Nuclear weapons are weapons of terror
79 years ago, US soldiers dropped an atomic bomb on an inhabited area for the first time in human history. Their target on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, was the southern Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Just three days later, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and shortly afterwards 73,000 in Nagasaki.
To this day, the US government justifies its brutal deployment with the argument that the two atomic bombs were the only way to end the Second World War in the Far East quickly. Not only Japanese, but also US historians dispute this thesis and point out that the Japanese government had already sent peace signals and signs of “war fatigue” beforehand.
By 2024, however, more than twice as many people had died from the long-term effects of nuclear radiation – over 400,000 in total. And the deaths continue to this day – almost 80 years after the atomic bombs.
A few years ago, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki invited me to give lectures. My topic was “From the nuclear age to the solar age”. There are probably no more important places on this subject. I learned that the majority of Japanese citizens are against both nuclear energy and nuclear bombs.
Anyone who talks to victims of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or visits the two impressive memorial sites opens the door to hell on earth. In August 1945, a mass murder took place the likes of which the world had never before imagined. Within seconds, tens of thousands of people were reduced to nothing, were at best a heap of ashes or were irradiated and crippled for the rest of their lives.
However, I was most shocked by a figure given by the mayor of Hiroshima: Every year, over 3,000 people still die in Japan as a result of nuclear radiation from 1945. Shortly before my lecture in Nagasaki, the deputy mayor slipped me a handwritten note on which he had written the current number of people killed by nuclear radiation in his city to date: 140,144! (see photo attached)
79 years on, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not behind us, but still ahead of us. We continue to die.
We know from years of discussions about the nuclear bomb for North Korea and Iran about the close connection between the so-called peaceful use of nuclear power and the construction of nuclear bombs. The material for the bomb is also produced in nuclear power plants. Without nuclear power plants, there is no nuclear bomb – not even for Iran or North Korea. The worldwide incidents in many nuclear plants should make even the biggest nuclear enthusiasts think twice! But as long as there are around 400 nuclear power plants in operation around the world, unscrupulous power politicians will continue to try to build nuclear bombs. 400 nuclear power plants are 400 possible nuclear accidents. There is not a single nuclear power plant in the world that is 100% safe.
We must also expect that nuclear bombs will one day fall into the hands of terrorists if we do not leave the nuclear age behind us. But that means closing all nuclear power plants as quickly as possible and generating energy from renewable energy sources in future – from the sun, wind, bioenergy, geothermal energy, hydropower and ocean energy. With the right political will, the solar energy transition will be 100 percent possible in 15 years. The solar age is beginning. The sun is winning.
The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki swore 40 years ago that the nuclear mass murder in their cities must never be forgotten or suppressed by humanity and founded the global organization “Mayors for Peace”, which has since been joined by 8,374 mayors from 166 countries – including the mayors of 683 German cities and municipalities, including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne, but also smaller cities such as Heidelberg or Baden-Baden or Trier and Mainz. According to a FORSA survey, 93% of Germans are in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons under international law and 85% support the withdrawal of the 25 US nuclear weapons still stored on German soil.
The goal of the “Mayors for Peace”, who now represent over 300 million people: A world free of nuclear weapons!
The Mayor of Hiroshima is optimistic: “Since it was possible to abolish biological and chemical weapons worldwide, it is of course also possible to abolish the most dangerous weapons, nuclear weapons. No other city in the world should ever suffer the fate of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. To achieve this goal, however, many more cities and villages must join our alliance. Please help us in Germany too. Because only by putting pressure on the powerful national politicians of the nuclear bomb owners can we achieve the destruction of the more than 15,000 nuclear warheads in the world today. This could wipe out the entire human race at least 20 times over.” (More about the peace mayors: www.mayorsforpeace.de)
“There is,” the deputy mayor of Nagasaki tells me in parting, “not the slightest justification for taking cities and villages hostage with nuclear weapons. Never again should a city be the target of nuclear weapons.” This makes me wonder whether we owe this commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons to our children and grandchildren.
Nuclear weapons are weapons of terror, 25 of which are still stored in Germany today – each with the destructive power of 5 Hiroshima bombs! It is probably the greatest and most dangerous illusion in human history that we can secure lasting peace with nuclear weapons.
The bomber pilot of Hiroshima, US soldier Paul Tibbets, died in 2007. Shortly before his death, he said: “Yes, I would do it again. I didn’t lose any sleep over it”. To this day, no US president in Japan has apologized for the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for the mass murder.
In 2018, the mayor of Fukushima invited me to give a lecture to 400 Japanese mayors. As in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my topic was “From the nuclear age to the solar age”. I asked the mayor of Fukushima, who had just come from the stricken nuclear power plant, what would happen if he were to enter the inside of the reactor. His answer: “I would be ashes in seconds”.
In 2020, the whole world was looking for a vaccine against the coronavirus pandemic. We already have the vaccine against the nuclear pandemic and the fossil fuel pandemic: renewable energies.
Wars are a crime against humanity. A nuclear war would probably be the last war, because after that there would probably be no people left to wage war. The cry of conscience that has been ignored so far is: Do not forget the lessons of the four major nuclear disasters in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
The mayors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima told me that they alone cannot achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and a world without nuclear power plants. To achieve this, they need the support of many colleagues around the world. After all, 122 UN states called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons in 2017. But all nine nuclear governments voted against it. Unfortunately, so did the German government at the UN. In Germany, it was only the former FDP Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle who spoke out in favor of the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Germany as a member of the government in 2012. It is likely that many more German mayors will have to campaign for this until the federal government in Berlin also speaks out in favor. This could show that Germany has actually learned something from its history after 1945.
For 2,000 years, the ancient Roman principle “If you want peace, prepare for war” has applied. The result of this policy: 2000 years of wars, mass murder and endless suffering. Based on this experience, we must finally develop this philosophy: “Whoever wants peace must prepare for peace”. That means disarming and not rearming, as the current German government is doing by pouring more and more money into armaments, above all to appease the US President.
The USA spends more than eight times more money on armaments and the military than Russia and three times as much as China. Who is actually threatening whom here? With a tenth of global military spending, we could ensure that no child has to starve to death. And with another tenth we could ensure that all children could go to school. Wouldn’t these be more worthwhile goals than starting a new arms race, as the USA, China and Russia, as well as Germany, are currently doing again? When will we finally learn that the purpose of our existence is not hatred and arms races, but peaceful coexistence?
NATO’s announcement to station new medium-range missiles in Germany, which can be equipped with conventional and nuclear weapons, must worry us. The spiral of escalation continues. According to US President Biden, the risk of nuclear war is as high as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis at the beginning of the 1960s.
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FRANZ ALT 2024 | Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator