Atomic bombing: Never again!

August 5, 2013

Yoroku: In a world drifting toward atomic confrontation, remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/perspectives/news/20130805p2a00m0na004000c.html

Late last month, we saw something ominous during an enormous North Korean military parade in Pyongyang: soldiers in three open-top trucks, backpacks emblazoned with the black and yellow nuclear symbol sitting on their laps. Were those portable atomic bombs?

Until the end of the 1980s, the United States military stocked portable nuclear bombs called SADM, or Special Atomic Demolition Munitions. They each weighed nearly 70 kilograms, but were small enough for a person to wear on their back, if not comfortably. So, were those backpacks we saw during the Pyongyang parade North Korean SADM? South Korea has said that its northern neighbor "doesn't have the technology to make bombs so small," but that unit showing off those nuclear symbols was surely established with nuclear war in mind.

These days, the danger of nuclear war once again feels realistic. North Korea detonated a test warhead in February this year. Soon after, some in South Korea were calling for their own nation to acquire nuclear weapons. During joint U.S.-South Korean military maneuvers in March, the U.S. Air Force deployed B52 and B2 warplanes -- heavy bombers perfectly capable of carrying nuclear weapons if needed.

The North's February A-bomb test brought down the wrath of Pyongyang's only real ally China, which had never criticized similar actions in the past. Meanwhile, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has estimated that North Korea built 10 nuclear warheads in 2012. To make matters worse, the institute has also said that the North is steadily increasing its stockpile of ballistic missiles capable of carrying those warheads.

Is humanity really moving closer to nuclear war? In mid-June, U.S. President Barack Obama told a Berlin audience that the world would never be safe as long as nuclear weapons existed, and that the U.S. would reduce its own atomic arsenal by 1,000 warheads. Obama's call for an end to nuclear arms in his famous speech in Prague four years ago was met with enthusiasm. His Berlin statement, however, mostly failed to resonate.

On Aug. 6 in Hiroshima, and on Aug. 9 in Nagasaki, we will once again remember two days of atomic fire. Meanwhile, the rest of the world seems increasingly numb to the idea of all-out nuclear warfare. And so, 68 years after the destruction of those cities, Japan must redouble its efforts to tell the world what happened on those August days in 1945, what horrors are contained in those terrible weapons. ("Yoroku," a front-page column in the Mainichi Shimbun)