| On the Brink of Insanity: The Bush Administration�s Nuclear Agenda By Ryan Masaaki Yokota "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana The recent leak of the secret Bush Administration document, the �Nuclear Posture Review,� which details the development of nuclear contingency plans against seven countries (Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Syria), and also allows for the development of �smaller� nuclear weapons for use in conventional battlefield situations represents a new level of insanity on the part of the current administration. For despite the tragedy of the 9-11 attacks, by reclassifying nuclear weapons into the category of acceptable military options, the Bush Administration has shown that they lack a concrete understanding of the realities of nuclear weapons use. Yet perhaps the reason that they think this way is that the idea of nuclear weapons is an abstract construct divorced from their reality. For myself, having come from a family that directly survived the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing, I don�t have that luxury. And it is because of that experience, that I can say without equivocation that we must never be allowed to use nuclear weapons ever again. In my family, my grandmother, a U.S. citizen born here in California, went to Hiroshima in the late 30�s, where she met my grandfather, and married. He was a middle school principal at the time, and between them, they had three children by the time of that fateful day in August 6, 1945, when the first nuclear bomb ever used on a civilian population was dropped. In interviews with them, they described the horrors that nuclear weapons had wrought. My grandmother described what had happened on that day, when the blast first hit their house, shattering the window and sending glass shards into her body: �I was in a storage house, a pretty thick walled building, and when I was there, the first thing was that the radio stopped, and I thought, �Oh gee, the radio stopped,� and I stood up to go to check the radio and that's when the bakufu (the nuclear blast) pushed me from one side of the room to the other side, and in that instant you can't remember anything, and you find you are on the opposite side of the room and all the glass from the window was stuck on this side of the wall, and that's when the glass hit me.� My grandfather was working in the City education department, and when the blast hit, the roof of the building he was in collapsed, though he was luckily able to get under his desk to escape being crushed. Despite this, however, he had to walk back through the charred remains of the city to get back to my grandmother. They told me of the aftereffects of the blast as well: �So we were among the lucky ones. 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, like how new potatoes just peel off the skin. Their skin would just peel off the burns and they were just hanging. 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... It's not like living. The ones that got burned, because [the blast] burned their skin, they had gone into the water and then they�d get all blown up and lot of these bloated bodies were drifting [in the rivers]. It's just a horrible situation.� 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, and would most likely affect neighboring countries as well. 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 re-visioning of the role of nuclear weapons only underscores the administration�s failure to deal with the root causes of international instability, which include 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 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, instead of weakening them. 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. Go to page 2 of Ryan's op-ed Back to Main Page |