Beg my boy's pardon, Apologize
on your knees, Those who made the atomic
bomb.
So
demanded the mother of Fumiki Nagoya, a
seven-year-old victim of the horror visited upon
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The searing lines
from an English version of the elegy titled 'I
Want to Live" have continued to be cited for six
decades and a half. The demand, however, has also
continued to be dismissed with a contempt it never
deserved.
CBS News video
Some saw
a change coming on the 65th anniversary of the
Hiroshima bombing. Did not Barack Obama say in
Prague last year what successive US Presidents
have refused to say down the years since the
world's first nuclear weapon vaporized Fukimi and
over a hundred thousand others? Did not the "We
can" man then declare a nuclear-weapon-free world
as a cherished dream of his?
All Obama
could manage in the end was to send a US
representative (Ambassador John Roos) to the sad
annual remembrance ceremony in Hiroshima. The US
State Department went out of its way to announce
that no apologies would be offered. None
were.
To
quite a few back home, however, even this symbolic
participation in the ceremony was going too far.
Gene Tibbetts, son of Paul W. Tibbetts, pilot of
the plane that dropped the bomb on an entirely
unprepared Hiroshima, waxed indignant. He called
Obama's semblance of a sympathetic gesture "an
unsaid apology" and an "attempt to rewrite
history." He was alluding to official history that
maintained, in the face of all evidence to the
contrary, that the use of the mass destruction
weapon was mandatory in order to end the Second
World War.
The frightening rise of a
US far right after Obama's advent in power is
reality that few can ignore. It is not, however,
as if Washington was otherwise prepared to start
moving instantly towards a world free from nukes.
It is not as if the US military-industrial complex
had gone into retirement once the results of the
last presidential elections were announced.
It is clear by now that the cuts in the US
nuclear arsenal, such as officially contemplated
are no more than cosmetic. As experts on the
subject point out, the recent termination by US
Congress of the Reliable Replacement Warhead
programme, represented no real advance. This
programme has been replaced by a Stockpile
Management Programme, which will help to
"modernize the US nuclear stockpile along a
spectrum of options ranging from ... refurbishment
to the manufacture of new weapons."
The
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review
Conference of May in New York ilustrated once
again the hollowness and hypocrisy of the nuclear
haves' talk of nuclear disarmament.The focus was
again on fobbing off the blame for the nuclear
situation today and raising fears of non-state
actors and "rogue states" in this regard.
The "responsible nuclear weapon states" on the
contrary, were projected, not for the first time,
as part of the solution and not as the primary
problem.
The NPT upheld by them has, in
fact, placed a powerful weapon in the hands
of the nuclear hawks in countries like India and
Pakistan against national peace movements. Unitil
lately this is a fact that the Western part of the
world peace movement appeared unable to appreciate
fully.
In the NPT RevCon and other
forums, the fashion of the day is to pretend that
terrorists and traditionally West-wary states
represent the main nuclear threat. As Pugwash
President Jayantha Dhanapala, former UN under
secretary general for disarmament affairs from the
South Asian state of Sri Lanka, has said, "An
arbitrary distinction has been drawn between
'good' and 'bad' proliferators."
As
for the nuclear proliferation threat from
terrorists, Dhanapala pointed out that the nuclear
powers have only "seized upon (it) to distract
attention from their own nuclear weapons."
States and systems, sitting atop mountains
of nuclear weapons, need to apologise and not to
Japan alone. It is time they said sorry to south
Asia and to the rest of the world. And they must
say sorry as though they meant it -- by readying
themselves, however reluctantly, for concrete and
credible steps and complete and nuclear
disarmament.
by J. Sri
Raman