Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Survivors push for nuclear disarmament

When Hirotami Yamada witnessed the atomic bomb that consumed Nagasaki in a fireball on Aug. 9, 1945, he was a 14-year-old boy inside a school.

His mother, two brothers and an older sister were trapped in their home about 2,700 feet from the center of the detonation.

"I thought it was a miracle that my family members were still alive there," Yamada, 64, said, recalling Monday how he returned home to find them.

But within days, they started to die. His infant brother and older sister died in less than five days.

Yamada and his mother burned the bodies. Then his mother died 10 days later, followed by his younger brother.

Hirotami discovered his father in a distant hospital. He had been burned, but survived 16 years before dying of cancer.

"All we want," Yamada said on UNLV's lawn as an April breeze ruffled his salt and pepper hair, "is no more Nagasakis, no more Hiroshimas, ever again."

And no testing of nuclear weapons, uranium mining, production or dumping of nuclear wastes either, said Stephanie Fraser, the organizer for "Breaking the Nuclear Chain," an international meeting aimed at closing the Nevada Test Site and stopping Yucca Mountain from becoming a high-level radioactive dump.

Fraser said the Abolition 2000 Network opposes the two "subcritical" experiments planned for the Test Site this year. The first experiment of using nuclear material but not allowing it to become a nuclear reaction is set for June 18.

In addition to abolishing nuclear weapons and waste, the network wants disarmament by the year 2000, she said.

About 60 activists marched in a "nuclear fool's parade" from UNLV to the U.S. Department of Energy office Monday. Among the group were those who survived above-ground nuclear weapons tests, atomic veterans, Indian tribes, Hawaiians protesting recent French nuclear tests and the Japanese.

Nancy Harkess of the DOE stood on the sidewalk and watched the gathering as she explained the massive billion-dollar cleanup going on at Energy Department sites around the nation.

"I see so much good, good things are happening," she said. "I see a lot of hard-working dedicated people working on cleanup."

The DOE is probably doing more to clean up the environment than the federal Environmental Protection Agency, she said.

But memories of the earlier nuclear terror emerged.

For Masao Morhihara, then 20 years old, the aftermath of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, meant picking up thousands of bodies.

"It was horrible, it was hell out there," he said. "The city of Hiroshima was swept by fire. When you looked at the river, it was full of people like leaves floating on the river.

"They indiscriminately killed children who did not know about war," he said of the Nazis. "It was the same at Hiroshima. The bomb indiscriminately killed."

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