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A fight against nuclear weapons
AT 27, the Japanese child rights activist, Mioi Nakayama, is obviously too young to remember Japan's unconditional capitulation ending World War II after the world's first atomic bombs were dropped on that country.
Also too young to recall the bombing of Pearl Harbour without any warning or provocation by Japan, which set off the course of events leading to the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Now in Bangalore, Nakayama is trying to compare what is happening today in Iraq with the destruction of Hiroshima in Japan on August 6, 1945.
That she was born and brought up in Hiroshima makes up for her lack of firsthand knowledge of the events of World War II.
"Although 59 years have passed since the Hiroshima tragedy, nuclear weapons still exist in our world. Moreover, we have seen the Iraqi war, which has violated human rights and is against international law. I want to emphasise the importance of this Hiroshima Day as well as the crime that is the Iraq war," Nakayama says.
Nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons only escalated with the dawn of the Cold War. "By the late Eighties, 22 billion tonnes of nuclear weapons had been accumulated by the five nuclear powers — the U.S., the U.K., Russia, France, and China.
This is equal to 14,70,000 bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima... enough to kill about 200 billion people! By 2002, seven nations including India and Pakistan possessed 17,150 warheads and they are enough to kill the world's population several times over. Thus far, 2,092 nuclear tests have been conducted all over the world, including those by India," she says.
Testing ground
The worry among the thinking people of the world, which Nakayama echoes, is whether Iraq is turning out to be another testing ground for a super, advanced military power. There is also another side to all that money being spent on conquering Iraq. "We cannot have nuclear weapons while children are not in school; 115 million of them below 14 years have never attended school. To put them in school, we need the equivalent of Rs. 500 billion to Rs. 750 billion annually. This is equal to three days of global military spending. Let us not be militarised but get educated," she appeals.
By K.S.
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