HIROSHIMA, Japan — In this place where a fearful age was born one fiery instant 65 years ago, the Flame of Peace still flickers on, awaiting the day when the world is rid of nuclear weapons.
Many think that day might be approaching.
“I saw a light in a dark tunnel,” said Emiko Okada, 73. “President Obama said, ‘Yes, I can.’ “
For her and other “hibakusha,” survivors of Hiroshima 1945, abolishing nuclear weapons has been a lifelong crusade. The cause that Hiroshima never abandoned is now also the cause of a growing movement worldwide, embraced by statesmen in Washington and other capitals, endorsed by old Cold Warriors, promoted by Hollywood, financed by billionaires.
Ordinary people, too, in country after country, want “zero nukes,” opinion polls show.
But is it achievable? Can doomsday arms be banished from the face of the Earth? Will humans stop reaching for ever more powerful weapons?
And, more immediately, will an American president, following his ambassador’s unprecedented visit, finally walk this year among the cherry trees, the memorials, the unspeakable memories of Hiroshima?
“The hibakusha say, ‘We’re getting older and older and we’ll soon die.’ For them, abolition is a kind of dream that should be achieved immediately,” said Kazumi Mizumoto, 53, a Hiroshima-born scholar of the nuclear age. “I understand their feelings. But feelings aren’t enough.”
The strongest feelings are of obligation — to the countless thousands whose ashes lie beneath the burial mound beside the Ota, the tidal river that ebbed and flowed with charred bodies Aug. 6, 1945, after U.S. airmen dropped a bomb that, in a blinding flash, unleashed the atom’s unearthly power on an unsuspecting city below.
U.S., Russia endorse “zero” goal
In April 2009, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev jointly endorsed the “zero” goal. Obama, in a historic address in Prague, declared the U.S. must act “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon” — a rare statement of U.S. moral responsibility.
By April this year, the American and Russian leaders were signing a treaty taking their countries’ arsenals down a notch, to 1,550 deployed warheads, with several thousand in reserve. That pact awaits U.S. Senate ratification.
The abolitionists, meanwhile, have rolled out their plans.
Global Zero’s study group of former U.S., Russian, Chinese and other military and diplomatic leaders proposes a phased process whereby the U.S. and Russia negotiate down to 1,000 warheads each by 2018. Meanwhile, by mid-decade, other nuclear-armed nations would enter multilateral talks to reduce their weapons in proportion to continuing U.S. and Russian cuts. All would reach zero by 2030.
Mayors for Peace, representing 4,037 cities worldwide and led by Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, is even more ambitious, calling for abolition by 2020.
Opponents cite zero possibility
But “realists” have been quick to agree with what former U.S. defense secretary Harold Brown calls the “practical impossibility” of zero nukes.
For starters, they say, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and France, each for its own reasons, would resist giving up their arsenals — Russia, for example, out of concern about a large U.S. conventional military advantage. They argue, too, that such countries as Germany and Japan, reliant on U.S. nuclear protection, would be tempted to build their own if they saw the U.S. moving to dismantle its weapons.
Abolitionists counter that progress depends on political will and leadership to overcome such nationalistic concerns.
“One thing we have learned is that working just on the basis of self-interest, this does not work,” said former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a 2009 Associated Press interview. If the U.S. and Russia together take the lead, he said, “then the next steps will come from other countries.”
Champions and critics of “zero nukes” both say the greatest obstacle lies in regional clashes that keep the world on edge and nations building nuclear arsenals: India and Pakistan over Kashmir; Israel’s standoff with the Arabs; the China-Taiwan impasse.
Global hostility over North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear goals poses another hurdle.
Easing such crises must come first, many say.
“Disarmament is important, but a safer world is more important,” said France’s Eric Danon, a veteran of disarmament diplomacy.
Numbers
At least 140,000 People killed in the bombing of Hiroshima, followed three days later with the bombing of Nagasaki, which killed at least 80,000
70,000 Global stockpile of nuclear weapons at its peak in 1986: 96 percent in U.S. and Soviet hands, equivalent to 3 tons of TNT for every person on Earth
1,550 Number of deployed warheads allowed each nation in a U.S.- Russia treaty that awaits U.S. Senate ratification
