after the broadcast of The Day After, November 20, 1983. General Brent Scowcroft states this point from the 39:00 mark of the video.

[14] Chris Busby, “Chernobyl, genetic damage, and the UK nuclear bomb tests - justice at last?” The Ecologist, May 6, 2016,

[15] Marlene Cimons, “Clinton Apologizes for Radiation Tests,” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1995.

[16] “Gorbachev warns world of ‘cult of force,’ says all recent conflicts could have had peaceful solution,” Russia Today, June 3, 2016.

[17] Ricky Twisdale, “Nuland to Congress: We Spend $100 Mil a Year Trying to Destabilize Russia,” Russia Insider, June 9, 2016. 

[18] Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 197-202. Masco describes the original research document containing the Free State of Chihuahua scenario: 10,000 Years of Solitude? published by Los Alamos National Laboratories. The title chosen by the government scientists is an interesting tip of the hat toward the Latino heritage of New Mexico and to the magic realism of both novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (author of One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the American nuclear weapons project.

Other links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Arms_Limitation_Talks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Arms_Limitation_Talks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nptfact

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USRussiaNuclearAgreementsMarch2010