Radioactive Colonization: The Impacts of Nuclear Weaponry on Non-White Populations

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota

On August 6, 1945, my grandparents and father luckily survived the worst horrors of the nuclear bombing in Hiroshima. As American citizens by birth, my grandmother and father (aged two) had by the merest chance been situated behind a hill some two and a half kilometers away from the blast and had thus evaded the vaporization or slow death by radiation poisoning promised by the bomb blast.

My grandfather, an educator, had also been lucky, and though buffeted by the blast, had survived to walk the long road home.

Yet while my family still lives on, the memory of the horrors of the bombs have not, and some fifty years after the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we, as the United States, still have not faced up to the true nature of the atomic bombs and the nuclear legacy that five decades of the Cold War have left to our generation.

Even further, however, we have failed to adequately address the deeper and more insidious side of nuclear weapons, mainly in the way that nuclear weapons, waste, and testing have only spelled destruction and suffering for nonwhite peoples since the beginnings of the nuclear age in Alamagordo.

To begin with, 140,000 nonwhite men, women, and children died in the bomb blast in Hiroshima. Another 70,000 died three days later in Nagasaki. Scholars and nuclear apologists have attempted to explain the horrors of the bomb blast in terms of "military necessity," and oftentimes cite the thousands of American soldiers that they claim were saved by the blast.

And sadly, the recent controversy in the Smithsonian Institute has shown that the forces of historical inaccuracy and blind patriotism have gained the upper hand in failing to address the true nature of the atomic bombs. For if they had truly addressed the horrors of the bombs, they would've seen that there is nothing glorious or commendable about the wholesale slaughter and destruction of thousands of innocent civilians, or the sentencing of their offspring to deformations and abnormalities as a result of nuclear radiation.

In fact, if all of the facts surrounding the bombings were truly addressed, then the racism that surrounded the decision to bomb Japan would be revealed in its truest light.

For, as discussed in John Dower's historical analysis War Without Mercy, if the context of the war were adequately analyzed, the racist viewpoint of our American government would be clearly revealed as a major factor in determining the rationale for the bomb's use. For, as noted in Dower's text, when Truman decided on the use of the bomb, he felt that "this was regrettable but necessary, . . . because the Japanese were 'savage, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic.'"

In fact, there can be no mistake that the incarceration of my great-grandfather in an Arkansas concentration camp, along with 120,000 other American citizens of Japanese ancestry, was linked with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the common thread of racially-based decision making on the part of our government.

Yet even beyond the actual use of nuclear weaponry on nonwhite peoples, the mere presence of nuclear waste in America has had extremely detrimental effects on nonwhite populations here in the U.S., largely by impacting the Native American population through environmental racism.

When considering that the U.S. arms industry generated some 100,000 kilograms of plutonium over the last 50 years for nuclear weapons construction, with "340 gallons of highly radioactive waste and more than 55,000 gallons of low- to middle-level radioactive waste" produced for every one kilogram of plutonium, the size of the nuclear waste problem becomes readily apparent. These nuclear wastes produce devastatingly lethal effects on organic creatures for the duration of their half-lives, which can range from 500-600 years in the lowest levels to 250,000 years in radionuclides.

Native American reservation lands and water supplies have been contaminated time and again by the radioactive tailings left by Uranium mines, by nuclear waste left on reservation land, and by contamination of Native water supplies. All of these offenses have had devastating effects on the Native populations, as cattle and livestock have died of radiation poisoning, Native peoples have been contaminated, and radiation-related birth defects have risen among the children of Native women throughout the nation.

All of this has amounted to a situation that scholars LaDuke and Churchill have called "radioactive colonization," where Native populations have been pushed to near extinction by the policies of those corporate and governmental entities that continue to push for the development of nuclear weaponry and power.

From nuclear waste to nuclear testing, nonwhite people have continued to suffer the effects of this "radioactive colonization."

The 1954 detonation of a 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb on the Bikini atoll, for example, effectively brought about the displacement of the native residents of the island, as noted in the film "The Atomic Cafe," destroying their entire traditional way of life, due to the radioactive contamination of their original lands and waters.

In Polynesia's Moruroa atoll, French underground nuclear testing has reduced the island to a "Swiss cheese of fractured rock," with a concurrent growth of radiation-related diseases in surrounding communities in places like Tahiti.

Yet the French have never conducted nuclear testing on their own soil. Even further, just last month, French President Jacques Chirac expressed his plans to resume underground nuclear testing in the South Pacific, and yet there has been no cry of outrage from the international community, and no significant coverage of this situation.

The reason for this silence becomes readily apparent, however, when realizing that the people most effected by the testing will be, again, the nonwhite populations of the South Pacific. As noted by American Samoa Representative Faleomavaega, "Nuclear explosions constitute the ultimate rape of a people," and the French, and even the United States, have expressed their desire to resume nuclear testing.

As demonstrated by the continuing impact that nuclear weapons development, testing, and waste have had on nonwhite populations, it becomes increasingly evident that nuclear weapons and waste continue to be major problems today, and hold especially dire tidings for nonwhite populations throughout the world. For though the Cold War has ended, the weaponry that supported it still remains, like a loaded gun ready to explode, or like a slow poison bubbling to the surface.

As we approach the anniversary of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it becomes clear that there is a continuing need for sober reflection on the global state of nuclear affairs, and a dire necessity to remove the menace of nuclear weapons, testing, and waste, once and for all.

Now we must remember, as LaDuke and Churchill point out, that "radioactive colonialism" "can never be someone else's problem; regardless of its immediate location at the moment, it has become the problem and peril of everyone alive, and who will be alive."

Now we must remember that we are all endangered by the threat of nuclear weapons and their lethal and ever-present legacy.

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