Spokesman Books

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...

Dear friends, We hope this letter finds you all well, and wish you all the best for new year. As you are of course aware, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, have both had a dramatic impact around the world. In response to this massive disaster and its tragic consequences to people's lives and environment, the people of Japan are trying to take steps towards recovery. Meanwhile, the nuclear power plant is still unstable and workers are forced to continue working in life-threatening conditions. As the radioactive contamination spreads, many people including children are forced to suffer from prolonged radiation exposure, unable to evacuate due to lack of support from the government. It is vital that we do not continue to make the same mistakes. It is now time for humanity to put an end to the nuclear age that started with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Japan, well over half the population now supports the goal of br...

‘A nuclear explosion [dubbed ‘Little Boy’] was detonated some 600 metres above Hiroshima at 8.15 on 6 August 1945 … a second, over Nagasaki three days later, was a plutonium bomb, dubbed ‘Fat Man’. It is 66 years since those terrible experiments, which instantly killed hundreds of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Tens of thousands more suffered lingering deaths due to their injuries, caused by intense heat, blast, and radiation sickness … As the nuclear disaster at Fukushima continues to unfold, Japanese perceptions have probed more deeply. Sumiteru Taniguchi survived extensive injuries suffered during the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and, at 82 years of age, maintains a lively presence on behalf of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Sufferers (or Hibakusha , in Japanese). He recently observed that ‘Nuclear power and mankind cannot co-exist. We survivors of the atomic bomb have said this all along. And yet, the use of nuclear power was camouflaged as “peaceful” and continued to ...

This year's World Conference against A&H Bombs will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the devastating nuclear disaster which is still unfolding at Fukushima . Understandably, this is one of the main themes running through this year's Conference. Tony Simpson addresses some of the questions raised by Fukushima in the paper he will present to the Conference. To mark the 66th anniversary of the nuclear bombardment of these two Japanese cities, on 6 August, the Russell Foundation is publishing a new edition of THE LEGACY OF CHERNOBYL by Zhores Medvedev. In his preface to the new edition, Dr Medvedev descibes how, in 1987, he met with members of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum. At that time, he had already started to study the available information about what had happened at Chernobyl the previous year, as he was not satisfied with the Soviet report to the International Atomic Energy Agency. His Japanese hosts were not interested in too many details. "We d...