Debra Sweet | August 17, 2023
Debra: I think it’s been all of our experience both people that go out to speak very publicly on the streets and also to students that the past and potential future use of nuclear weapons is not front of mind. What happened 78 years ago and the danger of what is shaping up is not front of mind for people living in this country. It just isn’t. There’s a lot of avoidance of what this country is doing around the world. But specifically, I don’t think many people know that both Obama and Biden went to Hiroshima and did not apologize, pointedly for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Outrageously, the U.S. will not abandon the right of first nuclear strike. That is not widely known. All those who spoke point in a direction for us to work o opening people’s minds and eyes up and getting the actual history out there. It’s extremely important if you’re talking about changing the world, turning things over, setting up new values. We have to struggle with people over this.
Agnes: … it wasn’t a film that you should just see and then go home. That’s why I was drawn to it….The film spent a lot of time showing how Oppenheimer suffered but there were a lot of others who suffered. My husband’s brother was in one of those testing sites. They were told, “just turn your back.” Years later, when he was still a fairly young man, he got a very rare blood disease that is absolutely related to the radioactivity he was exposed to. How many more casualties? How many more people die? We will never know.
Zeke: … it didn’t show the effect on the people the U.S. actually bombed… The framing of it was he U.S. was doing this to beat the Nazis. and the movie does indicate that the Nazis were beaten when the bomb was used. It mentions that Japanese ruling class had been putting out diplomatic feelers to surrender but the U.S. went ahead and dropped the bomb anyway… It doesn’t get into the bigger picture how this was a war between competing imperialist powers. One faction was fascist and one faction was bourgeois democratic – the United States, France, and England were aligned.
Robin: … the anti-communism came out, even during the war, when we were on the same side as Soviet Russia with Oppenheimer being quizzed even back then.
Stephanie: … this happened at a point in the fight against fascism when a lot of people who should have known better didn’t predict where the future was going … It focuses too much on Strauss who calls himself “Straws” and names Oppenheimer as a communist or someone with communist leanings who, therefore, should lose his security clearance. At that point, the United States had changed from fighting fascism to fighting communism or socialism. “Straws” was used as the individual to carry that out. But it was really that the United States had become the main imperialist power and had to get rid of any kind of opposition among people who had any kind of influence within society, especially in the military. So “Straws” was like their straw man. The focus on him made the film personal rather than showing the bigger picture.
Sema: … we all grew up with the fear, a very striking, a very visceral fear our whole generation grew up with. The Los Alamos culture got into this secrecy supposedly to end fascism but replacing it with a grander fascism in a bowl of fire kind of thing… There have been a lot of instruments, agreements and treaties, on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons… in 2017, there was a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons and many countries have ratified it. The problem with it is that the nuclear countries are not signatories,… They don’t want to be regulated. They want to regulate everybody else…[Sema sent more information on the non-proliferation treaty, which we will share.]
Carl: … The competition was over who was going to get the nuclear bomb first. They said the U.S. dropping the bombs on Japan is about saving American lives and ometimes even claimed to save Japanese lives, which is an interesting way to lie – to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese to save Japanese lives. But it’s all a lie. The U.S. was aware that Japan was ready to surrender. One of Truman’s biographers quotes him as saying, got a telegram from the “Japemperor” who wants to surrender. This was a few weeks before they went ahead with dropping the bombs. The bombs were not required to end the war. They were a statement to the world about future U.S. domination and the viciousness with which the U.S. was ready to maintain and defend that.
The U.S. has maintained that legacy up to today – napalm in Vietnam and cluster bombs in the Ukraine where you have a proxy war being waged by two of the nuclear superpowers in the world, dragging the world to the brink of war, closer to nuclear war.… These things all stem from this imperialist system. Unless and until we get rid of it, they’;re going to keep going on… Now is the time when revolution is becoming more possible because of the fierce fighting at the top, because the imperialist ruling class of the United States is deeply divided… What the film did not get to, though, is the central problem Oppenheimer had and many people today have: looking at America as a force for good, or at least a force with good intentions. There are things that people with a heart for humanity get behind because, well, Russia is an imperialist country, it’s doing these bad things and America is trying to stop it. So we should support the United States. We have to break with this thing that America is a force for good, with good intentions. When America does things around the world, in reality, it is to maintain and extend a global empire of plunder, massacring, exploiting and oppressing people. Unless and until we get out from under that system and way of thinking, the U.S. is going to keep doing these things.
Carolyn: …. I saw the film a number of times with different groups of people, different types of people. It’s really important to see the film… Maybe it’s because we’re in Hawaii, and the question of war is on our front pages and in our minds every day because, of course, we’re a target. Conversations after the film are very important. Everybody I’ve talked with had a different opinion which has been very helpful in trying to sort things out… I went with a couple who knew the Oppenheimers quite well during the McCarthy era… I went with a group of scientists, some of them now with military contracts… Do you become an Oppenheimer? Or do you become an Ellsberg?… I went with people from the Catholic Worker Center and some Quakers. who are into the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The family of one of the people I went with was killed in Hiroshima. He was very clear. He was outraged. He was crying when we left, that they didn’t show the horror, the absolute horror of Hiroshima… A team of us went to a sovereignty festival attended by several thousand people. Those film conversations were totally different… It’s really important to unite with all these kinds people.. Why do we go to these wars?… It’s really our responsibility to do a lot more teaching about the crimes, so that people actually can understand why America isn’t so great…
Roxanne: …I taught at the University of New Mexico from ‘78 to ‘81… I learned so much from oral histories while I was there about how it affected New Mexicans. I understand – I haven’t seen the film yet – that you wouldn’t know there were human beings around Los Alamos. It was native land that was just taken away and 5000 other people came with their cars and their machinery and who knows what and are still there… There is a really strong movement in New Mexico with the Pueblos and the Navajos. The uranium mines were in the Navajo Nation and material is still blowing around, it doesn’t go away. It’s in the deserts where the bombs were exploded. And downwind, there are a lot of health problems… They were considered non-people…
Elizabeth: … being a Canadian, I was led to believe all the same propaganda… The film showed that when Oppenheimer realized what he did, he realized the carnage. Scientists had created this amazing thing, not thinking of the consequences, because that’s not their job…There’s no humanity involved at all…
Jay: … One of the things that I found actually the most disturbing was when they weren’t sure if the Trinity tread test would actually set off a chain reaction that would set the whole world on fire. What did they do? They did it anyway. I think about all of Oppenheimer’s equivocation and the equivocation in the movie overall. I think the end message is yes, the ends justify the means, even if the means are going to explode the whole world, that the ends were good defeating fascism which, of course, it showed was not actually necessary… But really, I felt the message, especially now, when the U.S. is posing as the great defender of democracy against Putin’s autocracy, in complete opposition to the real history of the U.S., to have such a powerful film with that takeaway message is dangerous.
Lorraine: …. I was in Womens Strike for Peace.. I’m now a retired teacher and a large part of my income comes from my pension. I’m wondering how much of my pension is actually involved in the military industrial complex. I’m thinking of going to the next retired teachers conference to bring up this volatile subject… I also sense there’s a real war fever going on. I live in the West Village, which is probably one of the most progressive places in NYC. But I still have a sense that everybody is very excited about fighting for “democracy” in Ukraine. That’s why I really appreciate going into the schools and talking to the kids about this… I’m also involved with English as a Second Language instruction. There are many programs especially now with so many immigrants coming into the city. I’m wondering whether anyone is going to speak to these people. There’s a lot of opportunity here for education, for a different kind of history. Most of the people, I find, who come into this country really believe in so many of the things that we know are lies. It’s very difficult to tell people who’ve made such tremendous effort to get into this country, to tell this other story.
Carolyn: …One of the things I’ve thought about a lot is that Oppenheimer accepted the Medal of Honor for what he did. If he really regretted it, wouldn’t that have been the time to say, “No, I’m not going to accept this”?…
Wendy: … I’m another Canadian… We’re in a real dilemma right now at the political level, your country and mine. And what’s most fearsome is this build-up of nuclear arms…
Sara: Oppenheimer never backed off the justification for the dropping of the August 6 bomb on Hiroshima. He argued that it needed to be some civilian population and be really decisive. And maybe this was added on later, but he said that it would be so horrific that it would never be used again. Apparently, he was shocked when it was used three days later, on Nagasaki. And he was then completely cut out of the loop… It really is almost metaphorically comparable to the U.S. empire: we have the power, so we’re gonna use it.
Robin: … The image of the planning to keep certain cities pure, not previously bombed, so the atomic bomb could be tested on them is a part of the horrendous history of this whole thing I find very terrible.
Debra: I’m going to share some of the comments people have made on our social media and in an email, and I’m going to share all the suggestions people made as well to all of you that were on this call. The hallmark of World Cant Wait, when we began in 2005, to drive out the was it then Bush and Cheney regime was internationalism, that we are really acting in the interests of humanity, when we are stopping with what the biggest imperialist country than the United States is doing The Security Council that decides what the United Nations is not going to be bound by votes, and they’re not necessarily at all bound by justice. Sure, the smaller countries that are going to be eaten up, have opposition to nuclear weapons, but the nuclear powers are all completely committed to them.
This puts humanity in tremendous peril. I unite with what Carl brought in about revolution, a whole different society being extremely important. And possible, he’s arguing it’s possible. We should all look at that. I value the historic perspective, all of you speaking of the Women’s Strike for Peace, from the West Village, western Canada, Hawai’i, the Bay Area. I know Curt, was in a protest Sunday in San Francisco, protesting Hiroshima, demanding no nuclear weapons, and you went into a Japanese festival. And the organizers demanded that the San Francisco Police make the protesters leave, because I quote, they didn’t want to “kill the vibe” of the festival, a Japanese festival. So it’s not just a question of nationality.
It’s very widely a question of peoples’ sights being set on the greatest interests of humanity. Being internationalist, not being bound by these restraints of the US is always the good guy, or even Canada’s always the good guy. So we have a lot of work to do. And I do want to say that Stephanie and Joe working on the project of we’re not your soldiers, I began to see as more and more important, we should go talk to the immigrants who are being forced into New York City. I think that was Wendy. I’m sorry, Lorraine, Wendy, somebody raised the point of the immigrants coming in under the impression a lot of times, but not always, that this is the road to riches. And this is democracy. And this is a great country. They’re really being disabused of that in New York City right now.
I was with Carl and some others on Tuesday, in front of the Roosevelt Hotel, where immigrants had been sitting for days outside. Eric Adams, we call him the black Giuliani mayor of New York City was turning people away from the shelters. So that’s the kind of welcome that the sanctuary city was giving to people coming from all literally over the world. So, yes, we we have a lot to do. I really, really appreciate people coming on. And if, if you want to write me, I think you’ve all got my email address [ debrasweet@worldcantwait.net] because you got the email with your thoughts further ideas. Comments. Let’s keep working together on this. Thanks to everyone for coming on.