'저는 그들의 땅을 지키기 위하여 싸웠던 인디안들의 이야기를 기억합니다. 백인들이 그들의 신성한 숲에 도로를 만들기 위하여 나무들을 잘랐습니다. 매일밤 인디안들이 나가서 백인들이 만든 그 길을 해체하면 그 다음 날 백인들이 와서 도로를 다시 짓곤 했습니다. 한동안 그 것이 반복되었습니다. 그러던 어느날, 숲에서 가장 큰 나무가 백인들이 일할 동안 그들 머리 위로 떨어져 말과 마차들을 파괴하고 그들 중 몇몇을 죽였습니다. 그러자 백인들은 떠났고 결코 다시 오지 않았습니다….' (브루스 개그논)





For any updates on the struggle against the Jeju naval base, please go to savejejunow.org and facebook no naval base on Jeju. The facebook provides latest updates.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Text Fwd: Global Strike Command Will Stress Nuclear Mission

* Image source/ description : Same as the article below
'Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, left, and Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, Air Force Chief of Staff, answer questions at an Aug. 5, 2009, Pentagon news conference on the Air Force Global Strike Command activation. The new command, with headquarters at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., stands up Aug. 7, 2009. U.S. Air Force photo by Scott M. Ash'

* StopNATO

http://www.defenselink.mil//news/newsarticle.aspx?id=55403
U.S. Department of Defense American Forces Press Service August 7, 2009 Global Strike Command Will Stress Nuclear Mission By Jim Garamone

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7, 2009 – A key step in reinvigorating the Air Force’s nuclear deterrence mission will be made today with the activation of the service’s Global Strike Command at Barksdale Air Force Base, La.

Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley said the new command will bring together the Air Force bomber force and intercontinental ballistic missiles under a single commander.

“Standing up the command is no small task, and actually we’re doing it sooner than we anticipated,” Donley said during a Pentagon news conference Aug. 5. “This command will provide the combatant commanders the forces needed to conduct strategic nuclear deterrence and global strike operations through ICBM, B-2 and B-52 operations.”

Air Force Lt. Gen. Frank G. Klotz will command the organization. The headquarters will include 900 people, and is slated to reach full operating capability by Aug. 7, 2010, Donley said. The 20th Air Force, the service’s missile organization, will come under the new command in December; and the 8th Air Force, the bomber component, will come under the command in April.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz stressed that the new command will be a major command like Air Combat Command or Air Force Special Operations Command. The role is to “organize, train and equip America’s ICBMs and nuclear-capable bombers, and prepare a cadre to do this important work with passion and professionalism,” he said during the news conference.

Ensuring professionalism and pride in the nuclear field will be vital to the command’s success, Schwartz said, noting that airmen with nuclear expertise had been leaving the service, feeling their work was not appreciated.

“The bottom line is retention has a lot to do with perceptions on how important people’s work is, and how worthy that work is,” the general said. “We’ve worked to make it clear to those who will serve in this command that the work is important to the country’s defense and it will continue to be so.”

Making the command a major command also will give airmen in the nuclear fields an advocate equal to the other commands, he said.

The creation of the command is an effort to boost security and reduce errors. In a 2007 incident, nuclear weapons were loaded aboard a B-52 bomber at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and flown to Barksdale before the mistake was discovered. In another incident, nuclear nose cones mistakenly were shipped to Taiwan. As a result, the service’s top civilian and military officials -- Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley -- resigned.

Multiple studies of the incidents and the Air Force’s atmosphere revealed that the service’s nuclear forces and the entire enterprise lacked clear lines of authority and responsibility, officials said. The Global Strike Command is one of the solutions.

Donley said moves at the Air Staff and in the field have emphasized accountability and compliance with respect to nuclear issues at all levels. The service has re-emphasized training for inspectors and added $750 million over the Future Year Defense Plan for nuclear efforts, in addition to a $4.2 billion base budget. The service also is standing up another B-52 squadron, in part to provide for longer and more focused training.

A number of entities have an interest in the nuclear arena, including the U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. These agencies will play a key role in inspections of the new command, Schwartz said.

The command will have an inspector general, and the service has made a special effort to make the inspections “more challenging and intrusive to ensure that commanders get good feedback in how healthy their commands were,” the general said.

Inspections will be demanding, he promised, and will include operations, security, maintenance and weapons.

The emphasis on the nuclear missions means that when a mission requires B-2s or B-52s to carry conventional weapons, they will be reassigned from the new command to the regional commanders for that mission. Global Strike Command will ensure that air and ground crews have expertise in conventional weaponry and raids, but the focus must remain on the nuclear capability, the chief of staff said.

Biographies:
Michael B. Donley
Air Force Gen. Norton A. Schwartz
Air Force Lt. Gen. Frank G. Klotz

Related Sites:
Air Force Global Strike Command
Air Force News Release

* Related blog

No Base Stories of Korea
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Video Fwd: Day Last Past

Text Fwd: Korea to Develop F-16 Simulators

Korea Times
08-07-2009 21:00
Korea to Develop F-16 Simulators
By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter

South Korea will develop a dozen of its own F-16/KF-16 fighter flight simulators by 2014 as part of efforts to help pilots keep up with fighter upgrades and conduct sustainable flight training amid high oil prices, according to the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) Friday.

The agency awarded Korea Aerospace Industries, the country's only aircraft maker, a 130-billion won ($106 million) contract to develop up-to-date flight simulators and unit training devices for F-16/KF-16 pilots, as well as upgrade existing simulation systems, DAPA officials said.

Previously, airmen used flight simulators developed by Raytheon.

The new systems will help pilots train skills in tactical flight, landings and take-offs, and emergency landings, the officials said.

Production will begin after the development of the new simulators is completed by November 2014, they said.

``Once entering service, the new simulators are expected to not only help resolve the shortage of flight trainings for pilots, resulting from high oil prices, but also improve pilots' aircraft operational capabilities to an extent,'' a DAPA official said.

The Air Force operates an older fleet of 34 Block 32 F-16s purchased in the 1980s and a newer fleet of 135 KF-16s manufactured locally to the Block 52 standard from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s.

Earlier this year, the Air Force unveiled plans to upgrade its KF-16 fighters. The upgrades will include arming the aircrafts with precision-guided JoJoint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and other guided weapons.

Another key upgrade will be a replacement for the fighter's radar systems.

jsungki@defensenews.com

Text Fwd: Small merchants unite against large distributors

* Image source/ description: Same as below

'Kim Kyung-bae, the chairperson of the Association of Supermarket Managers, delivers the opening speech for the founding ceremony of the National Association of Small Businesses held at the office of Korea Federation of Small and Medium Businesses located in Seoul’s Yeouido, Aug 6.'

Hankyoreh
Small merchants unite against large distributors:
The new federation of small merchant organizations organize within the retail services market while lawmakers pledge parliamentary support
Posted on : Aug.7,2009 12:28 KST

Small merchants in South Korea are uniting to fight against large distributors who are attempting to take control of local markets, including the trade that takes place on alley streets.

Small merchant organizations, including the Korea Supermarket Cooperative Association, participated in the inaugural meeting of the National Federation of Association of Small Merchant Organizations at the Hall for Small and Medium Enterprises in Yeouido, Seoul. They resolved to cooperate against big business. The new federation is comprised of 32 organizations, including the Korean Optometric Association, the Korea Bakers Association, the Korea Oil Station Association, and the Korea Federation of Bookstore Association.

The federation’s prospectus says, “5.2 million small merchants working at 2.7 million retail shops across the country play a role in grounding the national economy, but we have witnessed a succession of closures or suspensions of businesses. It also says,“A crisis in management is escalating due to inroads big business companies are making in the retail services market.”

The Federation has resolved to work together against the push into local retail markets by big business companies, and for reducing credit card fees. The Federation appointed 500 voluntary monitors to inspect the inroads large distributors have been making into local retail markets. Grand National Party Lawmaker Won Hee-Ryong and independent Lawmaker Chung Dong-Young attended the inaugural meeting and promised parliamentary support.

The number of small business that are filing business mediation requests to stop the inroads of large companies to the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Businesses is rapidly increasing. To date, the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Businesses has received 34 requests, including a request from the Korea Oil Station Association and the Association of Tool Sellers, the Korea Supermarket Cooperative Association, and the Korea Federation of Bookstore Association. the Korea Oil Station Association is asking for mediation support in order to stop large companies from entering some place of Suwon City (Gyeonggi Province) and Gunsan City (North Jeolla Province).

On August 5, the Korea Supermarket Cooperative Association in Cheongju city located in North Chungcheong Province filed a request to be informed of the fact when large companies, such as Home Plus, attempt to move into their market. This is the first request by an association of small merchants since the government created a system to inform small businesses of the actions of large companies.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

Text Fwd: Agreement was Reached at Ssangyong Motors


* Image source:
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)

Agreement was Reached at Ssangyong Motors ...

6th August, 2009
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)

Dear Colleagues,

Solidarity Greetings from KCTU!

On Thursday(August 6th), agreement was reached between Ssangyong Motors management and workers. KMWU Ssangyong Motors Branch brought a 77-day sit-in strike to an end. The main contents of the agreement are as follows.

_ Union members who are affected by the layoffs, are allowed to make a choice of unpaid leave, transfers to sales positions, transfers to spin-offs, or voluntary resignation. 48 % of restructured people are being given unpaid leave or are being transferred to sales positions, and 52 % are voluntarily resigning or shifting to spin-offs. (However, what is the '100%' out of which the ratio is applied is subject to additional negotiations for details.)

_After one year, depending on production levels, workers on unpaid leave are allowed to engage in job rotation and 2-day work shift system will be implemented. Workers who are transferred into sales positions will be provided with wages of 500,000 Won per month for one year.

__Workers who take an unpaid leave, transfer to sales positions or voluntarily retire during this restructuring period will be fairly reinstated or rehired if a demand for new workers arises in the future as a result of an improvement in the company’s financial situation.

__An additional two-month voluntary retirement allowance will be paid to workers taking unpaid leave or retiring voluntarily, while livelihood security support, such as job placement, will be provided in cooperation with central and local governments and cooperating firms.

__The management will withdraw criminal proceedings against the trade union and its members in order to encourage good willingness for the revival of Ssangyong Motors. Civil liability will be also called off when the company’s revival plan is approved.

As for the KCTU’s position on the agreement, please see the below statement. But at this moment, we would like to point out that 96 strikers have been jailed, immediately transported from the sit-in strike to the police jail. We are very concerned that arrested people will be facing serious prison sentences and the union will face massive legal fees. In this regard, we are kindly requesting you to keep your eyes on this case continuously. We will keep you informed on any development of Ssangyong workers who are taken into custody.

Finally, we would like to emphasize that international solidarity and pressure contributed enormously to bring a peaceful settlement of the dispute. We would like to extend upmost appreciation for your great support and solidarity for the Ssangyong Motors Workers.

In Solidarity,

Korean Confederation of Trade Unions(KCTU)

[Attached]

KCTU Statement on Agreement
between Ssangyong Motors Management and Workers



The Struggle against Layoffs will Continue!

The management and trade union of Ssangyong Motors held their final round of talks today (6th August) and came to an agreement. The KCTU respects the decisions of KMWU Ssangyong Motors Branch, of coming to an agreement through dialogue to prevent further catastrophe. We firmly reaffirm that the inhumane and potentially deadly actions taken by police and management during the course of the strike are acts that cannot be condoned. Innocent workers are still being made to bear the brunt of this economic crisis and the poorly-conceived sell-off of companies to foreign capital. If these circumstances persist, the KCTU warns that the struggle against unjust dismissals can re-spark anytime, anywhere.

The struggle of KMWU Ssangyong Motors Branch is the result of bad contradictory economic policies. The management and government initially caused and then precipitated the crisis. They had continuously looked for ways to bash the union. Workers were forced through mass dismissals to pay for bad management practices. The government had pushed ahead with the sell-off of Ssangyong Motors to Shanghai Motors, which then withdrew after profiteering, driving Ssangyong to bankruptcy. Furthermore, we witnessed the worst forms of human rights violations such as cutting off the electricity, water and medicine, and the clashes in front of the plant was also very serious. Thus, the lesson to be learnt from this crisis is that the government must revise its substandard economic and labour policies while the management must do away with its union-bashing attitude and practices such as refusing to recognize the trade union as a dialogue partner.

The agreement between Ssangyong Motor labour and management will not automatically lead to normalization of production. The forthcoming revival process of Ssangyong Motors may entail more confrontation. Both government and management must realize that if they maintain their present mindset, the tragedy can be repeated. The management must acknowledge the errors that it had made, and accordingly sincerely reflect upon their conduct as well as show their will for improvement. The government should turn away from their attitude of instigating destructive government-labour and management-labour relations, including its excessive criminal punishment for legitimate union activities. Furthermore, the government should come up with responsible measures such as injecting needed government aid into the ailing company. Both the government and management must not forget that the reason Ssangyong Motors struggle went beyond a ‘managerial’ to become a ‘political’ issue, blocking amicable settlement, was precisely because of their negative approach.

The KCTU will not stop its struggles against anti-labour policies of the Lee Myung Bak government, and will not stand by complacently should Ssangyong Motors continue its union-bashing practices as shown during the recent crisis. We express sincere gratitude to our members and all citizens who had exerted tremendous effort into settling the crisis, and resolve to strive more strongly to attain labour rights of 15 million workers of South Korea.

Finally, the KCTU hopes that the souls of Ssangyong Motors workers and family members who had lost their very lives in the course of these mass redundancy dismissals may rest in peace and conveys deep condolences to the bereaved.

6th August, 2009

Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)

* Related articles

Hankyoreh
Ssangyong Motors, union members come to an agreement
As autoworkers secure a lower ratio of non-fired workers and call off strike, police start making arrests
Posted on : Aug.7,2009 12:24 KST

Yonhap News
(LEAD) Creditors of Ssangyong Motor to withdraw liquidation petition
2009/08/07 14:48 KST


* Related blog

No Base Stories of Korea
Text Fwd: Ssangyong's fired workers end plant occupation
Thursday, August 6, 2009


Text Fwd: We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima

* Text informed by Frank Cordaro on August 7, 2009

The Catholic Worker, September 1945, page 1
We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima
By Dorothy Day

Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange
name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and
true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He
was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese,
jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which
was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great
news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed
318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page
one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for,
not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers
--
scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven
seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them
in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the
hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have
created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto.
Nature had nothing to do with it.

Created to Destroy

"A cavern below Columbia was the bomb's cradle," born not that men
might live, but that men might be killed. Brought into being in a
cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the midst of tempest and
lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve of the Feast of the
Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a far off island in the
eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this "new weapon which
conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps the planet itself."

"Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent to a severe
earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. A scientific brain
trust has solved the problem of how to confine and release almost
unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to measure its effects."

"We have spent two billion on the greatest scientific gamble in
history and won," said President Truman jubilantly.

The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with
perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding authority "who earlier had
developed a powerful electrical bombardment machine called the
cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner of the
University of California. In the heat of the race to unlock the atom,
he built the world's most powerful atom smashing gun, a machine whose
electrical projectiles carried charges equivalent to 25,000,000 volts.
But such machines were found in the end to be unnecessary. The atom of
Uranium-235 was smashed with surprising ease. Science discovered
that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps from slow traveling
neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were all that wereneeded
to disintegrate the Uranium-235 atom."

(Remember the tales we used to hear, that one note of a violin, if
that note could be discovered, could collapse the Empire State
Building. Remember too, that God's voice was heard not in the great
and strong wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but "in the
whistling of a gentle air.")

Scientists, army officers, great universities (Notre Dame included),
and captains of industry -- all are given credit lines in the press
for their work of preparing the bomb -- and other bombs, the President
assures us, are in production now.

Great Britain controls the supply of uranium ore, in Canada and
Rhodesia. We are making the bombs. This new great force will be used
for good, the scientists assured us. And then they wiped out a city of
318,000. This was good. The President was jubilant.

Today's paper with its columns of description of the new era, the
atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered
in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new
discovery. Pictures of the towns and the industrial plants where the
parts are made are spread across the pages. In the forefront of the
town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a chapel, a large comfortable-looking
chapel benignly settled beside the plant. And the scientists making
the first tests in the desert prayed, one newspaper account said.

God, Our Creator

Yes, God is still in the picture. God is not mocked. Today, the day of
this so great news, God made a madman dance and talk, who had not
spoken for twenty years. God sent a typhoon to damage the carrier
Hornet. God permitted a fog to obscure vision and a bomber crashed
into the Empire State Building. God permits these things. We have to
remember it. We are held in God's hands, all of us, and President
Truman too, and these scientists who have created death, but will use
it for good. He, God, holds our life and our happiness, our sanity and
our health; our lives are in His hands. He is our Creator. Creator.

And as I write, Pigsie, who works in Secaucus, New Jersey, feeding
hogs, and cleaning out the excrement of the hogs, who comes in once a
month to find beauty and surcease and glamour and glory in the drink
of the Bowery, trying to drive the hell and the smell out of his
nostrils and his life, sleeps on our doorstep, in this best and most
advanced and progressive of all possible worlds. And as I write, our
cat, Rainbow, slinks by with a shrill rat in her jaws, out of the
kitchen closet here at Mott Street. Here in this greatest of cities
which covered the cavern where this stupendous discovery was made,
which institutes an era of unbelievable richness and power and glory
for man ?

Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?" How everyone
turns to the Vatican for judgement, even though they do not seem to
listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself has already pronounced
judgment on the atomic bomb. When James and John (John the beloved)
wished to call down fire from heaven on their enemies, Jesus said:

"You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to
destroy souls but to save." He said also, "What you do unto the least
of these my brethren, you do unto me."


* * *
This text is not copyrighted. However, if you use or cite this text
please indicate the original publication source and this website
(Dorothy Day Library on the Web at
http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/).
Thank you.
* * *

Text Fwd: Fr Carl Kabat disarms yet another nuclear missile in Co enacting the "Nuclear Weapon Here Pruning Hooks" Plowshares Witness


* Informed by Frank Cordaro(with the information of the image above ) and Bill Sulzman on August 7, 2009

* For more on the protest photos/ videos against the N-8, Weld County , see here

[ Reply to Cordaro] Fr Carl Kabat disarms yet another nuclear missile in Co enacting the "Nuclear Weapon Here Pruning Hooks" Plowshares Witness

'Carl entered the site at about 8:00 a.m. By 8:34 a.m. he had hung banners and had begun to symbolically disarm the missile. As of 8:57 a.m. the security forces were beginning to move in.'

Fr Carl's statement to press

We are Fools and Clowns For The Holy One And Humanity's Sake

I Father Carl Kabat O.M.I. come to this evil place today as a Roman
Catholic priest, of fifty years, to show what insanity is in the
ground here and other silos in our beautiful country.

President Barack Obama has stated, "As the only nuclear power to have
used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to
act...So today I state clearly and with conviction America's
commitment and desire to seek the peace and serenity of a world
without nuclear weapons."

The Roman Catholic Church, of which I am a priest, at the close of its Vatican Council II in 1965 condemned nuclear bombs as a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY and are to be condemned unreservedly.

The World Council of Churches has proclaimed that "the manufacture, deployment or use of nuclear bombs is a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY"

I support President Barack Obama's desire and have attempted to do my
little bit in his effort.

The nuclear bomb that is in the ground here is more than 20 times more powerful that the atomic bombs we dropped on the Japanese. Each of
those bombs killed more than 100,000 people. At lest twenty times
that number totals more than 2 million people.

The Bible says in the words of Isaiah "They shall beat their spears
into pruning hooks and their swords into plowshares".

May the Holy One have mercy on us for not doing so.

Fr Carl Kabat O.M.I. the man who was arrested this morning at a Weld County Missile Silo.


------------------------------

Aug 6, 2009 Greeley CO Tribune Priest arrested for breaching missile silo


http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20090806/NEWS/908069993/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001

A Roman Catholic priest was arrested this morning after cutting a hole
in a fence in a Weld County missile silo and entering the facility.

Weld Sheriff deputies responded to a missile silo between Weld County
Roads 86 and 88 along Weld County Road 113 at 8:50 this morning on
report of a man trespassing.

There, they found a 75-year-old man inside the perimeter of the fence,
and was arrested without incident.

The silo is one of 150 missile silos patrolled by security teams from
Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne. All silos have sensors, which alert
the base to someone's presence.

Warren authorities expected the breach after an article that ran in
the Monday edition of the St. Louis Dispatch, stating Carl Kabat, a
Roman Catholic priest, was planning the breach to cap off 25 years of
nuclear protests.

* Related article
Denver Post , 08/07/2009 ( Informed by Frank Cordaro on Aug. 8, 2009)
Johnson: The priest, the clown and the life of protest
By Bill Johnson, Denver Post Columnist

* Related News

[ Reply to Cordaro Hiroshima/Nagasaki - Aug. 9 observance in Wichita KS

Text informed by by Frank Cordaro on Aug. 9, 2009

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mary McDonough-Harren
Date: Thu, Aug 6, 2009

Frank - this is the announcement of our Hiroshima event - we consider
the fire bombing of Tokyo, the saturation bombings of Dresden,
Cologne, Hamburg, Nuremberg, etc - to be as important to remember as
H/N - and of course, the German Airforce bombing of hapless, tiny
Guernica, Spain in April 1937 to be the real commencement of WWII.

Mary McDonough-Harren
________________________________

Another Hiroshima/Nagasaki Event ~

Sun. Aug. 9th - 7:00 P.M.
Solar Calendar* - North Central Riverside Park

This event carries on the longest held tradition of the peace
community in Wichita - the commemorating of the nuclear bombings of
Hiroshima / Nagasaki.

Gather at 7 P.M.
Selected readings from Thomas Merton's epic poem "The Original Child Bomb"
~
Dr. Dotty Billings, WSU anthropology professor will have just returned from China; she has agreed to share her peace journey with us.
*somestimes referred to as Wichita's Stonehenge

More memories: the saturation bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne,
London, etc. (the good war - Christian nations pitted Christian
nations) - the oft-overlooked fire-bombing of Tokyo. All of this was
proceeded by hapless little Guernica, Spain

Please call 942-6630 for directions, if needed.

Text Fwd: Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years

* Image source/ description: same as the article below
'U.S. Army Signal Corps
B-24 Liberators under construction at the Willow Run factory during World War II.'

* Text informed by Frank Cordaro

Truthdig
By Daniel Ellsberg
Aug. 5, 2009

It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about, the previous fall.

I thought: “We got it first. And we used it. On a city.”

I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong.

Unlike nearly everyone else outside the Manhattan Project, my first awareness of the challenges of the nuclear era had occurred—and my attitudes toward the advent of nuclear weaponry had formed—some nine months earlier than those headlines, and in a crucially different context.

It was in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I was 13, a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a private school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Our teacher, Bradley Patterson, was discussing a concept that was familiar then in sociology, William F. Ogburn’s notion of “cultural lag.”

After Labor Day, Daniel Ellsberg’s Web site, http://www.ellsberg.net, and some other sites including Truthdig, will start regular installments of his insider’s memoir of the nuclear era—“The American Doomsday Machine”—an Internet book reflecting his earlier classified work and 40 years of research. In the article here, Ellsberg says: “To understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world toward abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age. ... I plan over the next year, before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part in unveiling this hidden history.”

The idea was that the development of technology regularly moved much further and faster in human social-historical evolution than other aspects of culture: our institutions of government, our values, habits, our understanding of society and ourselves. Indeed, the very notion of “progress” referred mainly to technology. What “lagged” behind, what developed more slowly or not at all in social adaptation to new technology was everything that bore on our ability to control and direct technology and the use of technology to dominate other humans.

To illustrate this, Mr. Patterson posed a potential advance in technology that might be realized soon. It was possible now, he told us, to conceive of a bomb made of U-235, an isotope of uranium, which would have an explosive power 1,000 times greater than the largest bombs being used in the war that was then going on. German scientists in late 1938 had discovered that uranium could be split by nuclear fission, in a way that would release immense amounts of energy.

Several popular articles about the possibility of atomic bombs and specifically U-235 bombs appeared during the war in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. None of these represented leaks from the Manhattan Project, whose very existence was top-secret. In every case they had been inspired by earlier articles on the subject that had been published freely in 1939 and 1940, before scientific self-censorship and then formal classification had set in. Patterson had come across one of these wartime articles. He brought the potential development to us as an example of one more possible leap by science and technology ahead of our social institutions.

Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the possibility of making this into a bomb, and succeeded. What would be the probable implications of this for humanity? How would it be used, by humans and states as they were today? Would it be, on balance, bad or good for the world? Would it be a force for peace, for example, or for destruction? We were to write a short essay on this, within a week.

I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about it for a few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived at much the same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious.

The existence of such a bomb—we each concluded—would be bad news for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not control it, safely, appropriately. The power would be “abused”: used dangerously and destructively, with terrible consequences. Many cities would be destroyed entirely, just as the Allies were doing their best to destroy German cities without atomic bombs at that very time, just as the Germans earlier had attempted to do to Rotterdam and London. Civilization, perhaps our species, would be in danger of destruction.

It was just too powerful. Bad enough that bombs already existed that could destroy a whole city block. They were called “block-busters”: 10 tons of high explosive. Humanity didn’t need the prospect of bombs a thousand times more powerful, bombs that could destroy whole cities.

As I recall, this conclusion didn’t depend mainly on who had the Bomb, or how many had it, or who got it first. And to the best of my memory, we in the class weren’t addressing it as something that might come so soon as to bear on the outcome of the ongoing war. It seemed likely, the way the case was presented to us, that the Germans would get it first, since they had done the original science. But we didn’t base our negative assessment on the idea that this would necessarily be a Nazi or German bomb. It would be a bad development, on balance, even if democratic countries got it first.

After we turned in our papers and discussed them in class, it was months before I thought of the issues again. I remember the moment when I did, on a street corner in Detroit. I can still see and feel the scene and recall my thoughts, described above, as I read the headline on Aug. 6.

I remember that I was uneasy, on that first day and in the days ahead, about the tone in President Harry Truman’s voice on the radio as he exulted over our success in the race for the Bomb and its effectiveness against Japan. I generally admired Truman, then and later, but in hearing his announcements I was put off by the lack of concern in his voice, the absence of a sense of tragedy, of desperation or fear for the future. It seemed to me that this was a decision best made in anguish; and both Truman’s manner and the tone of the official communiqués made unmistakably clear that this hadn’t been the case.

Which meant for me that our leaders didn’t have the picture, didn’t grasp the significance of the precedent they had set and the sinister implications for the future. And that evident unawareness was itself scary. I believed that something ominous had happened; that it was bad for humanity that the Bomb was feasible, and that its use would have bad long-term consequences, whether or not those negatives were balanced or even outweighed by short-run benefits.

Looking back, it seems clear to me my reactions then were right.

Moreover, reflecting on two related themes that have run through my life since then—intense abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and more generally of killing women and children—I’ve come to suspect that I’ve conflated in my emotional memory two events less than a year apart: Hiroshima and a catastrophe that visited my own family 11 months later.

On the Fourth of July, 1946, driving on a hot afternoon on a flat, straight road through the cornfields of Iowa—on the way from Detroit to visit our relatives in Denver—my father fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road long enough to hit a sidewall over a culvert that sheared off the right side of the car, killing my mother and sister.

My father’s nose was broken and his forehead was cut. When a highway patrol car came by, he was wandering by the wreckage, bleeding and dazed. I was inside, in a coma from a concussion, with a large gash on the left side of my forehead. I had been sitting on the floor next to the back seat, on a suitcase covered with a blanket, with my head just behind the driver’s seat. When the car hit the wall, my head was thrown against a metal fixture on the back of the driver’s seat, knocking me out and opening up a large triangular flap of flesh on my forehead. I was in coma for 36 hours. My legs had been stretched out in front of me across the car and my right leg was broken just above the knee.

My father had been a highway engineer in Nebraska. He said that highway walls should never have been flush with the road like that, and later laws tended to ban that placement. This one took off the side of the car where my mother and sister were sitting, my sister looking forward and my mother facing left with her back to the side of the car. My brother, who came to the scene from Detroit, said later that when he saw what was left of the car in a junkyard, the right side looked like steel wool. It was amazing that anyone had survived.

My understanding of how that event came about—it wasn’t entirely an accident, as I heard from my father, that he had kept driving when he was exhausted—and how it affected my life is a story for another time. But looking back now, at what I drew from reading the Pentagon Papers later and on my citizen’s activism since then, I think I saw in the events of August 1945 and July 1946, unconsciously, a common message. I loved my father, and I respected Truman. But you couldn’t rely entirely on a trusted authority—no matter how well-intentioned he was, however much you admired him—to protect you, and your family, from disaster. You couldn’t safely leave events entirely to the care of authorities. Some vigilance was called for, to awaken them if need be or warn others. They could be asleep at the wheel, heading for a wall or a cliff. I saw that later in Lyndon Johnson and in his successor, and I’ve seen it since.

But I sensed almost right away, in August 1945 as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated, that such feelings—about our president, and our Bomb—separated me from nearly everyone around me, from my parents and friends and from most other Americans. They were not to be mentioned. They could only sound unpatriotic. And in World War II, that was about the last way one wanted to sound. These were thoughts to be kept to myself.

Unlikely thoughts for a 14-year-old American boy to have had the week the war ended? Yes, if he hadn’t been in Mr. Patterson’s social studies class the previous fall. Every member of that class must have had the same flash of recognition of the Bomb, as they read the August headlines during our summer vacation. Beyond that, I don’t know whether they responded as I did, in the terms of our earlier discussion.

But neither our conclusions then or reactions like mine on Aug. 6 stamped us as gifted prophets. Before that day perhaps no one in the public outside our class—no one else outside the Manhattan Project (and very few inside it)—had spent a week, as we had, or even a day thinking about the impact of such a weapon on the long-run prospects for humanity.

And we were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important way. Perhaps no others outside the project or our class ever had occasion to think about the Bomb without the strongly biasing positive associations that accompanied their first awareness in August 1945 of its very possibility: that it was “our” weapon, an instrument of American democracy developed to deter a Nazi Bomb, pursued by two presidents, a war-winning weapon and a necessary one—so it was claimed and almost universally believed—to end the war without a costly invasion of Japan.

Unlike nearly all the others who started thinking about the new nuclear era after Aug. 6, our attitudes of the previous fall had not been shaped, or warped, by the claim and appearance that such a weapon had just won a war for the forces of justice, a feat that supposedly would otherwise have cost a million American lives (and as many or more Japanese).

For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt about the long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression of this in elite media than most people remembered later) was offset at the time and ever afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy, and its almost miraculous potential for good which had already been realized. For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I’m convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I’m not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public’s ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.

By contrast, given a few days’ reflection in the summer of 1945 before a presidential fait accompli was framed in that fashion, you didn’t have to be a moral prodigy to arrive at the sense of foreboding we all had in Mr. Patterson’s class. It was as easily available to 13-year-old ninth-graders as it was to many Manhattan Project scientists, who also had the opportunity to form their judgments before the Bomb was used.

But the scientists knew something else that was unknown to the public and even to most high-level decision-makers. They knew that the atomic bombs, the uranium and plutonium fission bombs they were preparing, were only the precursors to far more powerful explosives, almost surely including a thermonuclear fusion bomb, later called the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. That weapon—of which we eventually came to have tens of thousands—could have an explosive yield much greater than the fission bombs needed to trigger it. A thousand times greater.

Moreover, most of the scientists who focused on the long-run implications of nuclear weapons, belatedly, after the surrender of Germany in May 1945 believed that using the Bomb against Japan would make international control of the weapon very unlikely. In turn that would make inevitable a desperate arms race, which would soon expose the United States to adversaries’ uncontrolled possession of thermonuclear weapons, so that, as the scientists said in a pre-attack petition to the president, “the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation.” (In this they were proved correct.) They cautioned the president—on both moral grounds and considerations of long-run survival of civilization—against beginning this process by using the Bomb against Japan even if its use might shorten the war.

But their petition was sent “through channels” and was deliberately held back by Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. It never got to the president, or even to Secretary of War Henry Stimson until after the Bomb had been dropped. There is no record that the scientists’ concerns about the future and their judgment of a nuclear attack’s impact on it were ever made known to President Truman before or after his decisions. Still less, made known to the American public.

At the end of the war the scientists’ petition and their reasoning were reclassified secret to keep it from public knowledge, and its existence was unknown for more than a decade. Several Manhattan Project scientists later expressed regret that they had earlier deferred to the demands of the secrecy managers—for fear of losing their clearances and positions, and perhaps facing prosecution—and had collaborated in maintaining public ignorance on this most vital of issues.

One of them—Eugene Rabinowitch, who after the war founded and edited the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (with its Doomsday Clock)—had in fact, after the German surrender in May, actively considered breaking ranks and alerting the American public to the existence of the Bomb, the plans for using it against Japan, and the scientists’ views both of the moral issues and the long-term dangers of doing so.

He first reported this in a letter to The New York Times published on June 28, 1971. It was the day I submitted to arrest at the federal courthouse in Boston; for 13 days previous, my wife and I had been underground, eluding the FBI while distributing the Pentagon Papers to 17 newspapers after injunctions had halted publication in the Times and The Washington Post. The Rabinowitch letter began by saying it was “the revelation by The Times of the Pentagon history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, despite its classification as ‘secret’ ” that led him now to reveal:

“Before the atom bomb-drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had spent sleepless nights thinking that I should reveal to the American people, perhaps through a reputable news organ, the fateful act—the first introduction of atomic weapons—which the U.S. Government planned to carry out without consultation with its people. Twenty-five years later, I feel I would have been right if I had done so.”

I didn’t see this the morning it was published, because I was getting myself arrested and arraigned, for doing what Rabinowitch wishes he had done in 1945, and I wish I had done in 1964. I first came across this extraordinary confession by a would-be whistle-blower (I don’t know another like it) in “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial” by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (New York, 1995, p. 249).

Rereading Rabinowitch’s statement, still with some astonishment, I agree with him. He was right to consider it, and he would have been right if he had done it. He would have faced prosecution and prison then (as I did at the time his letter was published), but he would have been more than justified, as a citizen and as a human being, in informing the American public and burdening them with shared responsibility for the fateful decision.

Some of the same scientists faced a comparable challenge four years after Hiroshima, addressing the possible development of an even more terrible weapon, more fraught with possible danger to human survival: the hydrogen bomb. This time some who had urged use of the atom bomb against Japan (dissenting from the petitioners above) recommended against even development and testing of the new proposal, in view of its “extreme dangers to mankind.” “Let it be clearly realized,” they said, “that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb” (Herbert York, “The Advisors” [California, 1976], p. 156).

Once more, as I learned much later, knowledge of the secret possibility was not completely limited to government scientists. A few others—my father, it turns out, was one—knew of this prospect before it had received the stamp of presidential approval and had become an American government project. And once again, under those conditions of prior knowledge (denied as before to the public), to grasp the moral and long-run dangers you didn’t have to be a nuclear physicist. My father was not.

Further reading

* Another cover-up of Hiroshima
The Huffington Post
For 64th Anniversary:
The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up -- And the Nuclear Fallout for All of Us Today

Friday, August 7, 2009

Video Fwd: Day Last Past

* video link





* Related blog
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2009/08/recipe-for-disaster.html
Friday, August 07, 2009
A RECIPE FOR DISASTER

* Other Reference website
Nebraskans for Peace

Text Fwd: A Peace Message from Korea


* Image source/ description: Peace Network

' May He Rest in Peace
The Suffering Second Generation of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victim, Kim Hyeongyul(34), passed away in the morning, 29th of May in 2005. He is the first man who had revealed himself a second generation of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victim in 2002 and has been acting hard to protect the human rights of the second generation. He has been suffered from a relapsing pneumonia in his lifetime. We pray for the souls of the departed.'

A peace message from Korea May 23, 2009
Kang Je-suk
(Co-representative of the Committee for Resolving the Problem of the Korean Atomic victims and their second generation)


Dear the attendants of the Australia-Japan Peace Forum in Melbourne.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to send congratulations on the opening of the Australia-Japan Peace Forum. And I would like to send the message of peace to all the people of this Peace Forum, who love peace.

In the middle of the 1990s, I started to work as a supporter for the victims of the Japanese Imperial Army, who have been called ‘comfort women’ and took the action to solve the problems of the forced laborers of the Japanese Imperial Army, specially the problems of the atomic bomb victims. I’ve been working to solve these problems to achieve world peace. In these years, recognition of the problem of the Japanese Army’s ‘comfort women’ has become a world-wide issue, as the result of efforts by many people. However, the problem of the atomic bomb victims, even in Korea, has been a relatively neglected one. In addition, the problem of the second-generation of the atomic bomb victims is also a minority issue.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, a large number of people and nature itself were damaged and devastated by the atomic bombs dropped by America. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki at that time, there were many Korean people. They were called Japanese then, but many had been forced to leave their homeland as forced laborers, while others had come to seek ways to make their living because of the Japanese colonial policy in Korea. Besides these Koreans, there also were many Asian peoples. They were all victimized by the atomic bombs. But the Japanese government has taken a discriminatory attitude toward these peoples and has evaded war responsibility by only saying that victims were solely Japanese people and it is they who want peace. When the atomic bombs were dropped, in Hiroshima there were 50,000 Korean people who were victimized, and in Nagasaki 20,000 Korean people were victimized. The number of Koreans killed in both cities was 10% of the all the victims of the atomic bomb atrocity, which is a little known fact in Korea, and in Japan too.

Today, May 23, when your Peace forum is held, I will be conducting the fourth memorial service for Kim Hyeong Yul, the first chairman of the Kanyukai, the Association of Korean Atomic Bomb Victims’ Second Generation. He was the first person to disclose his being in the second-generation of an atomic bomb victim family in Korea, and he was the first to raise the issue publicly and to work to see the problem of the second generation of the atomic bomb victims addressed. The late Kim Hyeong Yul ‘s mother was born in Hiroshima in 1940, and was atom-bombed at the age of 6. As a consequence, Kim Hyeong Yul inherited from his mother congenital immune globulin deficiency, which he suffered as an after effect of the atomic bomb. He passed away at the young age of 35 years on May 25, in 2005, 60 years after the atomic bombing.

While those war victims who have inherited such effects are alive, we can’t say that the war has ended for them. Today, May 23, in Australia you are holding the Australia –Japan Peace Forum and in Korea we are attending the 4th memorial service of Kim Hyeong Yul, which will remind us of the pain and grief of those people and give us hope and solidarity for peace. To grow and realize world peace, we have to learn the history of the past and make it a lesson not to repeat this mistake. If there is some guilt, we should admit this guilt and then we’ll become reconciled and friends. If we become friends, we won’t be able to make war against each other. Therefore I would like to send my deep gratitude and a big applause to Mr. David Palmer and other attendants of this Peace Forum.

The place called ‘Hapcheon’ is the county where the largest number of atomic victims in Korea live. Before long we hope to make a World Peace Park in Hapcheon. I hope the attendants of this Peace Forum will remember not only Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also Hapcheon in Korea and hope all of you will one day make a peace pilgrimage to Hapcheon.

What is more, I hope this Australia-Japan Peace Forum will develop into the Australia-Korea- Japan Peace Forum. Thank you very much.

(Translation from Korean by Kimura Hideto, Nagasaki)


* Related websites

Peace Network (English site, A Korean Organization)
: On Korean Atomic Bombing Victims' Struggle

Voice of America
Korean Victims Mark Atomic Bomb Anniversary
By Jason Strother
Seoul
06 August 2009

Nuclear Files.org: A Project of the Nuclear Age peace Foundation
Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors
Photographs and story by
Sinartus Sosrodjojo / Zuma Press

Korea Report
March 11, 2009
"Atomic bomb survivors in South Korea still feel the wounds"

Korea is ONE
Support Scarce for N Korean Hibakusha
Activists Hampered by Security Tension, Lack of Diplomatic Relations
By Miya Tanaka
The Japan Times, August 03, 2006

Gwangju Council of Citizen’s Movement
당신에게는 어떤 60주년 입니까?
2005-10-31

Chosun Ilbo(The most conservative right wing Newspaper)
Japan Marks Atomic Bombing Anniversary
VOA News / Aug. 07, 2009 09:26 KST

Thursday, August 6, 2009

[국문 번역]Text Fwd: WORDS FROM HIROSHIMA


Bruce Gagnon blog
Thursday, August 06, 2009
WORDS FROM HIROSHIMA

Yesterday I scurried from one event to another in Hiroshima. I first attended another international conference, this one put on by the Social Democrats. There I was given ten minutes to make a presentation to 75 people on the issues of concern to the Global Network. While there I listened to the voices of activists from Japan, South Korea, China, and the US.

Following that four-hour event I made my way across town to a larger event of about 250 people who were from all over Japan. They seemed to be from many different local peace groups in the country, each giving their local reports on their work. After they were finished I heard an impressive presentation on the US history of using, and threatening to use, nuclear weapons from 1945 to the present by Professor Peter Kaznic from American University in Washington DC. He has brought a group of his students to Japan for these days of remembrance. Following his talk I was introduced and asked to say a few words about the Global Network.

Today I gave a five-minute speech at a large rally of about 3,000 during the middle of the day and then in the evening I did a full speech before a about 80 people at the meeting of the Hiroshima Alliance for Nuclear Weapons Abolition (HANWA).

I got to spend a few minutes attending the lantern ceremony in Hiroshima this evening. They say the lanterns are to ease the spirits of those who jumped into the river after the US bombing in order to relieve their burning bodies. It occurred to me that the beautiful ceremony also soothes the souls of us living today in the midst of the nuclear arms race and endless wars.

Eearly in the morning I take the train for Nagasaki where I will be speaking at the Mayors for Peace Convention.

While I was at the meeting last night a man handed me a leaflet he had written headlined "The 2009 Citizens Peace Declaration." Come to find out he is the same man that translated my talk this evening at the HANWA event. I was so impressed with it that I want to share just a couple of paragraphs from it with you.


By Yuki Tanaka, PhD
Hiroshima City University

Early this year, when President Obama was inaugurated into the White House, there was great anticipation among the American people that positive change may finally be possible. On April 5, in his speech in Prague [Czech Republic], Obama said: "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the US has a moral responsibility to act." Many people in the world, in particular in Hiroshima, felt these words gave reason to hope for the abolition of nuclear weapons. We must remember however, that in the same speech Obama also said, "As long as these weapons exist, the US will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary." In other words, he intends to reduce the number of nuclear weapons worldwide in order to prevent terrorists from obtaining them, but also wishes to maintain the US's nuclear deterrent against Russia and China.

Regrettably, the Japanese government clearly exposes its self-contradiction on nuclear issues. While it claims that as the only nation that has experienced nuclear attacks, it supports the idea of the "ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons," it contradictorily justifies and supports the US's "expanded deterrence," but strongly condemns China's nuclear policy at the same time. Recently, it was revealed that the Japanese government violated its own Three Non-nuclear Principles by secretly agreeing to allow the US government to bring nuclear weapons into Japanese territory. Yet unashamedly, the Japanese cabinet members as well as high-officials are still denying the existence of such an agreement, despite ample evidence to the contrary.


히로시마로부터의 전언

2009년 8월 6일, 브루스 개그논 씀

어제 저는 히로시마에서 한 행사에서 다른 행사로 급하게 움직여야 했읍니다. 저는 처음에 다른 국제 회담에 참가했는데 그 것은 사회 민주당원들에 의해 주최된 것이었읍니다. 그 곳에서 저는 75명 앞에서 글로벌 넷워크의 관심에 관한 이슈들에 대해 프리젠테이션 하도록 10분을 할애받았읍니다. 그 곳에서 저는 일본, 대한 민국, 중국, 그리고 미국의 활동가들의 목소리를 들었읍니다.

네 시간여의 행사 이 후 저는 일본 전역에서 250여명이 모인 좀 더 큰 행사를 가기 위해 마을을 가로질렀읍니다. 그들은 각각 그들의 작업에 대해 지역 보고를 했는데 그 나라의 많은 다른 지방 평화 단체들로부터 온 것 같았읍니다. 그들이 끝낸 후 저는 수도 워싱턴 아메리카 대학의 교수 피터 카즈닉의 인상적인 프리젠테이션을 들었는데 그것은 1945년부터 현재까지 핵무기를 사용하고 사용하겠다 위협한 미국의 역사에 관한 것이었읍니다. 그는 기념을 위한 이 날들을 기해서 그의 학생들을 그룹으로 일본으로 데리고 왔읍니다. 그의 말이 끝난 후 저는 [청중들에게] 소개되었고 글로벌 넷워크에 관해 말하도록 요청받았읍니다.

오늘 저는 한 낮에 약 3,000 여명이 모인 커다란 실내에서 5분 연설을 했고 핵무기 폐지 연대 Hiroshima Alliance for Nuclear Weapons Abolition (HANWA) 의 모임에서 80여명 앞에서
전문 연설을 했읍니다.

저는 오늘 저녁 히로시마의 등잔 의식에 수 분간 참석해야 합니다. 그들은 등잔은 미국의 폭탄 투하 뒤 불타는 몸을 경감하기 위해 강으로 뛰어든 영혼들을 평안하게 하기 위한 것이라 합니다. 그 아름다운 의식은 오늘날 핵 무기 경쟁과 끝없는 전쟁의 한 가운데 사는 우리의 영혼들을 또한 위안한다는 생각을 떠올렸읍니다.

저는 이른 아침, 나가사키로 가는 기차를 타는데 그 곳에서 평화를 위한 시장들의 모임에 참석하여 연설할 것입니다.

지난 밤 모임에 있었을 때 한 남자가 저에게 그가 쓴 리플릿을 건네 주었는데 “2009년 시민 평화 선언 The 2009 Citizens Peace Declaration” 이란 문두가 있었읍니다. 그가 오늘 저녁 HANWA 행사에서 제 연설을 번역한 같은 사람이란 것을 알게 되었읍니다. 저는 그 리플릿이 매우 인상적이었기에 그 두 단락을 여러분과 같이 공유하고 싶습니다.


유키 타나카 박사
히로시마 대학

금년 초, 오바마 대통령이 백악관에 취임했을 때, 미국인들 사이에서 긍적적인 변화가 마침내 올 지모른다는 커다란 기대가 있었읍니다. 4월 5일, [체코 공화국의] 프라하 연설에서 오바마는 말했읍니다. “핵무기를 사용한 유일한 핵보유국으로서, 미국은 행동할 도덕적 책임이 있읍니다. 세계의 많은 사람들, 특별히 히로시마의 사람들은 그 말들이 핵무기 폐지라는 희망에 근거를 준 것으로 느꼈읍니다. 그러나 우리는 오바마가 같은 연설에서 또한 다음과 같이 말했음을 기억해야 합니다. “이 무기들이 존재하는 한, 미국은 어떠한 적들도 제지하기 위한 안정되고, 확실하고 효과적인 무기들을 유지할 것입니다.” 바꾸어 말하면, 그는 테러리스트들이 그 것들을 획득하는 것을 막기 위해 전 세계의 핵무기 숫자들을 줄이려 하나 또한 러시아와 중국에 대항하여 미국의 핵 억제를 유지하길 원합니다.

유감스럽게도, 일본 정부는 핵 이슈에 관해 자기 모순을 명확히 드러냅니다. 핵공격을 받은 유일한 국가로서 “핵무기의 궁극적 폐지” 구상을 지지한다고 주장하는 반면에 모순적으로 미국의 “확장 억제”를 정당화하고 지지합니다. 그러나 동시에 중국의 핵 정책을 강하게 비난합니다. 최근 일본 정부가 미국 정부로 하여금 일본 영토에 핵무기들을 들여오는 것을 허락하는 것을 비밀리에 동의함으로서 자신의 3대 비핵 원칙을 위반했다는 사실이 드러났읍니다. 그럼에도 후안무치하게도 일본 내각은 고위 관리들과 마찬가지로 충분한 증거들이 반대로 있음에도 불구, 아직도 그러한 동의의 존재를 부인하고 있읍니다.