Hanford Nuclear Site

I was born just two hours too soon to have arrived on the first anniversary of Hiroshima. That I was born in Pasco, Washington, was itself a consequence of the Manhattan Project – there was housing nearby in Kennewick for military families, since the bomb that was to be dropped on Nagasaki was being constructed on what is now the Hanford nuclear reservation nearby. My paternal grandfather was the mayor of Kennewick for a time – the family still owns Farmers Exchange on Canal Street – & my father was a radio operator on the USS Meriwether, so it was convenient arrangement. After the Japanese surrender, the Meriwether ferried troops home from Hawai’i to the mainland. Only commissioned at the end of 1944, the Meriwether had seen a short war.

The “victory babies” of summer 1946 were the first burst of the baby-boom generation – it’s the one thing I have in common with both Bill Clinton & George W. Bush – we were all born within weeks of one another. As was Arkadii Dragomoshchenko – “same victory,” he once told me, “different army.”

Wars & governments have enormous impacts on the lives of people. My parents would certainly never have met had my father not enlisted at 16 & thus arrived one evening at a USO dance in the Bay Area. My mother’s family had been in Berkeley & Oakland since the early 1890s, but my mother was anxious to put a little geography between herself & her own mother. So there I was, an infant just over the river from a facility that was building nuclear weapons at a time when they didn’t even know about the possibilities of radiation.

My father had seen the devastation at Nagasaki first hand – the Meriwether sailors had taken relief supplies to the city in the days immediately following the surrender – although I didn’t know this for another half century, when I finally met my half-siblings in South Carolina & saw my father’s own photographs of the flattened, charred landscape.

The arrogance of power is a feature of power itself. In choosing to “deploy” the bomb on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Truman was not behaving qualitatively differently than any of the other leaders during the Second World War. That is, to my thinking, perhaps the very worst thing about it – any of those men, given the opportunity, on either side, would have done exactly the same thing.

In 60 years, only one nation has ever used nuclear weapons on another population. Yet now the capability to do so is becoming widespread. Indeed there is a legitimate concern that this capability no longer is necessarily limited to states. There is a side of me that feels a gut certainty that the poor people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki were the not the last who will experience this terrible fate. Just as, after the Second World War, the refrain “Never Again” was coined, while one genocidal event after another have continued onward to this very day. Try that phrase out today in Darfur, for example.

Hiroshima Day demonstrations have been a feature of my birthday week my entire life. When I turned 18 on the day after the Gulf of Tonkin incident & was told that there were no draft counselors on the East Coast except in Philadelphia, I hitched down here on August 6^th and immediately set off for the Federal Building, certain that I would find a demo & people who could put me in touch with Coordinating Council of Conscientious Objectors. I was right.

Take a moment today to think about the people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. And of Iraq. And pay a visit to the War Resisters League, the senior organization in the field of peace activism.