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| Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow |
Setsuko Nakamura
Thurlow was born in Hiroshima in 1932. When Harry S. Truman took the horrifying,
inhuman and fateful decision on August 6, 1945, to single out the United States
for dubious renown as the only country in history to use the atomic bomb
against another people—and did so twice in three days despite the horrendous
results of the first attack—Setsuko, now 85, was a 13-year-old schoolgirl. At
the precise moment in which the Doomsday Clock struck twelve in Hiroshima, she
was only eighteen blocks from the hypocenter of the blast.
What she would
witness would be the direct results of nuclear holocaust—her city leveled, and friends,
family, classmates literally vaporized or melting before her eyes in the expansion
wave and firestorm that followed detonation of a primitive US A-bomb known as
“Little Boy”.
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| Detonation over Hiroshima |
Setsuko’s
immediate survival, and the fact that she also survived the nuclear aftermath
and has reached a ripe old age besides, can only be considered a miracle. And
perhaps that miracle is tied to an even greater destiny: that of being one of
the last witnesses to one of the gravest crimes of war ever committed against
the innocent civilians of one nation by the government of another.
This year the
Nobel Peace Prize went to the ICAN, (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons), an organization with which Setsuko Thurlow’s image and name are
intimately linked. Founded just a decade ago in Melbourne, Australia, and today
headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the ICAN is a civil society coalition
that partners with 468 other organizations in 101 countries. Its main mission
is to actively cultivate an awareness of the unacceptable horrors of nuclear
war and to achieve full adherence to and implementation of the UN Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The ICAN was the leading campaigner for
introduction of this treaty in the United Nations and considers its adoption
last July, by a vote of 122 to one, to be an organizational landmark. The treaty
prohibits the development, testing, production, manufacture, acquisition,
possession, stockpiling, transfer, use, and threatened use of nuclear weapons
or any other nuclear explosive devices. It will come into force once 50 UN states
have ratified it.
ICAN President Beatrice Fihn invited Setsuko
Thurlow to join her in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, in a tribute to
Thurlow’s tireless work both for the ICAN and within the United Nations in
raising awareness regarding the need to ban nuclear weapons worldwide and to
initiate an immediate disarmament process. Fihn herself is a 35-year-old
Swedish attorney who, despite her youth, has already accumulated firm
credentials as an anti-nuclear arms activist.
Fihn has crafted a simple but hard-hitting
argument against nuclear arms, saying, “In our advocacy, we have
always emphasized the inhumanity of nuclear weapons. Devices that are
incapable of distinguishing between a combatant and a child are simply unacceptable.”
She adds that “survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are
living witnesses to the horror of nuclear war...World leaders must heed their
call for a nuclear-weapon-free future.”
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| Thurlow and Fihn at the Nobel Ceremony |
Setsuko Thurlow,
for her part, has been a leading figure in the ICAN since it was founded in 2007.
She also played a crucial role in negotiating the adoption of the UN
treaty outlawing nuclear arms. A naturalized Canadian, Thurlow initiated her
public anti-nuclear activism less than a decade after her devastating
first-hand experience. What spurred her into action was when, in the 1950s, the
United States tested a hydrogen bomb—a much more powerful device than the one
that leveled Hiroshima—on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands and released
vast amounts of radioactive fallout into the global atmosphere.
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| "Little Boy" |
It wasn’t
until 1974, however, that, concerned by how many people seemed to have
forgotten the horrifying lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she decided that it
was important to start telling her story publicly, and to get other survivors
to do the same. It was then that she founded Hiroshima Nagasaki Re-lived, an
organization devoted to both educating and sparking activism among individuals
and communities worldwide.
Indeed, as a
first-hand witness of nuclear holocaust, her story is both heartbreaking and
inspiring. In an article under her by-line in the Huffington Post two years ago to mark the 70th
anniversary of the Hiroshima massacre, Setsuko Thurlow recalled the supreme
horror among horrors that has been the driving force behind her anti-nuclear arms
campaign for the past seven decades. “The first thing that comes to mind,” she
wrote, “is an image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji—transformed into a charred,
blackened and swollen child who kept asking in a faint voice for water until he
died in agony...
Regardless of the passage
of time, he remains in my memory as a four-year-old child who came to represent
all the innocent children of the world...Eiji’s image is burnt into my retina.”
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| Some estimates indicate 65% of those who died were
children.
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She goes on to
say, “As a 13-year-old schoolgirl, I witnessed my city of Hiroshima blinded by
the flash, flattened by the hurricane-like blast, burned in the heat of 4000
degrees Celsius and contaminated by the radiation of one atomic bomb.”
She talks
about how she and only two others girls miraculously escaped from their
collapsed classroom and what they saw on the streets outside after being pulled
from the rubble. “We saw a procession of ghostly figures slowly shuffling from
the center of the city. Grotesquely wounded people, whose clothes were
tattered, or who were made naked by the blast. They were bleeding, burnt,
blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing, flesh and skin
hanging from their bones, some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands, and
some with their stomachs burst open, with their intestines hanging out.”
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In makeshift centers volunteers sought to give what help
they could to the victims, but it was futile. Everything
was destroyed and tens of thousands were gravely wounded.
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“As of now,”
Thurlow writes, “over 250,000 victims have perished in Hiroshima from the
effects of the blast, heat and radiation. Seventy years later, people are still
dying from the delayed effects of one atomic bomb, considered crude by today’s
standard for mass destruction.”
In her
campaign to raise awareness of the need to embrace nuclear disarmament, Setsuko
Thurlow lays her finger on the main hurdle facing world peace promoters:
namely, the continuing acceptance by the major nuclear powers of nuclear
weapons as a viable deterrent to war, when they are, instead a recipe for global
holocaust, perhaps in the very near future. At no time in the history of
nuclear weapons, numerous experts agree, has the threat of nuclear war or the
accidental triggering of nuclear holocaust been more imminent.
Thurlow reminds
us that while Germany has fully accepted its role as an aggressor power in
World War II and has taken exceptional and extraordinary steps to right that
wrong in its global humanitarian stance, and while Japan has, since the end of
the war, been governed by what is known as a “Peace Constitution”, the United
States has recently—and incredibly—created a national monument to the Manhattan
Project as a triumphant of technological advancement, when it was precisely
that project that gave birth to the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, vaporizing a major part of their innocent civilian populations.
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| A flash, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled. |
As I wrote in
my book, War—A Crime Against Humanity,
“Despite debate that has divided Western intellectuals for well over half a
century, not even the most liberal of mainstream politicians and thinkers are
willing to openly refer to US President Harry S. Truman as a ‘war criminal’ for
ordering the surprise nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in which tens
of thousands of civilians were literally vaporized—at the end of the World War
II...” And, as I go on to corroborate in that work, the argument that the mass
murder of the populations of these two Japanese cities “saved Allied lives” and
“kept the war from dragging on indefinitely” has been amply and eloquently
debunked by both military and scientific experts of Truman’s own time,
including such major figures as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester
Nimitz, General Douglas McArthur, Truman’s own Chief of Staff, Admiral William
Leahy, and prominent nuclear scientists Leó Szilárd and Nobel Prize laureate
James Franck.
Szilárd
provided perhaps the most cogent example of how morally repugnant an act the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been, when he told US News & World Report in a 1960 interview, “Suppose Germany
had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had
dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then, having
run out of bombs, she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would
then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and
that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death
at Nuremberg and hanged them?”
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Charred bodies littered the streets of the two cities. Closer
to ground zero, not even the bodies remained. People
were literally vaporized.
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With all of
the research and knowledge that has been accumulated in the more than 70 years
since the end of World War II regarding nuclear arms, no world leader should
today be able to consider nuclear warfare as anything but unthinkable. Until
now, successive US presidents, for instance, have governed the most powerful
military nation on earth in the understanding the country’s nuclear arsenal is
a deterrent to world war—in other words, something too terrible to be
considered anything but a passive guarantee—not a viable weapon of war for limited
use.
But now the US
is governed by Donald Trump, who has asked the stunning question, “If we have
them, why can’t we use them?” A question that has prompted not only ICAN’s Beatrice
Fihn but also Trump’s own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, to refer to the
president as “a moron”. The US current president has also suggested that
countries like Japan and South Korea should be provided with nuclear weapons so
as to be able to “defend themselves” against the rogue nuclear regime in North
Korea. No one with even a passing knowledge of nuclear arms could talk this
way, as if limited nuclear war were a possibility. Make no mistake: Any nuclear
blast will directly affect the entire world, and a nuclear war would spell the
devastation of the human race.
Says Setsuko
Thurlow, “The truth is, we all live with the daily threat of nuclear weapons.
In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes, every second
of every day, nuclear weapons, thousands on high alert, are poised for
deployment threatening everyone we love and everything we hold dear. How much
longer can we allow the nuclear weapon states to wield this threat to all life
on earth? The time has come for action to establish a legally binding framework
to ban nuclear weapons as a first step in their total abolition.”
This is why
every single sane person on earth should be mortally concerned about the true meaning
of living in the Nuclear Age, and, whether for their own sake, for the sake of
their families, or for the sake of humanity as a whole, should become ardent
activists for nuclear disarmament and for world peace and cooperation.
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