Spokesman Books

Summer, 69 years later. The burning sun takes us back to "that day."   August 6, 1945. A single atomic bomb renders Hiroshima a burnt plain.   From infants to the elderly, tens of thousands of innocent civilians lose their lives in a single day. By the end of the year, 140,000 have died. To avoid forgetting that sacred sacrifice and to prevent a repetition of that tragedy, please listen to the voices of the survivors.   Approximately 6,000 young boys and girls died removing buildings for fire lanes. One who was a 12-year-old junior high student at the time says, "Even now, I carry the scars of war and that atomic bombing on my body and in my heart. Nearly all my classmates were killed instantly. My heart is tortured by guilt when I think how badly they wanted to live and that I was the only one who did." Having somehow survived, hibakusha still suffer from severe physical and emotional wounds.   "Water, please." Voices from ...

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, NOT PROLIFERATION! The Japan Council against A and H Bombs (Gensuikyo) has sent the following message to the 16th Summit of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, meeting in Tehran, Iran from 26 to 31 August 2012. Hiroshi TAKA, representative director of Gensuikyo, presented the message in person. On the occasion of the 16th summit of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, we extend warmest greetings of solidarity to you, and through you to the people each of you represent, from the movement against atomic and hydrogen bombs working in Japan, the only A-bombed country in the world. During the period of the Cold War, which followed the end of World War Two, the Non-aligned Movement played the key role in establishing a peaceful and just world order based on the UN Charter, by opposing the division of the world by military blocs and the nuclear arms race, and firmly promoting non-alignment, national independence and sovereig...

6 August 2012 In October, it will be fifty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, known as the ‘October Crisis’ in Cuba, and the ‘Caribbean Crisis’ in Russia. During those days in 1962, the United States and Soviet Union came closer to conflict than at any other time. It has been described as the worst week of the Cold War. That the conflict did not erupt probably has quite a lot to do with the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The suffering of those cities and their hibakusha was indelibly etched on the consciousness of the post-war generation. One prominent member of that generation, Robert McNamara, was US Defence Secretary from 1961 to 1968. Decades later, in 2005, he observed that: ‘ Much of the current US nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defence, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years. ’ Mr McNamara then assessed the average modern US warhead as having a destructive power 20 times that of...

On the Start of the New Signature Campaign in Support of “Appeal for a Total Ban on Nuclear Weapons” February 15, 2011 in Hiroshima, Nagasaki & Tokyo Dear friends, First of all, I want to express my gratitude to you and all the other friends in Japan and overseas who have given us support in preparing to launch the new signature campaign. At present, when we will soon see the 66th Summer of the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is rapidly changing in terms of nuclear weapons. With our actions in New York, or in many other cities around the world, the NPT Review Conference in May last year declared it as its goal “to achieve the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”, and called on all states to make “special efforts” to establish a framework for it, focusing on the proposal of UN Secretary General Ban KI-moon for the start of negotiations on a convention banning nuclear weapons. The outcome of the session of the UN General assembly towards the end of th...