The impact of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, the leakage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant should be strong reasons for the use of nuclear cannot be arbitrary.
By
LUKI AULIA
·5 minutes read
AP PHOTO/POOL/STANLEY TROUTMAN
Ruins of buildings in Hiroshima, one month after the bombing on August 6, 1945.
Toshiyuki Mimaki, 80, was playing in front of his house when he saw a flash of light in the sky on August 6, 1945. That morning, a United States B-29 bomber dropped a nuclear bomb weighing 15 kilotons on Hiroshima. The incident changed the lives of Mimaki and the entire population of Japan forever.
Around 60,000 people died on that day and the fatalities increased to 140,000 at the end of 1945. Meanwhile, in Nagasaki, about 74,000 people died. Mimaki, who was then three years old, still remembers how he was rushed away by his family after the whole city was ablaze and the air filled with radioactive ash.
“People’s hair got burned, their skin peeling off, and they shouted for water,” recalled Mimaki when interviewed by The Guardian in October 2022.
Mimaki is one of the Hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombs in Japan. They hoped that any such horrible experience would not recur by prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons. As a reminder, Mimaki and his fellow Hibakusha have voiced this message everywhere, as far as the United Nations headquarters.
The Hibakusha played an important role in the advocacy of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons of the United Nations. In June 2022, a total of 66 countries signed and ratified the treaty after its enforcement in 2021. The Treaty was prepared through the initiative of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a nongovernmental organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize 2017.
Annihilation
After almost eight decades, the specter of Japan’s nuclear calamity again haunted the world when Russia invaded Ukraine. It was even more the case when Russian President Vladimir Putin touched on the use of tactical nuclear weapons that would be installed in Belarus, and not to mention North Korea, who bragged about a nuclear attack on the US.
Terumi Tanaka, 89, chairman of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers’ Organizations and a Nagasaki bombing survivor, warned that any war involving nuclear weapons would create the risk of annihilation of humankind and all lives on Earth. The people previously living around the Nuclear Power Plant (PLTN) of Fukushima Daiichi in Okuma city, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, also feel anxious over the intensive battle near the Zaporizhzhia PLTN in Ukraine.
AP/ KYODO NEWS
This aerial photo shows the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma city, Fukushima prefecture, north of Tokyo, Japan, after an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.4, Thursday (17/3/2022). Japanese government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno said the nuclear power plant in Fukushima was safe so far.
After the tsunami on 11 March 2011 hit Fukushima and caused a nuclear reactor leakage, many residents have not yet been able to return because the level of radiation is still high. “Since the Fukushima disaster, radioactive contamination in the forest has remained high and crops cannot yet be grown in its soil. Mushrooms cannot grow on wooden stems either,” said a shiitake mushroom farmer, Kanichiro Munakata, 71.
A former foreign affairs official at the US State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Bennett Ramberg, who wrote a book on Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy, in The Japan Times, on 18 Feb. 2022 indicated that a leaking nuclear reactor could be a radiological trap. If the Zaporizhzhia PLTN leaks, Russia will be its radioactive victim.
Power plants have always been a target in modern conflict because their destruction will hamper the capability of a country to carry on its battle. However, PLTNs are unlike other energy sources, as they contain a lot of radioactive materials. If a PLTN leaks, its waste will settle thousands of kilometers away.
Nuclear bombs are terrifying weapons of war.
One example is the nuclear reactor accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on 26 April 1986. The worst nuclear disaster in history released radioactive materials 400 times as big in quantity as those of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated and now Chernobyl is a dead city. The Chernobyl Forum in the UN estimated that the accident would cause 5,000 deaths due to cancer in the next 50 years.
Even the contamination of ammunition containing depleted uranium (DU) has made the Iraqi people suffer. As a result of the US attack on Iraq, especially on Fallujah, there has been a sharp increase in the number of congenital birth defects, cases of cancer, leukemia in children, kidney, lung and liver diseases, immunity system breakdowns, miscarriages and premature births.
During the attack on Fallujah, the US used a lot of DU ammunition and white phosphorus. US toxicologist Mozghan Savabieasfahani on the Al Jazeera website on 15 March 2013 explained that after the US invasion residents refused to move from their contaminated homes. They continued to be exposed to contamination of metals from bombs, bullets and other explosives that gave rise to birth defects, anomalies and other diseases.
“It’s almost impossible to save those who are wounded or dying. Nuclear bombs are terrifying weapons of war,” said former director of the Atomic Bomb Hospital of the Japanese Red Cross in Nagasaki, Masao Tomonaga.
