Yokota is a UCLA alumnus.
By Ryan Yokota
The recent leak of the secret document titled the “Nuclear
Posture Review” not only details the Bush
Administration’s development of nuclear contingency plans
against seven countries (Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea,
Libya, and Syria), but also shows that the administration lacks a
concrete understanding of the realities of nuclear weapons use.
I come from a family that directly survived the horrors of the
Hiroshima bombing, and I can unequivocally say that we must never
be allowed to use nuclear weapons again.
My grandmother was in a storage house when the blast first hit
her house, pushing her from one side of the room to the other,
shattering the window and sending glass shards into her body.
My grandfather was working in the city education department, and
when the blast hit, the roof of the building he was in collapsed,
though luckily he was able to get under his desk to escape being
crushed.
“So we were among the lucky ones,” he said.
“But after the bomb you’d go to school and there were a
lot of burned people and their skin was peeled off like new
potatoes. Their skin would just peel off … a lot of people needed
help but there weren’t that many people to help them … they
had to burn the dead people, so they made a hole and they just put
the bodies in there and you could smell this smell of dead meat, a
dead bodies smell.”
All in all, over 200,000 people died because of the Hiroshima
bomb blast, and another 140,000 died from the nuclear bombing of
Nagasaki. These numbers include the count of those that died from
the radiation aftereffects that would waste a person away from the
insides.
With the use of modern nuclear weapons, however, the gruesome
reality of the power and radiation that modern nuclear weapons
would produce make the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pale in
comparison. Additionally, the effects of radiation poisoning would
contaminate the land, air and water for generations.
These are the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush
Administration would so flippantly consider to be appropriate for
use on other countries, in the most egregious shift in nuclear
policy in the last fifty years.
Indeed, the U.S.’s unilateralist revision of the role of
nuclear weapons only underscores the administration’s failure
to deal with the root causes of international instability. This
includes the conditions of economic inequality and lack of access
to the bargaining table that precipitate the soil for anger against
the U.S. to grow and flourish. These actions have come in
combination with the Bush Administration’s emphasis on
building a “Star Wars” missile defense system that has
shown to be faulty and ineffective in even being able to tell the
difference between actual and “dummy” warheads.
All in all, these events only highlight the thoughtlessness of
an administration that has single-handedly upset the precarious
balance of a post-Cold War era. Bush’s actions will only
serve to anger the international community even more, in a time
when the U.S. needs to be building stronger relations. In addition,
the administration’s hawkish position will only serve to stir
other nations to develop nuclear capabilities and bring the world
one step closer to the possibility of nuclear destruction.
The reality of nuclear weapons is a grim and tragic nightmare
from which we still have not awoken. The Bush
Administration’s actions are an affront not only to the
international community, but also to our very future as a
species.
We simply cannot allow the expansion of the role of nuclear
weapons in this country, and must firmly act to stop this madness
from continuing. If we fail to do so, our children will wake up in
a more treacherous and horrific future.