Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506170003
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES J. HANLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HIROSHIMA, JAPAN LENGTH: Long
``Look!'' someone shouted. ``B-29!''
Yoshitaka leaped from his desk to the window. A flash of light stunned him, and then his world exploded around him.
When he awoke, buried in the ruins of his school, he could hear classmates singing, trapped and dying boys finding a last breath of courage in a school song.
He sang, too, until the voices faded one by one and he sang alone.
He struggled for hours to pull himself from the rubble. Finally, somehow, he crawled out into a city ablaze, a bloody, broken 13-year-old at the dawn of a dangerous new age.
A fire still burns in Hiroshima a half-century later.
``That's the Flame of Peace,'' Yoshitaka Kawamoto says of the flame-tipped memorial. ``When we abolish nuclear weapons, we will put out the fire.''
The gray-haired man smiles at the boy inside. ``I may sound idealistic, but I want to be idealistic until the day I die.''
Fifty years into the nuclear age, after generations of missiles and missilemen, after decades of summits and dealmaking, after uncountable radiation victims and unknowable brushes with catastrophe, the nuclear arms race has largely ended.
Just a decade ago, the idea of freezing nuclear arsenals was dismissed as radical fantasy. Today, the United States and Russia are dismantling as many as 4,000 warheads a year. By 2003, under the START I and II treaties, they will reduce deployment of strategic warheads to one-third what it was at the height of the Cold War.
But if the race has ended, the dangers have not.
Just one of 60 missile submarines roaming the oceans still packs the firepower of 1,000 Hiroshimas. Even the three ``minor'' nuclear states - Britain, France and China - can still obliterate an enemy instantly. And more and more nations are finding nuclear weapons within their reach.
Viktor N. Mikhailov, who once designed warheads, applauds their destruction.
``Today I think we are on the right path,'' the Russian atomic energy minister said in a Moscow interview. But moving forward will be difficult. ``We are at a very important point in history.''
The road ahead leads not just through missile silos, but through the heart of world economies, including in Japan, where even the lights of Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Museum, the institution that Yoshitaka Kawamoto grew up to head, run on the power first unleashed here one summer's morning a lifetime ago.
Early in this 50th-anniversary year, some of Mikhailov's scientists made a remarkable journey to the Los Alamos weapons laboratories in New Mexico, to consult with their U.S. counterparts on what to do with plutonium, the deadly leftover from dismantled bombs.
The working sessions among old adversaries closed a historic circle in a sense, for it was in New Mexico's desert that their nuclear arms race began, on July 16, 1945, when specialists of the ``Manhattan Project'' detonated the first atomic bomb.
``What an explosion!'' Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves said in messaging Washington about the terrifying energy released when heavy atoms were split in the ``fission'' device.
Three weeks later, at 8:16 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dubbed Enola Gay dropped an A-bomb over Hiroshima equal to 15,000 tons of TNT. Three days after that, a second bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
An estimated 210,000 men, women and children were killed outright or died later from the two bombings. Albert Einstein, the physicist whose theories pointed the way to nuclear energy, grieved after hearing of its use. ``If I were to be born again, I would like to be a plumber or peddler,'' he said.
The bombs helped bring the war with Japan to a quick end. But they served a further purpose, too - impressing the Soviet Union with American might. When the Soviets finally exploded their own nuclear test in 1949, the grim game of technological leapfrog was joined.
In 1954, on the remote Pacific atoll of Bikini, the Americans tested a hydrogen bomb - in which a fission bomb causes the ``fusion'' of light atoms for an even greater explosion. The fallout from that cataclysmic 15-megaton blast - equivalent to 15 million tons of TNT - sickened people on atolls more than 300 miles away.
A doomsday culture grew in America. Schoolchildren were taught to ``duck and cover'' under their desks, to expect a holocaust at any moment. Homeowners were encouraged to build backyard fallout shelters.
The Russians struggled to keep up. They deployed the first intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1958, but were quickly outclassed and far outnumbered by U.S. missiles.
American scientists and engineers went on to develop the submarine-launched missile (1960), the multiple-warhead missile (1968) and the cruise missile (early 1970s) anywhere from two to five years before the Soviets.
Not until the 1980s did Moscow achieve the nuclear parity it long sought, at great sacrifice to an overburdened economy.
Between them, the two superpowers fielded more than 60,000 nuclear warheads, the equivalent of three tons of TNT - twice the power of the bomb that wrecked the Oklahoma City federal building - for every person on Earth. The perverse stability of ``mutual assured destruction,'' a balance of terror, took hold.
But the costs were huge, not only in fortunes spent, but in stretches of land - from Hanford, Wash., to Chelyabinsk in Russia's Urals - contaminated with the wastes of weapons production, and in unknown numbers of people doomed by fallout from atmospheric testing at Bikini, in Nevada and at Soviet sites.
Global opposition to those tests led to the first success for nuclear arms control - the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, prohibiting explosions in the atmosphere. The people of Hiroshima lighted their ``peace flame.'' But disarmament remained low on the Cold War agenda.
Although the SALT agreements of the 1970s put limits - high ceilings - on the costly competition, it took an arms buildup in the 1980s to finally produce an arms ``builddown.''
To rid Western Europe of new middle-range U.S. missiles, the Soviets agreed to eliminate their own intermediate missiles. And that 1987 agreement spurred the broader strategic arms reduction talks - START.
In 1991, as the Soviet economy reeled, President Bush and Soviet President Gorbachev signed the first START treaty, slashing strategic warheads by one-third. After the Soviet Communist Party collapsed that August, and the Cold War with it, the two presidents went further, withdrawing thousands of short-range warheads from tactical units on land and sea.
In January 1993, Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin took the next step, signing the START II treaty to reduce strategic warheads to below 3,500 per side.
``Obviously there's a trend - to put it mildly,'' a veteran U.S. arms negotiator, Ralph Earle, said in an interview. ``It's clearly to the benefit of the United States and of Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenals.''
Just last month, Earle helped notch another breakthrough, permanent renewal of the 25-year-old Non-Proliferation Treaty, which commits 178 nations to try to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of all but five nations that already possess them - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.
At that conference, the weapon states agreed to a goal of outlawing underground nuclear tests by 1996 and of halting production of fissionable material for weapons.
Such restraints, nonweapon states believe, will slowly move the world toward abolition of nuclear arms, as prescribed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself.
But there is no guarantee the ``trend'' will continue. It could stall on opposition from the smaller nuclear powers, or on partisan politics back home, where the Russian Duma and U.S. Senate have yet to ratify START II.
Or it could bog down in its own success.
After all, as the United States and Russia disassemble warheads, they have yet to decide how to deal with the remnants - the awesomely dangerous ``physics package'' at the heart of each bomb.
That was why Mikhailov's men journeyed to New Mexico - not to commemorate what happened there 50 years ago, but to talk about tomorrow, and plutonium.
``We consider plutonium the top achievement of mankind,'' said Victor M. Murogov, one of those who went to Los Alamos. ``On the one hand, it's a great danger. On the other, it's a great asset.''
The silvery metal, a man-made element, is most commonly extracted from used nuclear fuel. It is probably the most dangerous cancer-causing material on Earth. But it also is ideal for chain reactions - whether in reactors or bombs.
Murogov, a nuclear physicist, heads a Russian institute that develops new reactors, including designs for burning plutonium for energy.
The U.S. attitude toward plutonium - no more production, no use, simply bury it somewhere forever - is ``an ostrich policy, hiding your head under your wing,'' Murogov said.
He said plutonium power reactors will serve ``as a bottle for the genie'' - a way to dispose of plutonium usefully.
But when a city-leveling bomb can be made from just a fistful of plutonium, many grow nervous at the prospect of hundreds of tons of it stockpiled worldwide. Reports of small amounts already smuggled from the former Soviet Union heighten the fears.
``Unless we acknowledge and begin to deal with the danger of plutonium in civilian commerce, we are risking a nuclear holocaust at the hands of terrorists or outlaw states,'' said Paul Leventhal, an American anti-plutonium campaigner.
The commerce may be greatest right here in Japan, where uranium reactors already produce 28 percent of the electricity, and the government sends used nuclear fuel to Britain and France for reprocessing into plutonium.
By 2000, Japan will have its own large plutonium production plant, and by 2030 a major plutonium-burning power plant.
Fossil fuels and uranium may run out, said Shinichiro Izumi, who oversees nuclear fuel for Japan's Science and Technology Agency. ``Long term, 50 or 100 years, it's important to promote plutonium use, to have more options.''
Jinzaburo Takagi, a Japanese anti-nuclear activist, believes the government recognizes its plutonium plans are a costly mistake.
``But there are too many big enterprises involved, too many contracts,'' he said. ``The main factor now is bureaucratic inertia.''
Inertia: first law of the nuclear age.
World figures are lining up to stop the momentum of nuclear arms. Russia's Gorbachev has endorsed a ``citizen's pledge'' to seek abolition of the weapons. Pope John Paul II appealed in February that they be banished forever. The U.N. secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, said in April that a nuclear ban should be ``humanity's great common cause.''
But how to do it?
Anti-nuclear advocates see a precedent in the 1993 treaty outlawing chemical weapons and its tough inspection system for foiling cheaters.
``You can't disinvent nuclear weapons. We all know that,'' said Daniel Ellsberg, a prominent American peace activist. ``You can't disinvent chemical weapons either. But we have banned them.''
But Earle, the U.S. arms negotiator, contends the comparison is flawed, because a failure of the chemical inspection system cannot be equated to the danger of a cheater's single nuclear bomb.
``Look at what happened in Tokyo,'' he said, speaking of the terrorist gas attack in March that killed 12 people in the subway. ``If you put one nuclear weapon in one subway line you have a rather different result.''
Another top U.S. arms envoy, Thomas Graham, is blunt about prospects for eliminating nuclear arsenals.
Serious negotiations on abolition are ``not possible under any foreseeable circumstance,'' he told an arms control newsletter. The reason: ``We don't know how to get there.''
In the end, they may be driven there by a force less benign than peace crusaders.
If the nuclear powers move too slowly toward the disarmament mandated by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, nonweapon states will grow increasingly uneasy in a world permanently divided between nuclear ``haves'' and ``have-nots.'' More may seek their own atomic arms, as Iraq and North Korea did.
Such a warning came, diplomatically phrased, from the Sri Lankan chairman of last month's Non-Proliferation Treaty conference.
``Citizens of countries could press their governments to reconsider the treaty if there is a persistent and prolonged refusal to honor its obligations,'' Jayantha Dhanapala said.
But how to meet the ``obligations''?
One former U.S. arms negotiator has offered a plan.
Jonathan Dean proposes phased reductions to a few hundred warheads for each nuclear power. To prevent surprise attacks, warheads would be separated from missiles, and all would be watched over by international monitors. Civilian use of plutonium would be banned.
This nuclear ``neutralization'' is the most that can be expected, Dean says, because without a genuine world security system, ``it is very unlikely that the nuclear weapon states would agree to give up their weapons completely.''
While the debates go on, so does the inertia.
As diplomats negotiate an underground test ban, France and the United States pursue still new techniques, planning centers for laser and computer simulation of bomb tests.
As the nuclear powers recommit themselves to the ultimate goal of nuclear abolition, the United States is designing a $5 billion plant to produce tritium, a vital trigger in hydrogen bombs, into the mid-21st century.
As the nuclear age enters its second half-century, its visionaries predict the best of times. Their bombs may even save the Earth.
``We have proposals for using nuclear devices to strike asteroids headed for our planet,'' said Mikhailov. ``It's not a high probability, but the danger is enormous. All mankind would be at risk.'
``My God! What have we done?''
A stunned crewman's question, 50 years ago, echoed through the headphones of the Enola Gay as it raced from the inferno below.
In time, Hiroshima's ruins gave way to a new city of high-rises, parks and cherry blossoms, of McDonald's, baseball diamonds and Mazda assembly lines.
But memory cannot be paved over.
The people of Hiroshima will always remind the world that ``nuclear weapons are cruel weapons, inhuman weapons,'' said Mayor Takashi Hiraoka. ``They should be abolished.''
Even in Japan, however, the black and white of atomic arms sometimes fades to gray.
Michio Royama was a student in Tokyo when word came that long-ago August of the horrifying new weapon. Much of his life since has been spent examining war and peace, and he has come to believe in nuclear deterrence.
``I am not so confident in the human ability to live peacefully with each other without nuclear weapons,'' said Royama, one of Japan's leading strategic thinkers.
Today in Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima schoolchildren crisscross the places where the wind once roared like six hurricanes, where people were vaporized in a heat hotter than the surface of the sun.
They stop by the museum, the Flame of Peace, the large burial mound. And they learn.
``Nuclear energy is something dangerous, I think,'' 13-year-old Kumiko Fukawa tells an American visitor. ``Fifty years ago, we had an atomic bombing here. But I think it probably can be used for good things, too.''
Nearby, another girl kneels mutely, engraved in stone, a figure on a memorial to children who perished that day.
In her arms this perpetual student holds a box that holds an equation, ``E equals MC-squared,'' the formula for good and evil that Einstein bequeathed to a fearful age that was born in this spot, in a flash of light, a half-century ago.
by CNB