August 6 and 9 will be the 60th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
SATORU KONISHI
AI MAEOKA
Konishi is a Hiroshima survivor. He stated: “Nuclear arms are the very height of violence and cruelty. We condemn the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; however, we have never demanded ‘retaliation.’ But from the beginning we have been asking the U.S. government to make an apology and to show its sincerity through an act: to realize its ‘unequivocal undertaking’ to abolish its nuclear arsenals.”
Maeoka is from Hiroshima and was part of the Hiroshima World Peace Mission, which toured the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States. Maeoka’s grandmother survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
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MASAKO HASHIDA
KOJI UEDA
Hashida is a Nagasaki survivor and board member of Kumamoto Prefectural Hidankyo, an organization of atom bomb survivors. This is the first time that she has traveled outside of Japan. Ueda is a Hiroshima survivor and Assistant General Secretary of the Tokyo Federation of A-Bomb Sufferers’ Association. He was a delegate to the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the United Nations in May. They will both attend the commemoration at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in New Mexico on August 6.
GREG MITCHELL
Greg Mitchell is the editor of Editor and Publisher and former editor of Nuclear Times. Mitchell is also the co-author of Hiroshima in America and was an adviser to the award-winning film “Original Child Bomb,” which will be aired by Sundance Channel on August 6. In a recent article titled “Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed,” he wrote: “In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. … In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited. The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. I corresponded and spoke with … Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military filmmakers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. ‘I always had the sense,’ McGovern told me, ‘that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. … They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because … we were sorry for our sins.'”
Mitchell added: “After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully judge for themselves … why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race — and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
