"Rest in peace. The mistake shall not be repeated." (Inscription on the A-bomb monument near ground-zero Hiroshima)

In Ottawa on 6 August 1945, Prime Minister Mackenzie King learned that an atomic bomb had obliterated Hiroshima. Following a perfunctory public statement lauding this “greatest achievement in science,” [1] King updated his diary:

“We can now see what might have come to the British race had German scientists won the race. It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe. I am a little concerned about how Russia may feel, not having been told anything of this invention or of what the British and the US were doing in the way of exploring and perfecting the process.” [2]

The first sentence in King’s paragraph recalls that atomic ordnance was originally developed in strenuous competition with Nazi Germany, which began an A-bomb program after uranium fission was discovered there in 1938. The German fascist menace absorbed most of the energy and war material of the US, UK and Canada until late 1944. Atomic ruination of Japan was not their initial wartime objective.

Since the bomb was not perfected as a weapon until 16 July 1945, victory in Europe was achieved with less firepower. The Atlantic triangle’s wartime objectives “fortunately” were attained without atomic assault on “the white races of Europe.”

However, Oxford historian Richard Storry wrote: “in bringing the war to an end a factor as decisive as the atomic bomb was the Soviet attack on Japan on 8 August.” A History of Modern Japan (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK, 1966) page 230.

King’s “racial purity” creed transcended the bigotry of one leader. King’s second sentence reflects the chauvinist ideology of his political establishment and lineage.

Shared by many leaders of the “British race” even as they severely punished Nazi Aryan-supremacist cohorts at Nuremberg for monstrous crimes against humankind, the doctrine confided by King to his diary holds that a mysterious, unprecedented catastrophe is more acceptable when visited upon “non-white” peoples. Racists depict Asian nationalities as ethnically inferior and geopolitically overpopulated, falsely ascribing the indifference to human life of the hated Japanese military-fascist General Staff to the Japanese people as a whole.

Racial supremacy was aggravated in King, the most enduring Prime Minister in Canadian history, by the disease of atomic superiority inflaming the code-named Manhattan Project, which constructed the A-bomb. The United States feared postwar economic, scientific and political competition from Britain and Canada, and intended to stifle their autonomous atomic capabilities. Diplomatically, however, Washington sought an “Anglo-Saxon” nuclear alliance.

The secret pact signed 19 August 1943 by Roosevelt and Churchill at Quebec City called for pooling in the Manhattan Project “all available British and American brains and resources.” A Montreal heavy water research team augmented the British scientific talents deployed into the Project. [3]

The major development of the Canadian uranium industry began in 1942, “in response to demand for virtually unlimited quantities of uranium for the military programs of the United States and Great Britain.” [4]

Hundreds of tons of uranium mined in northern and western Canada were processed in Ontario for fabrication into the Hiroshima bomb, and Canada’s abundant supply of military uranium to the US and the UK continued for decades.

The US built a heavy water plant in British Columbia, which sustained the Nagasaki bomb effort and produced several hundred tons of heavy water annually during 1944-1955.

The Quebec Agreement stipulated that A-weapons would be used against a third party only upon the joint assent of Roosevelt and Churchill. “To ensure a full and effective collaboration” in the Manhattan Project, a six-person intergovernmental Combined Policy Committee was formed, through which Washington coordinated British and Canadian R&D.

This committee included C.D. Howe, Ottawa’s Minister of Munitions and Supply. Howe was reputed as “the founder of modern, industrialized, Americanized Canada.” [5] The Anglo-Soviet agreement of 29 September 1942 called for “the exchange of new weapons, both those in use and those which might be discovered in the future.” [6] Mackenzie King, as his third diary sentence shows, was “a little concerned” by Moscow’s inevitable countermeasures against the hidden development and unilateral demonstration of atomic energy.

However, the Quebec Agreement was honoured when on 4 July 1945, with Howe in attendance, the Combined Policy Committee received Churchill’s assent to the atomic detonations.

Seeking to prevent or forestall the permanent militarization of atomic technology, some farsighted scientists appealed for restraint to Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill, but King and Howe comfortably acquiesced to the inundation of atomic death.

After the Pacific war, A-bombs anchored US military-political doctrine. The Atlantic triangle stiffened into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the USSR then nullified nuclear superiority by exploding its own A-bomb in 1949 and forming the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

Meanwhile, Washington threatened to use atomic bombs in the 1950-1953 Korean War. Into that conflict Canada and Britain dispatched their sizable “Commonwealth Division,” for what Canadian Foreign Minster Lester Pearson, a King legatee, termed “defense against Russian communism.” [7]

The Western racists inflamed citizens for intervention in Korea by slurring Koreans and Chinese as “gooks,” just as a decade later Washington demeaned each Vietnamese antagonist “Vietcong.” During the Indochina war, Washington brandished atomic weapons in 1954 when Ho Chi Minh’s armies besieged France’s Dienbienphu fortress. The US uttered similar threats during the 1958 Taiwan Straits crisis.

The thermonuclear fireball roaring upward from the Bikini Atoll test site in March 1954, was timed or so it was perceived in much of Asia, to precede by one month the Geneva Conference on Indochina and Korea. The world’s first H-bomb victims were again Asians: twenty-three Japanese tuna fishermen and several hundred Micronesian islanders trapped under the Bikini death ash.

Radiation protection professional Rosalie Bertell, retired president of Toronto-based International Institute of Concern for Public Health, described Bikini’s consequences: “Many lives in the Marshall Islands were lost or destroyed by slow death and poisoning of their local foods.”

MASS MOVEMENT

Inspired by the millions-strong movement in Japan against the production, testing, use and possession of nuclear weapons, and the invigoration of this movement after Bikini, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations (Hidankyo) was established on 10 August 1956.

The Japanese word “Hibakusha” describes people affected by the blast, burn and radiation effects of nuclear explosions. In 1984, following intensive preparation and mobilization, Hidankyo urged Government of Japan to enact comprehensive Hibakusha-assistance legislation.

Hidankyo has members in all 47 prefectures of Japan, and ”represents all organized Hibakusha. Its officials and members are all Hibakusha”

For many years after 1945, governments of Japan subordinated their policies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to US nuclear strategy, which includes attempts to cover-up A-bomb damage and after-effects, and Tokyo failed to assist survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The “hell on earth” survivors were forced to endure extreme hardships caused first by the catastrophes and then by callous attitudes in Tokyo towards hundreds of thousands of victims.

Hidankyo member and scientific researcher Shoji Sawada, A-bomb survivor and Professor of Physics, Nagoya University, told The Activist “Hidankyo was founded to ensure that human beings never again endure the torture and sacrifices experienced by the survivors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Bikini.”

In addition, Sawada represents The Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo), considered the longstanding major component of the Japanese antiwar, anti-imperialist peace movement.

We are studying Hidankyo’s case for compassionate relief, including special medical and livelihood assistance to all known Hibakusha; revision of narrow, irrational relief-qualification requirements; and principled refutation of radiation protection dogma entrenched in the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, an organ of the US Atomic Energy Commission, its US-Japanese successor the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, and their global accomplice ICRP, the International Commission on Radiation Protection.

Publishing in 2007 on effects of radiation damage to living organisms, Professor Sawada reports. “I analyzed incidence rates of acute radiation disease to prove that governmental relief criteria thus far neglect internal exposures caused by longer-term Hiroshima and Nagasaki fallout.”

Shoji Sawada, “Cover-Up of the Effects of Internal Exposure by Residual Radiation From the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival January-March 2007 23(1), pages 58-74.

JAPAN BREAKS WITH WAR AND IMPERIALISM

Sawada said: “The fifteen-year-long war of aggression launched by the Japanese military-fascist regime starting in the early 1930s in China may have provoked the atomic atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The Hidankyo website declares: “the state responsibility of having launched the war which lead to the damage by the atomic bombing should be acknowledged.”

Governments of Canada historically mortgaged Canada’s nuclear future to the global strategy of the United States, while sacrificing democratic decision making to secrecy.

The Quebec Agreement was not published until April 1954, during the worldwide outcry against Bikini. Officials obscured the negotiations begun during the Korean War on over-flights of Canada by nuclear-armed US aircraft, which led to the establishment in 1957 of the NATO-linked North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).[8]

The second sentence from King’s diary epigram (“It is fortunate”) was excised from The Mackenzie King Record of King’s literary executors, [9] and remained unpublished until the ‘thirty-year’ shrouding of government papers lapsed in January 1976.

Censorship and concealment retarded understanding of King’s times and Liberal Party of Canada administration, and appears doubly deplorable in light of the subsequent international engagements of Canadian nucleonics.

CANADA CONTINUES MISTAKES

Supplied in the framework of the neo-Colonialist Colombo Plan, a loosely safeguarded Candu heavy water research reactor cooked the fissile plutonium for India’s 1974 atomic explosion.

Despite this setback to the fragile regime of nuclear non-proliferation, Ottawa exported the Wolsung plutonium-producing Candu nuclear power plant to the nuclear-weapons-coveting Seoul autocracy. This incendiary “commercial” transaction courted a second Korean War and eroded the equivocal non-proliferation commitment of Japan.

Stephen Salaff, “Canada Boosts South Korea,” The Activist, 2 April 2007.

Canada’s avid co-partnership in the World War Two A-bomb enterprise and its subsequent commercial marketing of nuclear equipment and technology prefigure today’s quest for nuclear advantage whatever the cost in morality and international security.

By abandoning the fiction that “the British race” commands atomic supremacy, and sharing the antiwar concerns of progressive Japanese and fellow Asians, Canadians can honour the inscription of Hiroshima.

Rest in peace.

The mistake shall not be repeated.

Join the Toronto Hiroshima Day Coalition for their annual Hiroshima Day Commemoration from 6:30-9:00 pm on 6 August 2007 at Nathan Phillips Square Peace Garden, 100 Queen Street West, Toronto.

FOOTNOTES:

1) J.W. Pickersgill and D.G. Forster, The Mackenzie King Record: Volume II, 1944-45 (Toronto, 1968) page 451.

2) Diary of Mackenzie King, August 6, 1945. Public Archives of Canada. The voluminous King diary “was kept largely to serve as a record from which he could recount and explain his conduct of public affairs.” Pickersgill and Forster, p viii.

According to C.P. Stacy, the official historian of the Canadian army during World War II, the diary “is the most important single political document in twentieth-century Canadian history.” C.P. Stacy, A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King (Toronto, 1976) page 9.

3) “Canadian scientists, especially those with training in atomic or nuclear physics, were begged, borrowed or stolen from university staffs or wherever they could be found to augment this team.” Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. Review, March-April 1977, page 8. The Montreal group of Canadian and French scientists laid the basis for postwar development of Candu heavy water reactors.

4) Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, An Energy Policy for Canada, Phase I. Vol. II (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973) page 325.

5) Peter. C. Newman, The Canadian Establishment, Vol. I (Toronto, 1976) page 370. C.D. Howe organized Canada’s contribution to the production of the A-bomb, and for this contribution President Truman awarded Howe the Medal of Merit in 1947.

6) Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1939/1946 (University Park, PA, 1962) pages 267-268.

7) Lester Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Lester B. Pearson (Toronto, 1973) page 154.

8) An integrated military air headquarters was established at Colorado Springs on 1 August 1957. “For some years prior to the establishment of NORAD,” however, “it had been recognized that the air defense of Canada and the US must be considered as a single problem.” Agreement Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America Air Defense Command, May 12, 1958. Canada, Treaty Series 1958, No. 9, page 2.

9) Pickersgill and Forster.