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j. robert oppenheimer
Testimony of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: No More Nuclear Weapons
They have been telling their stories for nearly 80 years. It’s about time more of us listen.
Aug 09, 2025
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains descriptions of nuclear weapons effects, including disturbing accounts of the victims.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, the second was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities were totally destroyed by the bombs, a new type of weapon developed by the United States, infamously through the Manhattan Project. In Hiroshima, over 140,000 were killed. In Nagasaki, over 70,000. In the blink of an eye, humanity witnessed two of the darkest days in history.
This year marks the 80th commemoration of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each year, scores of Japanese peace organizations, and those from other nations, hold events in the two cities to remember the tragedies and renew passions for continuing the fight for peace.
This year, I had the privilege of being invited to attend one such event: the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, organized by Gensuikyo. It has been a tremendous honor to join as part of a delegation from the United States and as a representative of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security, an organization whose board I sit on.
What I have experienced has moved me powerfully. I learned from testimony from nuclear bomb survivors (Hibakusha), technical descriptions of the events of those days, diplomatic arguments from around the world, and demonstrations of peace movements from Japan and beyond. In the aftermath of such powerful testimony, the natural conclusion is inescapable: Nuclear weapons should be made illegal, never used again, and dismantled. The wealth of resources going toward their production should instead be dedicated to programs that actually create security like education, diplomacy, material security, and cooperative institutions.
I’d like to report back what I experienced and learned for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the details of nuclear weapons control—especially those in the United States. As someone who grew up through U.S. public schools and engages with students in higher education, I can say that we are woefully ignorant of the truth. Let this correct the record and help open more eyes to the truth.
The Reality of the Bombings and their Aftermath
I want to share both the technical details of what happened during nuclear bomb detonation as well as testimony from those who survived the blasts, the Hibakusha. Both are difficult to read. I urge readers to open their minds and hearts and imagine to their greatest ability what those who experienced the bombings felt like as horror unfolded before their very eyes.
At the World Conference, Professor Oya Masato of the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science shared a scientific account of the bombing of Nagasaki. This second bomb exploded at 11:02 am on August 9, 1945, 503 meters above the town of Matsuyama, about three kilometers north of Nagasaki city center. Instantly, the bomb turned into a fireball of tens of millions of degrees. The surface of the fireball cooled to approximately 7,000°C in 0.1 seconds. The ground temperature at the hypocenter (point of detonation) rose as high as 3,000-4,000°C, and humans in the area were instantly carbonized. The bomb generated a shock wave and blast which traveled at 440 meters per second at the hypocenter and 60 meters per second two kilometers away from the hypocenter. Those shock waves destroyed most of the city, an area of 405 square kilometers, within 10 seconds. Fires emerged and burned an area of 6.7 square kilometers. Thousands were instantly killed, and by the end of 1945, the death toll rose to 74,000.
This scientific description begins to describe the horrors of the bomb. But it can be hard to imagine. What stands out is the sheer power and devastation: a whole city leveled and engulfed in flames within seconds. Devastation on a scale never before seen. Callous destruction, indiscriminate murder.
What truly rends the heart is the testimony of Hibakusha, those who survived the bomb and tell their stories. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum depicts many such stories. It’s nearly unbearable to take in and try to imagine even a sliver of what these horrors would feel like. The stories make clear that the atomic bombs created a literal hell on Earth.
A device that can cause this amount of suffering has no place in human society.
One story, shared by a Hibakusha of Hiroshima, Park Jung-soon, 11 years old at the time, describes her experience. On the morning of the bombing, she and her six family members living together were surprised by a flash like lightning and thunder. The sky lit up. Suddenly, a blast and tremendous sound shook the whole house, lifting the entire structure upward. The house fell back down, collapsed, and crushed the family beneath it. It all happened in seconds. They could not move their bodies and thought they would die.
Imagine the sheer terror of suddenly being launched into the air only to plummet down and be crushed by your home. Imagine your home, something that we hold deep attachment to and a place of safety, comfort, and love, collapsing down on you and your whole family. In moments your safe haven becomes the source of incredible pain. Imagine those you love looking at you with the fear of death in their eyes for a split second before having your gaze ripped away by the force of crushing weight.
Jung-soon opened her eyes and found herself trapped under a thick beam. Her mother desperately pulled her out and helped her crawl out of the collapsed walls. Her head was bleeding heavily, but she rose to her feet and looked around: The house next door had fallen down as well, people were running away, crying, shouting. The village as she knew it was falling apart.
While the family fled, they saw people dead on the ground, or alive but in agony crying or shouting. People were pulling carts carrying wounded or dead neighbors. People were covered in burns and suffering in pain. She describes it as like the hell of a cartoon but in reality.
At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, there were many such stories and testimonies, as well as photographs and artwork created by Hibakusha attempting to visually depict what they experienced. Details like those in Jung-soon’s story were common. People burned beyond recognition. Structures flattened. The dead littering the city. People walking around with flesh peeling from their bodies, literally melting off, begging and screaming for water. It was, indeed, hell on Earth.
It may be difficult, but I implore you to try to deeply imagine what these words convey. In a world where many of us are constantly exposed to language of indiscriminate violence through news media, it may be easy to simply read this and register it as fact. But try to register it as feeling. What would it feel like to feel your own broken body throb with pain while simultaneously witnessing mass death all around you? Can you imagine a human being burnt beyond recognition? Someone with their flesh melting off? The sounds of screams, crying, wailing, and pure fear were profoundly traumatizing.
The effects of nuclear weapons, the scenes described by the Hibakusha, are things that should never be visited upon this Earth. A device that can cause this amount of suffering has no place in human society.
This does not even describe the effects of the bombing that persisted long after the initial devastation. Hibakusha faced severe effects from radiation poisoning and the physical damage—burns, breakages, disfigurations—they sustained. They were also subject to discrimination for decades, as people feared contamination if they came in contact with Hibakusha. Many kept their stories secret.
These are tragic tales that the Japanese peace movement describes and uplifts for all to learn from. They have been telling their stories for nearly 80 years. It’s about time more of us listen.
Telling the Truth in the United States
In the United States, there is a profound culture of ignorance surrounding nuclear weapons. I experienced this firsthand growing up in U.S. public schools and then in collegiate engineering studies.
When I was in high school, I elected to take the upper-level U.S. history class—one which gives college credit if you do well enough. The course is infamous in American high schools: AP U.S. History, or APUSH for short. Our teacher taught out of a book used in many classrooms across the country, titled The American Pageant: A History of the Republic by Kennedy, Cohen, and Bailey. This book, like many others used in the U.S., describes the atomic bombing as the key to ending the second World War, a tough but necessary decision by President Harry Truman. The argument goes that dropping the bombs eliminated the need for a U.S. ground invasion, which would have cost half a million lives (which Howard Zinn notes in A People’s History of the United States seemed to have “been pulled out of the air to justify the bombings”). It becomes a trolly problem of sorts: Would you end 200,000 lives to save half a million?
That’s as far as we typically get in U.S. depictions of the bombings. We are stuck thinking at a high school level about nuclear weapons—in a country whose high schools are not known for their rigor or nuanced teaching of U.S. history. Now, when I teach at universities and talk with students in engineering, their understanding of the bombings is the same: an unfortunate necessity or political blunder. Even the faculty teaching the course, presumably sharp thinkers with PhDs, repeat the same lines.
Students should not be indoctrinated into a version of the story favorable to the U.S. perspective.
In popular media, the story is no different. 2023’s blockbuster Oppenheimer—which broke box office expectations and was given seven awards at the Oscars—was a shallow depiction of the events. As it told a dramatized version of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the Manhattan Project, it attempted to depict his inner turmoil as he grappled with visions of what must have become of victims. However, the screen time dedicated to his haunting visions does not exceed five minutes in a three-hour film.
Accurate depictions of the horrors of nuclear bombings are nowhere to be found in dominant U.S. education and media. Textbooks do not describe the detailed suffering of victims, the social discrimination they experienced afterward, or the stories of their deeply difficult lives. Films choose not to center the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather the perpetrators. It is tragic and laughable to consider the fact that a film like Oppenheimer is praised for its critique of nuclear weapons while it entirely centers the life of the man who was instrumental in their creation rather than the lives of his victims.
Peace organizations across the U.S. are pushing against these narratives, trying to spread the truth, and fighting for nonproliferation. But without countering the widespread ignorance of our own population, we will not get far. In a world increasingly plagued by misinformation and falsehood, we have our work cut out when it comes to effectively spreading the truth about nuclear weapons. We need to dispel the veil of ignorance covering our communities if we are to build a large enough movement to push the U.S. to disarm, re-engage in treaties, and work toward peace under cooperation rather than precarious stability based on fear and threats.
One of the first steps can be to simply tell the truth. Stories matter, and how we tell the history of our own nation matters. Students should not be indoctrinated into a version of the story favorable to the U.S. perspective. Media should accurately describe the horrors. The stories of the Hibakusha should be known by everyone.
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What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?
The history serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
Jul 18, 2025
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.
The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.
Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.
The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?
The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
A Tale of Two Laboratories
In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.
The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future.
No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer would describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”
By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.
One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.
Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”
Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”
In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.
The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer
Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.
Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?
One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.
Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness.
Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”
Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”
Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”
The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.
Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”
When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierls acknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”
Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.
“Remember Your Humanity”
The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.
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The Commemoration of the Criminal Bravo H-Bomb Test Is a Cry for a Nuclear Free World
We will be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
Feb 11, 2024
Later this month I will return to Japan for the annual Bikini commemoration and the Gensuikyō, or Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, annual conference. There won’t be a bikini fashion show.
The commemoration of what can only be called the criminal U.S. Bravo H-bomb test on March 1, 1954, is one of two annual anchor events of the Japanese peace movement. Although Covid-19 is still with us, these events will play important roles in revitalizing the Japanese peace movement; one of the most effective in the world.
Over the years, this movement has played a major role in preventing Japan from becoming a nuclear weapons state, and the testimonies of Hibakusha (victims and witnesses of the A-bombings) have played critical roles in inspiring the nuclear disarmament diplomacy and the international negotiations that resulted in the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Although I initially met several Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors as early as the 1978 U.N. Second Session of Nuclear Disarmament, it wasn’t until I first traveled to Hiroshima in 1984 that I began what became a 40-year engagement with Hibakusha and the Japanese movement.
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism.
In an effort to compensate for his earlier support for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and to bring nonexistent jobs bacon to Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and, following him, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and the city’s business establishment were suckered into Reagan-administration planning to transform Boston Harbor into a nuclear weapons base. Knowing the Navy’s record of nuclear weapons accidents, the ways that the base would ratchet up tensions with Moscow and violate the freeze, and with knowledge of better economic and social uses for the waterfront property, several of us organized at the grassroots level to prevent construction of the base. We prevailed, and I was invited to give a brief inspirational speech at the World Conference against A- and H- Bombs. Needless to say, my first trip to Hiroshima was a transformative experience.
Not long thereafter, I returned to Japan for the Bikini Day commemorations and was shocked by what I learned from the testimonies of Rongelap and Japanese survivors of the March 1, 1954, Bravo “test.” Bravo was by far the most devastating of the United States’ nuclear weapons explosions that pulverized Bikini between 1946 and 1958. It was detonated a year after the Soviets tested their first H-bomb and two years before a culturally explosive women’s two-piece swimsuit was first marketed in Paris.
Washington responded to the Soviet Union’s first H-bomb with a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb that destroyed an entire city, initially killed 100,000 people—almost all civilians—and poisoned survivors, the environment, and future generations. Ninety-eight miles away from the Bikini H-bomb test site, inhabitants of tropical Rongelap Atoll were showered by and played with radioactive ash that they first thought was snow. Just 500 miles from the equator, they had never seen snow. Japanese fishing boats hundreds of miles from Bikini Atoll and fish that comprised a major portion of Japan’s ocean-based food supply were also irradiated.
Before the year was out, natives of Rongelap and Japanese fishermen began to die from radiation diseases and cancer. Still births and numerous birth defects including jellyfish babies (transparent skin and no bones), anencephaly (infants born without portions of their brain or skull), and other mutations followed.
Secrecy was immediately imposed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments. But as word got out following the return of the Lucky Dragon V tuna fishing boat’s sickened crew to Yaizu City, women with memories of Hiroshima launched a petition campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It garnered 25 million Japanese signatures, leading to the convening of the first World Conference against A- and H- Bombs, which attracted delegates from across Japan and around the world.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims, many of whom had hidden themselves from the world due to their disfigurements, excruciating physical and emotional pains, and popular fears that their radiation diseases were contagious began to tell their stories. What became the world’s most powerful and long enduring nuclear disarmament social movement was born.
Two years after Bravo, in 1956, the first Godzilla film was released. Unlike the deracinated version shown across the United States, it was not the compelling story of a love triangle. It was a powerful expression of rage against the A-and H- bombs, a cry for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Watching it now, the desperate fear of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini bombs—fears blunted over the decades—remains palpable.
Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese Hibakusha and Rongelap claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.
This outrageous charge was difficult and painful to believe, bringing to mind as it did Dr. Joseph Mengele’s murderous experiments at the Auschwitz death camp. But in 2000, in the course of hosting a “Global Hibakusha delegation” for a conference at the United Nations, several of us met with the senior Department of Energy (DOE) official who was responsible for studies of the impacts of radiation on people. I explained that in Japan I had heard Hibakusha cry out that they had been used as “guinea pigs” in experiments conducted by the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission. I said that I could understand victims thinking the worst of their tormentors, but expressed some doubt and asked if he could say it wasn’t so.
“No,” he responded. The experiments had indeed been conducted. And a Utah downwinder who was with us raged in response that the same was secretly being done across the western United States. She was a woman who had lost her father and father-in-law to uranium mining, her sister and daughter to Nevada test fallout, and who consumed a daily meal of pills simply to stay alive
Some years later I experienced an equally sobering reverberation from the Bikini H-bomb. It came during a lunch break in a well-appointed conference site during another annual Bikini commemoration. A descendant of Rongelap Hibakusha was given a book about the Bikini H-bomb and its devastations. It included a list of the names of each of Rongelap’s inhabitants on that 1954 March 1 morning. One by one this young man placed a check mark next to the name of each person who had died of cancer and other radiation diseases from the Bravo “test.” I watched amidst very painful silence as he methodically checked off the names of nearly every person on the list. Some were women and men I had met along our ways.
This is not simply history. In preparation for the Bikini commemoration, this year I came across two recent articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by Robert Alverez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the DOE. Coincident with the release of Oppenheimer, Alvarez reported that Oppie and Lawrence (for whom the Lawrence Livermore lab is named) performed a “vaudeville” on themselves and others. To keep up their teams’ morale, they drank glasses of water with radioactive sodium and in some cases had lower level workers consume plutonium. More than a few, including Oppenheimer—who was also a smoker—subsequently died of cancer.
In his article “Seeking Justice for Radiation Victims of the U.S. Nuclear Program,” Alverez reviewed the campaigns of downwinders and tribal uranium miners for compensation via the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). He reports that, ostensibly to limit federal spending (at the same time that the U.S. has embarked on a nearly $2 trillion nuclear weapons “modernization” campaign) Congress recently refused to extend support for “victims not accounted for in earlier legislation.”
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
The hands of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock are now set at 90 second to midnight. We face the risks of possible nuclear escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over Taiwan tensions. With the post-Cold War order in free fall, all nine nuclear weapons states are escalating their arms racing, “modernizing” or expanding their nuclear arsenals. In these critical movements the messages from the Marshall Islands, Yaizu City, and nearby Shizuoka will be clear: The U.N. Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must be universally signed and ratified to make way for a nuclear weapons-free world. And here in the United States, campaigns like Back from the Brink provide paths and hope for human survival.
What must be found is the will!
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