Category Archives: Hiroshima

Lanterns for Peace 2022

We joined Wisconsin Physicians for Social Responsibility for this family friendly event to commemorate the lives lost in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings 77 years ago and make sure that such nuclear attacks never again take place. We remember the past, so that we can envision and work for a peaceful, just and nuclear-free future.

LISTEN IN TO wort 89.9FM ~  Hannah Mortensen from Physicians for Social Responsibility Wisconsin talks about their upcoming “Lanterns for Peace” event on August 7th, to remember the 77th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Open to public at 6:30pm for people to create lanterns
Program starts at 7:30pm
Lanterns start going out at dusk approximately 7:45-8:00pm

The event will be open to the public to attend at Tenney Park outside of the John Wall Family Pavilion and (weather & temperature depending) the entire event will be held outdoors. You are welcome to mail in your lantern if you cannot be in attendance. Please wear a mask if you are unvaccinated and maintain social distancing.

More information >> https://psr-wisconsin.org/lanterns-for-peace

 

2022 Event Sponsors:
– The Friends Meeting of Madison
– Interfaith Peace Working Group (IPWG)
– Linda and Gene Farley Center for Peace, Justice & Sustainability
– Madison Raging Grannies
– Madison Veterans for Peace
– Madison Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF)
– Nukewatch
– PC Foundation
– Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin
– United Nations Association of Dane County
– Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars
– Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice

*PS: PSR WI has reused the styrofoam bases, candles and skewer sticks for the lanterns for at least 6 years. PSR WI removes all the materials from the Tenney Park Lagoon and we leave no trace.

Lanterns for Peace — PSR Wisconsin (psr-wisconsin.org)


“I wanted to thank you once again for supporting Lanterns for Peace 2022! I am feeling uplifted and inspired to continue our work for a better world after the event.

Follow this link for photos and a few videos.

You are free to download any of them and use as you wish > https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1agPWdb-JrHgnRkyHZt_ylJGrm196Cvrt?usp=sharing

Thanks again

Hannah

PSR Wisconsin

[email protected]

www.psr-wisconsin.org

720 Hill Street, Suite 200, Madison, WI 53705

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


May be an image of text that says 'के 時 OPSR PSR WISCONSIN w I ο S Physicians for Social Responsibility'

Peace Walks ~ for Ukraine and the World ~ Fri August 19 @ 6

Peace Walks for Ukraine and the World

Join us to walk to promote and demand peace. 

For your calendar, here are two Peace Walks in August with special speakers.  Details below and updates are posted here.

  • Friday, Aug 19 at 6 pm – Special speaker Zubeir Haroun  

  • Friday, Aug 26 at 6 pm – Special speaker Lisa Masri

 

On August 19, we are so very pleased that Zubeir Haroun will give a talk about Libya.   Zubeir was born in Tripoli, Libya and lived there until 2007.  He will explain the situation in Libya after the so-called Arab spring, a rare event in which Libyans could have had a chance for prosperity but instead it slipped into a nightmare and chaos.  He’ll talk about the negative role of NATO, and how the US could have helped better.  He’ll present a brief history of Libya, the formation of Libya, and how we got here.   Zubeir recently moved with his family to Madison and they have participated in Madison Peace Walks.

We’re delighted to welcome Lisa Masri to speak at the Peace Walk on July 22.  Lisa and her family recently moved to Madison, and she’s participated in the Peace Walks for Ukraine and the World.  Before coming here, she lived in Palestine for 14 years, doing education and nonviolent accompaniment work with Project Hope and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Project.  Her peace work there in the West Bank was with youth, adults, and international volunteers, and included being an international presence in hot spots, and teaching English, French, drama, and circus arts.  Lisa will share about her work and answer your questions.

Lanterns for Peace 2020

Join us from your home for this family friendly event to commemorate the lives lost in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings 75 years ago and make sure that such nuclear attacks never again take place. We remember the past, so that we can envision and work for a peaceful, just and nuclear-free future. Due to COVID-19, there will be no public gathering for Lanterns for Peace but we will still be holding a lantern launch streamed online.

Lanterns for Peace 2020 Youtube Video

Lanterns for Peace: Physicians for Social Responsibility-Wisconsin

 

 

The use of nuclear weapons is a war crime.  The use of nuclear weapons violates multiple parts of the Laws of Armed Conflict.


Visitors to the National Air and Space Museum—America’s shrine to the technological leading edge of the military industrial complex—hear a familiar narrative from the tour guides in front of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped an atomic weapon on the civilians of Hiroshima 70 years ago today.

The bomb was dropped, they say, to save the lives of thousands of Americans who would otherwise have been killed in an invasion of the Home Islands. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely destroyed and the lives of between 135,000 and 300,000 mostly Japanese women, children, and old people were sacrificed—most young men were away at war—as the result of a terrible but morally just calculus aimed at bringing an intractable war to a close.

This story may assuage the conscience of the air museum visitor, but it is largely myth, fashioned to buttress our memories of the “good” war. By and large, the top generals and admirals who managed World War II knew better. Consider the small and little-noticed plaque hanging in the National Museum of the US Navy that accompanies the replica of “Little Boy,” the weapon used against the people of Hiroshima: In its one paragraph, it makes clear that Truman’s “political advisors” overruled the military in determining the way in which the end of the war in Japan would be approached. Furthermore, contrary to the popular myths around the atomic bomb’s nearly magical power to end the war, the Navy Museum’s explication of the history clearly indicates that “the vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military.”
Indeed, it would have been surprising if they had: Despite the terrible concentrated power of atomic weapons, the firebombing of Tokyo earlier in 1945 and the destruction of numerous Japanese cities by conventional bombing had killed far more people. The Navy Museum acknowledges what many historians have long known: It was only with the entry of the Soviet Union’s Red Army into the war two days after the bombing of Hiroshima that the Japanese moved to finally surrender. Japan was used to losing cities to American bombing; what their military leaders feared more was the destruction of the country’s military by an all-out Red Army assault.

The top American military leaders who fought World War II, much to the surprise of many who are not aware of the record, were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, and—for many—that the destruction of large numbers of civilians was immoral. Most were also conservatives, not liberals. Adm. William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.… in being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

The commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, Henry “Hap” Arnold, gave a strong indication of his views in a public statement only eleven days after Hiroshima was attacked. Asked on August 17 by a New York Times reporter whether the atomic bomb caused Japan to surrender, Arnold said that “the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.”

Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan…” Adm. William “Bull” Halsey Jr., Commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…. It was a mistake to ever drop it…. [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it…”

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, for his part, stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…” He later publicly declared “…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Even the famous “hawk” Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command, went public the month after the bombing, telling the press that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
The record is quite clear: From the perspective of an overwhelming number of key contemporary leaders in the US military, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a matter of military necessity. American intelligence had broken the Japanese codes, knew the Japanese government was trying to negotiate surrender through Moscow, and had long advised that the expected early August Russian declaration of war, along with assurances that Japan’s Emperor would be allowed to stay as a powerless figurehead, would bring surrender long before the first step in a November US invasion, three months later, could begin.

Historians still do not have a definitive answer to why the bomb was used. Given that US intelligence advised the war would likely end if Japan were given assurances regarding the Emperor—and given that the US military knew it would have to keep the Emperor to help control occupied Japan in any event—something else clearly seems to have been important. We do know that some of President Truman’s closest advisers viewed the bomb as a diplomatic and not simply a military weapon. Secretary of State James Byrnes, for instance, believed that the use of atomic weapons would help the United States more strongly dominate the postwar era. According to Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, who met with him on May 28, 1945, “[Byrnes] was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior…[and thought] that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.

”History is rarely simple, and confronting it head-on, with critical honesty, is often quite painful. Myths, no matter how oversimplified or blatantly false, are too often far more likely to be embraced than inconvenient and unsettling truths.

Even now, for instance, we see how difficult it is for the average US citizen to come to terms with the brutal record of slavery and white supremacy that underlies so much of our national story. Remaking our popular understanding of the “good” war’s climactic act is likely to be just as hard. But if the Confederate battle flag can come down in South Carolina, we can perhaps one day begin to ask ourselves more challenging questions about the nature of America’s global power, and what is true and what is false about why we really dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.”

Madison is a Nuclear Free Zone

In 1983, the Madison City Council passed an ordinance declaring the city a nuclear free zone”.

 

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Wisconsin and Veterans for Peace-Madison are asking our City Council members (Alders) to pass a Back from the Brink Resolution which builds on this ordinance and commits the city to nuclear weapons free contracts and investments. Our City already has a socially responsible investment policy in place; it no longer invests in fossil fuel companies. We are asking the City do the same regarding nuclear weapons production.

Back from the Brink Background