A Reflection on the Significance of Remembering the 60th. Anniversary of Hiroshima!

dublin | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Wednesday August 03, 2005 19:11 by Ciaron - Dubin Catholic Worker/Pit Stop Ploughshares (personal capacity) 087 918 4552

Hiroshima Day, August 6th. 60th. anniversary.

For those of us who lived through the nuclear stand off the Cold War and didn't fold to resignation or denial - Hiroshima Day August 6th remains significant.

Throughout the '80's a priority was to alert folks
that the defensive posture of Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD), where sities were the primary targets, had given away to an offensive posture of Counterforce or First Strike. Moved forward
under Prez Carter - the folks at the Pentagon were
talking about fighting and winning a nuclear war, by targeting the USSR weapons with the strategy of knocking out the majority of their weapons in their bunkers and taking sustainable casualties.

Hiroshima Day would see us out on the streets trying to wake people up to the dangers at hand. With the 1st. World - Europe & North America - being a likely nuclear battlefield, a lot of people did wake up and a broader anti-nuke weapon movement emerged. People marched in their hundreds of thousands and resisters moved into nonviolent resistance. Hiroshima Day took
me in the company of other resisters to dusty uranium mines in the Australian outback, slick hi tech corporate buildings in Southern California, the Nevada Test site 60 miles from Vegas, U.S. war fighting targeting bases all over the world.

In '87, I found myself in the basement of a homeless shelter in Washington DC with Phil Berrigan & the U.S. Plowshares crew. They had been taking nuclear disarmament literally since the 1980. We spent the evening with Hibakushu (survivors of the Hiroshima bombing) who shared their childhood stories of surviving the nuclear attack, of the 100,000 people who died in their city that day and the tens of thousands who died slowly of leukemia's and cancers in the years that followed.

What had been denounced as a Nazi war crime at the beginning WW2 - the targetting of civilian
populations & cities had been perfected over
Hiroshima and a few days later Nagasaki. The U.S. have offered no apologies for this act of total war that makes everything that has happened in its wake permissible. How many hospitals were bombed? How many commuters on their way to work were melted? How many had died torurous deaths? How many children slain? The paradigm had shifted.

After listening to the Habkishu, we planned Non Violent Direct Action for the White House & Pentagon in the morning.

When we woke news had come through of two plowshares actions having gone down in the east and west. August 6th being the "Feast of the Transfiguration" seemed an appropriate day to take nuclear disarmament literally and challenge the paradigm. It was a good crew to be with, many of them having done years in prison for nonviolent resistance, with few illusions of what it would take to turn this thing around. Most of them grounded with solidarity work with the homeless and in America's colonies.

hthttp/wwwwwlplowsharesactionsrg/wewebpagesRTRANSFIGURATIONPLOWSHARESthtm


In 1990, I was back in the basement in D.C. It had
been a weird 6 months in D.C. The Cold War had
officially ended with the Berlin Wall tumbling down in Christmas '89. Lots of folks in the homeless scene were talking about the "peace dividend"....the math went that with the USSR out of business and no realistic enemy, the U.S. military would have to wind down, decommission and all the money and resources that had been wasted on war could be turned to meeting human needs...like the 3 million homeless in the U.S. at that time.

We rose early to head off to blockade the 23,000 heading for work at the Pentagon,only to find that Maggie Thatcher & George Bush Snr demonizing their former buddy Saddam Hussein and announcing sanctions on Iraq. Little did we realise then, that this would be a Weapon of Mass Destruction that would kill over 1 million Iraqi
children in the years to come.

What has happened in the '90's is that the powers-that-be have co-opted and harnessed all that anxiety about nukes that the peace movement had generated in the '80's. George Jr. has gone to war marketing those anxieties justifying the invasion of Iraq (& maybe soon Iran) on the basis that they are only a short time away from possessing WMD. U.S. pre-emptive strikes on the basis that someone else maybe mimicing nuclear weapons production. Since the likely nuclear battlefields are 3rd. world, there is an absence of a broader anti-nuke movement in the 1st. That's the problem when you build a movement based on self-interest & anxiety rather than solidarity & love.

The Plowshares are still taking nuclear disarmament literally and nonviolently and Sr. Ardeth Platte is presently imprisoned in Alderson Fed Pen for begining the disarmament of an ICBM missile silo in Colarado. Unlike the U.S. & British militaries she & two friends had no trouble finding WMD.

http://www.plowsharesactions.org/sacred_earth_and_space_plowshares%202.htm

We will head to the U.S. Embassy on Saturday August 6th. to demand Sr. Ardeth's release and that U.S. should apologise for Hirohima and lead the way in disarming their nukes & WMD


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