Hoping for a nuclear weapons-free world

Bob Hughes

Opinion

I write this on Sunday, August 6 — Hiroshima Peace Day — the anniversary of the horrific nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

This and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later are the only uses of nuclear weapons during armed conflict in history.

During the decades since, eight other nations have become nuclear powers — with sufficient weapons to destroy the world.

A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city, killing most inhabitants. The use of less than 1 percent of stockpiled nuclear weapons could disrupt the global climate, threatening nuclear famine.

In 1911 Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize after defining radioactivity; seven years later Ernest Rutherford split the atom.

Meantime H.G. Wells, in his 1914 novel The World Set Free, predicted the development of atomic bombs. He wrote of war with powerful “uranium-based bombs” dropped from aircraft — offering a prescient description of radioactive atomic bombs capable of destroying cities, exterminating their inhabitants and rendering them uninhabitable for decades.

His far-sighted story is more centred on the world rather than the people. His novel concludes with hopefulness: humanity’s rise from the catastrophe of warfare.

Wells wrote of “war becoming impossible” and imagined, in the aftermath of nucelar war, the creation of a single world government; in essence, a United Nations with real power.

Wells’ theme of world government is presented as a solution. Strangely, his time set for nuclear weaponry destroying the cities of the world during the 1960s coincided with many of our real-time, very-near-likewise alerts from the 1960s onwards, through to Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s near false launch in 1995.

In truth, it is more by good luck than good management that the world has avoided an H.G. Wells-style nuclear war — needing only one of the near misses to activate such a war, and civilisation needing to begin afresh because of the consequences and repercussions.

Last month here Pauline E. Tangiora of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Aotearoa reminded us of New Zealand’s long-standing Nuclear-Free Pacific policy.

In support of her appeal to stop the release of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific, I wrote of Prime Minister David Lange’s ban on nuclear-powered/armed ships in 1984, the establishment of our Nuclear Free Zone in 1987, and a previous Labour government’s petition for an end to nuclear tests. For over 70 years, our country has consistently opposed nuclear weapons.

New Zealand/Aotearoa citizens are advantaged by the great work of former leaders in creating our nuclear-free objectives.

Wayward use of nuclear weapons or nuclear waste disposal could bring catastrophic long-term effects. I urge readers to give this some thought.

Achieving global nuclear disarmament was one of the earliest goals of the United Nations — to no avail. Today around 12,705 nuclear weapons await launching.

Hopefully, more public awareness and education about the threat posed to humanity by nuclear weapons will help to mobilise new international efforts towards achieving the common goal of a nuclear weapons-free world.

The St Andrew’s Church Hiroshima Peace Day service on Sunday contained St Francis’s Make Me a Channel of Your Peace poem, among the many other peace messages.

I add this famous quote from H.G. Wells:

“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”

Support New Zealand’s nuclear-free Pacific policy. Better still, let’s go for a nuclear-free world.