JAPAN: Cloud of Asian Nuclear Rivalry Over Hiroshima

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Aug 4 1998 (IPS) - Getting India and Pakistan to abandon nuclear weapons is a tall order, but that is what peace activists, who gather in Hiroshima this week to mark the world’s first atomic bombing, hope to see.

More than 200,000 people died in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 53 years ago, when the United States dropped the world’s first nuclear bombs on August 6 and 9 respectively.

The bombings forced Japan’s defeat at the hands of Allied forces and put an end the Second World War.

Activists and A-bomb survivors hope the human toll of the attacks, which is rarely discussed in governments’ security arguments about nuclear rivalry, and their visible reminders will help convince the India and Pakistan peoples to reject the nuclear option.

“Only the total elimination of nuclear weapons in the world can bring peace to the thousands of A-bomb sufferers,” said a statement released by Gensuikin or the Japan Council against A and H Bombs, a peace organisation under the Japan Communist Party.

Even today, the gleaming and rebuilt atom-bombed cities cannot totally erase the devastation that took place on those days in August.

The number of people suffering from radiation-related illnesses like cancer continue to rise, and survivors continue to die from them.

Sunao Tsuboi, 73, a victim of the Hiroshima bombing, survives on daily medication and a weekly transfusion to control a defect in blood formation he has lived with since the atomic attack. He was on the road, about one kilometre from ground zero, on Aug 6, 1945.

Tsuboi, now a member of the Hiroshima Citizens’ Group for promoting Peace with People of India and Pakistan, is an ardent speaker against the development of nuclear weapons. He visited New Delhi and Bombay in November, urging people to reject nuclear weapons and lobby their governments.

“People in India understand that nuclear weapons should be eliminated,” he explained. “But their governments tell them that it is not possible to stop developing nuclear weapons because of China and Pakistan and they blamed the United States for not abolishing their own weapons.”

While these are invoked as strategic arguments, he says human beings are being “stupid” because “they are ignoring the terrible consequences that will befall ordinary people like what happened to us”.

Chiyono Yeneda, 73, who lives in Nagasaki, says she trembled in fear when she heard the news of the tests carried out by the two rival South Asian countries in May.

It brought back the suffering she underwent as a 19-year-old after the Nagasaki bombing. Today, she is badly disfigured as a result of burns on her back. Worse, she suffered discrimination while growing up and even her children were stigmatised and looked upon as “polluted” people.

“As long as I live, I will continue to tell the world of the suffering and pain that is caused by nuclear weapons. Through education, we must urge the public to stand up to their governments and force them to stop nuclear weapons,” she said.

Participants at this week’s annual peace conferences in Hiroshima are calling for stronger grassroots action to seek the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Charles Hilfenhaus of the Alliance of Atomic Veterans, an American anti-nuclear group, says even the military forces of India and Pakistan have a stake in staying away from nuclear weaponry.

“We are convinced that if these weapons are used they will not be used on cities, it will be the young men of India and Pakistan in the armed forces,” Hilfenhaus explained.

The campaign by Japanese peace activists parallel efforts by the government to use the country’s standing as a non-nuclear economic power and a survivor of atomic bombings, to help ease nuclear tensions in South Asia.

Tokyo has used its economic clout, through large assistance programs to developing countries, to try to pressure India and Pakistan to stop its nuclear programmes.

Akiko Yamanaka, a senior politician on the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the May underground tests “the greatest threat to the international system” because it could encourage countries like North Korea and Iran to become nuclear states themselves.

But the tests also present Japan with another chance to actively prove its diplomatic clout in pushing disarmament. “Japan’s traditional style of diplomacy (using aid and relying on the U.S. and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) is not working,” Yamanaka said.

Upon assuming office last week, Japan’s new prime minister Keizo Obuchi said he was willing to mediate in the India-Pakistan standoff. The premiers of India and Pakistan met in Sri Lanka last week, but there was little thaw in frosty ties.

Yamanaka advocates a concept of security that involves working with all states and not against some states — something that Japan is suited for. “From the high moral ground that Japan occupies on the issue of nuclear weapons, it should work to form a new international consensus on nuclear weapons,” he said.

For this purpose, the foreign ministry last month set up an emergency action forum of experts that will draw up within one year proposals on nuclear disarmament. Members will come from government and grassroots groups in Japan, the five original nuclear powers, and India and Pakistan.

The May tests show that Japan needs to come up with more realistic steps toward disarmament, Kenichi Ito, head of the Japan Forum of International Relations said, given concerns about what critics call the bias of the current non-proliferation regime toward the traditional powers.

He said the world needs institutions with the authority and power to cope with the use of nuclear force by a rogue country or criminal group.

“This does not mean total elimination of weapons but the role of a credible, international institution that can be entrusted by the international community to have the authority to exercise deterrence in future contingencies,” he argued in a commentary in June.