Nuclear W eapons 8-8-2015

8, August 2015                       Nuclear Weapons Last week marked the 70th anniversary of the US bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima causing the death of 140,000. Three days later, the US dropped a second bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki killing another 74,000. Historians consider these attacks as war crimes as the victims were all civilians. The anniversary galvanized many Japanese across the nation to oppose the contentions decision of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to change Japan’s pacifist constitution to send troops into conflict zones for the first time since World War II. Acclaimed Japanese novelist and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe vehemently opposes his government’s decision to abandon its pacifist policy. Prominent Japanese activists and politicians joined a world-wide call for the total abolition of all nuclear weapons. Oe described nuclear weapons as personification of “pure evil” and was also highly critical of Japan’s decision to build nuclear power stations which resulted in the disaster in  Fukushima. Oe’s son was born with a severe birth defect – a hole in his skull, a tragic symbol of the US atomic bomb attacks. Many other survivors recalled seeing their loved ones vaporizing before their very eyes. Hundreds of peace activists from across the nation convened to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was built. The Obama administrations plans to upgrade its nuclear arsenal at a cost of $1 trillion is a tragic testimony that we have learned little from the sins of the past.