Beyond Nuclear International
Haunted by Hiroshima, Rae Street has spent 40 years working for peace
“I broke down in tears at seeing the trike whose rider had been vaporised when the bomb fell. My small grandson was the same age”
By Beth Abbit, Manchester Evening News, UK
Rae Street has been arrested, travelled the world and camped out on an RAF base — all in the name of peace.
The British campaigner has spent almost four decades fighting to raise awareness of the devastating effects of nuclear weapons.
Former teacher Rae, 80, has protested outside NATO headquarters and embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the U.S to promote a message of nuclear disarmament.
She was even part of the famous Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp — an anti nuclear protest which spanned almost 20 years.
But it was during a visit to Hiroshima — the city where the United States detonated a nuclear bomb during WWII — that Rae was convinced the fight to eradicate nuclear weapons was so vital.
Shin’s tricycle, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, moved Rae Street to tears
“One visit which deeply moved me above all others was being at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorative events,” says Rae, from Littleborough, Rochdale.
“I broke down in tears and collapsed in the dust at seeing the trike whose small rider had been vaporised when the bomb fell. My small grandson was the same age.”
Melania Trump likes to recycle; Donald Trump prefers the trash
Iran nuclear deal is the latest to go
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Melania Trump has demonstrated a keen interest in recycling — her speech at the Republican National Convention (Michelle Obama); her recent “Be Best” pamphlet (Obama Federal Trade Commission); the inaugural cake (Obama again) and so on.
Her less popular husband, on the other hand, prefers to trash everything — Affordable Care Act, DACA, Paris Climate Agreement, NAFTA (maybe), Trans-Pacific Partnership, Keystone Pipeline cancelation, Endangered Species Act, pretty much any and all environmental regulations. And now the Iran Nuclear Deal. But each time without any plans for an alternative.
The Wrecking Ball in Chief has struck one of his most dangerous blows in pulling the US out of the Iran nuclear deal — known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. And not only for the most obvious reasons, related to nuclear weapons development in the Middle East.
A whole island once, now become tomb
The nuclear atrocities committed by the US against the Marshall Islands come alive in six minutes of poetry and images
You were a whole island, once.
Who remembers you beyond your death?
Who would have us forget that you were once green globes of fruit, Pandanus roots and whispers of canoes?
Poet, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and director Dan Lin take you to the Marshall Islands, its beauty, its history, its legends and traditions. And its deadly radioactive curse. The US “tested” 67 atomic bombs on the Marshall Islands, destroying atolls, sickening and displacing people, treating humans like guinea-pigs, and abusing one of the most pristine places on Earth as its radioactive trash bin.
Bootin’ Putin
Women led a legal challenge that killed a Russian nuclear deal in South Africa
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The first thing that South Africans Liz McDaid and Makoma Lekalakala, pictured above and the 2018 winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa, will tell you is that there were many others who contributed to the victory for which they received the award. They were never — and will never be — alone in their fight.
That victory was a win last year in the South African High Court which ruled that a secret nuclear power deal between Russia and the then Zuma government was unconstitutional. It effectively chased Rosatom, the Russian government-owned nuclear corporation, out of the country. It was the culmination of several years of broad campaigning across many strategies and demographics.
Since the court victory, Zuma has stepped down and Cyril Ramaphosa, who is trying desperately to restore confidence in their shared political affiliation, the ANC, has taken the helm. So far, Ramaphosa has suggested that nuclear energy is not affordable for South Africa. For now, Lekalakala and McDaid remain on the winning side.
Leave uranium in the ground
Thirty years ago, those who feel strongly it should stay there, started a movement.
By Günter Wippel
Just over 30 years ago — on April 10, 1988 — seven indigenous activists from different parts of the world set out on a three-week public awareness tour through Germany. They called their tour “Leave Uranium in the Ground.” Its purpose was to bring the detrimental impacts of uranium mining and nuclear weapons tests on health, environment and indigenous peoples, to the awareness of German people and decision-makers in provincial and federal parliaments.
Why Germany? Because West German companies were directly involved in uranium extraction in countries around the world. And often, these operations were carried out on indigenous lands. (In the former East Germany, the Wismut uranium mines that supplied the Soviet Union operated until after reunification, closing in 1991.)
Joan Wingfield and Arlo Guthrie at the World Uranium Hearing, 1992. Photo: Dick Bancroft
Bikini was just the beginning
Update! Please also see the extraordinary video poem, Anointed, by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, posted here about the Marshall Islands atomic legacy.
John Pilger visits the Marshall Islands and its bomb survivors, still blighted by US nuclear weapons. (Article courtesy of New Internationalist)
By John Pilger
I was recently in the Marshall Islands, which lie in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, north of Australia and south of Hawaii. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, ‘Where is that?’
When I mention Bikini, their reference is the swimsuit. Few seem aware that the bikini was named after the nuclear explosions that destroyed life on Bikini atoll; its Paris designer hoped his ‘unique creation’ would ‘cause an explosion right round the world’. Sixty-seven nuclear bombs – each of them massive – were exploded in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12 years.
The Bikini atomic test
As my aircraft banked low over Bikini lagoon, the emerald water beneath me disappeared into a vast black hole, a deathly void. This is the crater left by the 1954 Hydrogen bomb known as Bravo. When I stepped out of the plane, my shoes registered ‘unsafe’ on a Geiger counter. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations. There were no birds.
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