Published On: Thu, Aug 6th, 2015
Ban the bomb: 70 years on, the nuclear threat looms as large as ever
Tilman Ruff (TC) : On
this day 70 years ago, the world and the preconditions for its health
and survival changed forever. A crude bomb containing 60 kilograms of
highly enriched uranium exploded 580 metres above Hiroshima.
Equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, it was 2000 times more powerful than
the British Grand Slam bomb, the largest produced until then.
On
August 6, 1945, a crude bomb containing 60 kilograms of highly enriched
uranium exploded 580 metres above Hiroshima. EPA/Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum
The moral threshold of catastrophic attacks with indiscriminate weapons had already been crossed, with poison gas
killing 90,000 and maiming or blinding one million men in the European
killing fields of the first world war. This was followed by
indiscriminate aerial bombing of cities during the second world war.
Nowhere was the bombing more extensive
than in Japan. Between March and August 1945, 66 Japanese cities, with
populations down to 30,000 inhabitants, were systematically bombed by an average of 500 bombers carrying 4000-5000 tons of bombs per city. In Tokyo on March 9-10, an estimated 120,000 civilians died in the bombing and subsequent fires.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Rumours had been circulating in
Hiroshima that the city was being saved for something special. It was.
The burst of ionising radiation, blast, heat and subsequent firestorm
that engulfed the city on August 6 killed 140,000 people by the end of
1945. Many were incinerated or dismembered instantly; others succumbed
over hours, days, weeks and months from cruel combinations of traumatic injury, burns and radiation sickness.
Three days later, another B-29 carrying a
bomb equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT headed for Kokura. Because of
clouds blocking visibility, its cargo was dropped over Nagasaki instead, raining similar radioactive ruin and killing 90,000 people by the end of 1945.
In both cities, ground temperatures reached about 7000° Celsius. Radioactive black rain poured down after the explosions.
In both weapons, less than one kilogram
of material was fissioned. The physics of the Hiroshima bomb were so
simple and predictable that the bomb was not tested prior to use. The
Nagasaki plutonium bomb required a more sophisticated design. A
prototype was exploded at Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16, 1945,
detonated by Australian nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton.
The survivors of the two bombings bore
the legacy of terrible injuries and scars on top of the cataclysmic
trauma of what they witnessed. They also faced discrimination and
ostracism, reduced opportunities for employment and marriage, and
increased risks of cancer and chronic disease, which stalk them, even 70
years later, for the rest of their days.
Over the past 30 years I have had the
privilege of visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a number of occasions.
What never ceases to amaze me is the extraordinary compassion, wisdom
and humbling humanity of hibakusha. Never have I heard even the
slightest hint of an understandable desire for revenge or retribution.
An unfulfilled quest
The constant yearning of hibakusha is
that no-one else should ever suffer as they have suffered: nuclear
weapons must be removed from the face of the earth.
In the newly established United Nations,
there was the same understanding. The first resolution passed at the
first meeting of the UN General Assembly in London in January 1946
established a commission to draw up a plan “for the elimination of
national armaments of atomic weapons”.
Today,
there is ample cause for existential despair and a poor prognosis for
human custodianship of the biosphere. No nuclear disarmament
negotiations are in train. Even reduced from their Cold War peak,
massively bloated nuclear arsenals of 15,650 weapons jeopardise not only
the living but those yet to be born.
Were one Hiroshima bomb to be detonated
every two hours from the end of 1945, the global arsenal would not yet
be consumed. All the nuclear-armed states continue to invest massively
in development and modernisation of their arsenals. In the Conference on Disarmament, it has not been possible to agree even on an agenda for 19 years.
The five-yearly review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the principal treaty regulating nuclear weapons and legally binding nuclear-armed states to disarm, recently ended in failure.
Britain, Canada and the US (acting for Israel, not even a party to the
treaty), refused to accept a March 2016 deadline for a conference,
promised for 20 years, to discuss a zone free of weapons of mass
destruction in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, conflict in Ukraine and
Crimea has re-inflamed Cold War risks of armed confrontation and nuclear
war between NATO and Russia.
However, there are grounds to be hopeful about decisive progress on a circuit-breaker. The first ever intergovernmental conferences
on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons have been held – three
in the past two years. These have led to 113 nations signing a humanitarian pledge committing them to work to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.
In a welcome development, the recent ALP national conference adopted a policy
that recognises that eliminating nuclear weapons is a humanitarian
imperative. The policy commits Labor to support negotiation of a global
treaty banning nuclear weapons.
Other treaties show the way
Hiroshima – The unfathomable scale of human suffering and dehumanization.
States without nuclear weapons cannot
eliminate them. But the dictates of common humanity, democracy, common
interest and common sense, based on all people everywhere being
vulnerable to the catastrophic impacts of nuclear weapons, can lead to
disarmament.
As happened with landmines and cluster munitions, like biological and chemical
weapons before them, unacceptable weapons can be prohibited as a
necessary condition for their elimination. In the face of recalcitrant
nuclear-armed states claiming a unique right to cling determinedly to
their weapons of terror, concluding a ban treaty is the most practical
next step the rest of the world can take.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon surprised many when he ordered an end
to the US biological weapons program. The US Defence Department, which
had previously declared that biological weapons lacked military
usefulness, supported this.
As the then-UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Angela Kane, said last year:
How many states today boast that they are “biological-weapon states” or “chemical-weapon states”? Who is arguing now that bubonic plague or polio are legitimate to use as weapons under any circumstance, whether in an attack or in retaliation? Who speaks of a bioweapon umbrella?
Yet all these things and more are
claimed regarding nuclear weapons, far more destructive and
indiscriminate than these other weapons.
In appealing to the 1982 UN Second Special Session on Disarmament, Hiroshima Mayor Takeshi Araki said:
Hiroshima is not merely a witness of history. Hiroshima is an endless warning for the future of humankind. If Hiroshima is ever forgotten, it is evident that the mistake will be repeated and bring human history to an end.
Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima added:
Nagasaki has to be forever the last city in the world bombed by nuclear weapons!
On the 70th anniversary of the bombings,
banning nuclear weapons is long overdue. The remaining survivors should
see negotiations on a ban treaty underway by the time a new year dawns.
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