U.S. Nuclear Policy Potentially Disastrous
Bush Administration Displays Disregard for Causes of Strained International Relations

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota

The recent leak of the secret document titled the “Nuclear Posture Review” not only details the Bush Administration’s development of nuclear contingency plans against seven countries (Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Syria), but also shows that the administration lacks a concrete understanding of the realities of nuclear weapons use.

I come from a family that directly survived the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing, and I can unequivocally say that we must never be allowed to use nuclear weapons again.

My grandmother was in a storage house when the blast first hit her house, pushing her from one side of the room to the other, shattering the window and sending glass shards into her body.

My grandfather was working in the city education department, and when the blast hit, the roof of the building he was in collapsed, though luckily he was able to get under his desk to escape being crushed.

“So we were among the lucky ones,” he said. “But after the bomb you’d go to school and there were a lot of burned people and their skin was peeled off like new potatoes. Their skin would just peel off ... a lot of people needed help but there weren’t that many people to help them ... they had to burn the dead people, so they made a hole and they just put the bodies in there and you could smell this smell of dead meat, a dead bodies smell.”

All in all, over 200,000 people died because of the Hiroshima bomb blast, and another 140,000 died from the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. These numbers include the count of those that died from the radiation aftereffects that would waste a person away from the insides.

With the use of modern nuclear weapons, however, the gruesome reality of the power and radiation that modern nuclear weapons would produce make the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pale in comparison. Additionally, the effects of radiation poisoning would contaminate the land, air and water for generations.

These are the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush Administration would so flippantly consider to be appropriate for use on other countries, in the most egregious shift in nuclear policy in the last fifty years.

Indeed, the U.S.’s unilateralist revision of the role of nuclear weapons only underscores the administration’s failure to deal with the root causes of international instability. This includes the conditions of economic inequality and lack of access to the bargaining table that precipitate the soil for anger against the U.S. to grow and flourish. These actions have come in combination with the Bush Administration’s emphasis on building a “Star Wars” missile defense system that has shown to be faulty and ineffective in even being able to tell the difference between actual and “dummy” warheads.

All in all, these events only highlight the thoughtlessness of an administration that has single-handedly upset the precarious balance of a post-Cold War era. Bush’s actions will only serve to anger the international community even more, in a time when the U.S. needs to be building stronger relations. In addition, the administration’s hawkish position will only serve to stir other nations to develop nuclear capabilities and bring the world one step closer to the possibility of nuclear destruction.

The reality of nuclear weapons is a grim and tragic nightmare from which we still have not awoken. The Bush Administration’s actions are an affront not only to the international community, but also to our very future as a species.

We simply cannot allow the expansion of the role of nuclear weapons in this country, and must firmly act to stop this madness from continuing. If we fail to do so, our children will wake up in a more treacherous and horrific future.

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