Atomic Inhumanity

Hiroshima marked sixty-eighth anniversary of the annihilation by atomic bomb. People in Hiroshima held a memorial ceremony to pray for the victims, to which Prime Minister of Japan and U.S. Ambassador to Japan attended. While a sense of inhumanity of nuclear weapons are getting common to the world, moves of governments are lagging behind. Future of nuclear disarmament is still opaque.

On behalf of the people, Mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, appealed the elimination of nuclear weapons in his Peace Declaration at the ceremony. “Atomic bomb is the extremity of inhumane weapons and absolute evil,” he stated. He also urged leaders in the world to recognize the inability of nuclear weapons to deter someone’s offensive motivation and the shift to a security strategy based on credibility and dialogue.

After the accident in the First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant two years ago, there is a growing tendency in Japan to identify nuclear power generation with nuclear weapons, with the notion that human being cannot coexist with nuclear power. Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations requested Tokyo Electric Power Company not to resume the reactors in Kashiwazaki Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata last month.

Even how victims and their families want to eliminate nuclear weapons, there is a limitation for governmental actions, mainly caused by the contradiction of appealing nuclear elimination under the nuclear umbrella of the United States. Japan rejected to sign on a joint statement to ask efforts to illegalizing nuclear weapons in a meeting of the United Nations last October. The reason was the statement that required immediate action would contradict to the situation of Japan under the umbrella.

The assertion often made by leaders of Japan that Japan is only a country that suffered from nuclear weapons is not persuasive enough. They say “That is why we are right people to appeal it.” It is always possible, however, that other countries ask the Japanese “Are you ok with killing people as quick as possible, if it is done by other method than nuclear weapons?” Knowing that dilemma, atomic bomb sufferers are reluctant to emphasize inhumanity of nuclear weapons too much, and focusing rather on “inhumanity of war.”

A pilot of fighter jet would never learn what was going on the land after he dropped a bomb. On August 6^th, 1945, one bomb killed over one hundred and forty thousand innocent people. Not only the Unites States, but the world needs to know what happened in Hiroshima, and of course in Nagasaki. Whether or not Japan is dependent on nuclear umbrella, there is no change in the inhumanity of the event these sixty-eight years.