05431
August 22, 2005   

Drifting toward catastrophe    

Ex-missionary says A-bomb memorials
reinforce grim lesson world still has not learned  

by the Rev. James E. Atwood
Retired PC(USA) missionary to Japan

Nagasaki.

    

     Two beautiful cities were instantly turned into radioactive wastelands.

     As is true in all wars, most of the victims were women, children and old people.

     Those near  the epicenter were the lucky ones. They were

     Tens of thousands of people at a distance from ground zero were burned alive, dying more slowly, in excruciating pain, begging for water.

     Survivors of the blasts, now in their 70s and 80s, still carry grotesque physical and psychological scars.

     I spent nine years as a missionary in Japan (1965-1974). This month I returned, on a peace pilgrimage, attending 60th-anniversary memorials of the two bombs that, in the words of Albert Einstein, “Changed everything except the way we think.” In their wake, Einstein added, “We drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.”

     I love the Japanese people. I salute the courage of the United Church of Christ in Japan as it continues to repent its complicity with Japanese militarism in World War II. I grieve over the use of atomic weapons on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am impressed that the Japanese people love their “Peace Constitution.”

     I had to add my voice for peace in a day when the whole world is threatened with nuclear extinction — yet few really want to talk about it.

     I was privileged to represent the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship in an eight-member delegation from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a group formed to support those in Japan and the United States who resist

Article IX of the Japanese constitution.

     That provision, written by representatives of American Occupation Forces in the early days of Japan’s post-war reconstruction, reads:

     1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling

     2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

     We made solemn visits to peace museums in both cities, the only ones in the world that have experienced nuclear annihilation, and attended gripping 60th-anniversary ceremonies.

     Our own country is still deeply divided over the use of these horrible weapons.

     I had always accepted the U.S. rationale — that the bombs saved thousands, perhaps millions, of young American and Japanese lives by bringing the war to an end and making an invasion of the empire

     However, revelations made public recently through the Freedom of Information Act have persuaded me that the first use of the bomb was a colossal mistake. On July 18 — nearly three weeks before the Hiroshima bombing — Japan had asked, through

on Nagasaki was positively demonic.

     Not even God can undo the past. But how are we to walk together into the future?

     If the planet is to survive, the world must accept the fact that using nuclear weapons on human beings is unconscionable.

     Every nation must understand that modern warfare involves the possible use of even more powerful nuclear weapons than those used in Japan. The average U.S. nuclear warhead in our program of “stockpile stewardship” has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Even now, 10 years after the end of the Cold War, we maintain thousands of such weapons — on a hair trigger.

     As former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote in July: “The United States must no longer rely on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal, and dreadfully dangerous.”

     Several times during our recent peace pilgrimage, we heard distress in the voices of Japanese church and political leaders as they recited the nuclear powers’ promises to engage in “an unequivocal undertaking for the elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” Yet, in May, these same nations, parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, met at the United Nations but could make no concrete progress toward this essential goal.

     In his Peace Declaration, Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh, called nuclear nations to account: “The nuclear weapons states, and the United States of America in particular, have ignored their international commitments and have made no change in their unyielding stance on nuclear deterrence,” Itoh said. “We strongly resent the trampling of the hopes of the world’s peoples.”

     Itoh then addressed the people of the United States, saying: “We understand your anger and anxiety over the memories of the horror of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet, is your security actually enhanced by your government’s policies of maintaining over 10,000 nuclear weapons, of carrying out repeated sub-critical nuclear tests, and of pursuing the development of new ‘mini-’ nuclear weapons?

     “We are confident that the vast majority of you desire in your hearts the elimination of nuclear arms. May you join hands with the people of the world who share that same desire, and work together for a peaceful planet free from nuclear weapons.”

     As doves circled over the assemblies, I was glad to be standing with thousands of others and making the vow: “No more Hiroshimas. No More Nagasakis. No more nuclear weapons. No more war.”