Cities are Not Targets: A Petition for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

Cities Are Not Targets (CANT) project Petition Drive

Please tell the nuclear powers that Cities Are Not Targets!

Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation

Mayors for Peace calls cities together to build a nuclear-weapon-free world.

Since our experience of the atomic bombing 62 years ago, Hiroshima has continually called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of lasting world peace. Despite our efforts, many areas around the world remain trapped in chains of hatred, violence and retaliation, our planet still bristles with vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, and the probability that such weapons will be used is increasing.

In response to this crisis, Mayors for Peace, an NGO over which we preside that now has 1,578 member cities in 120 countries and regions, is conducting an emergency campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2020 globally. This is our 2020 Vision Campaign.

The year 2006 was the 10th anniversary of the International Court of Justice advisory opinion that, “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.” Mayors for Peace marked this landmark finding by launching Phase II of our 2020 Vision Campaign.

The centerpiece of this phase is the Good Faith Challenge, a program for demanding that all governments abide by the other ICJ finding that, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” As a further contribution by cities, we have also initiated a Cities Are Not Targets (CANT) project to demand assurances from nuclear weapon states that no cities are targeted for nuclear attack.

Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral devices designed to obliterate entire cities. Despite the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear weapons remains virtually unchanged. We still have thousands of nuclear warheads deployed and ready to fire on warning. At the push of a button, nuclear-tipped missiles can be on their way to a target city. If such an event were to take place, some city, home to children and hundreds of thousands of innocent noncombatants, would suffer utter devastation.

The Mayors for Peace project is designed to lift the voices of cities and citizens to say, “No! You may not target cities. You may not target children.” Through these activities, we intend to bring to the attention of mayors, citizens and national leaders the fact that cities are, in fact, still being targeted for annihilation and the International Court of Justice has found this threat itself to be a war crime. Furthermore, we hope this project will intensify our demand that the nuclear-weapon states fulfill their promise to “negotiate in good faith” to abolish all nuclear weapons.

The goal of this project is not a shifting of nuclear weapons away from cities but their total elimination. And, when we speak here of “cities,” we refer not to a municipal entity of a certain size but to any area in which children and non-combatants are living routine daily lives.

Please participate in the petition drive associated with this project. Mayors for Peace will deliver your message to the nuclear-weapon states and to the United Nations. Let all peoples around the world come together and bequeath to our children a genuinely peaceful world free from nuclear weapons! Link to petition here.

Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War”

Still Present Pasts:
Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War”




A/P/A Institute at NYU
41-51 East 11th Street
7th Floor Gallery
New York, NY 10003

A multi-media exhibit that combines installation and performance art, documentary film, archival photographs, and oral histories to explore memories and legacies of the Korean War. Embodying life stories of ordinary Korean Americans who survived the war, the exhibit is a public space of remembering that breaks the silence about a tragic episode in U.S. and Korean history. Featured artists include Sukjong Hong, Deann Borshay Liem, Yul-san Liem, Yong Soon Min, Injoo Whang, Ji-Young Yooo.

NYU exhibition curated by Yul-san Liem. Project Director: Ramsay Liem.

Community cosponsor: Nodutdol for Korean Community Development.

The Korean War took the lives of 3 million Korean civilians and 1.2 million combatants, ushered in the Cold War era, and remains stalemated in an armistice agreement nearly 6 decades since its signing - yet most Americans remember it only as the “forgotten war.”

Listen to the Asia-Pacific Forum radio program on the exhibition, featuring curator and artist Yul-san Liem here.

Yul-san Liem is a social justice activist and artist whose work addresses issues of war, trauma and resistance. She is a long-time member and leader of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development (NDD), a Queens-based organization dedicated to achieving peace in Korea and empowering the Korean American community.

Is another Pacific War inevitable? John Feffer says "No" & brings clarity & hope to the issue of changing excessive military spending in the A-P

(Okinawa Network for the Global Day on Action on Military Spending (GDAMS) banner flying at Tent Village, Henoko, Okinawa: Photo: Okinawa Network for the Global Day on Action on Military Spending (GDAMS))

Some pundits tell us the U.S. is going to war with a "rising China" in the near future. That's why they want to spend more on missile defense surrounding China, military expansion in South Korea and Guam, and another U.S. military mega-base on Okinawa (although 30 U.S. bases and facilities already exist on 20% of the island).

But is another Pacific War inevitable?

John Feffer says "No" and brings clarity and hope to a discussion on excessive global military spending and how we can stop the march toward more wars in this great National Public Radio (NPR) interview, with good audience Q&A. (Head's up: a fund-raising drive interrupts the interview; just use the button to scroll through those parts).

Feffer, an editor at Foreign Policy in Focus and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a D.C.-based think tank that focuses on social justice, peace, and environmental issues, explains how the Global Day of Action on Military Spending came into being. Last summer, he and others at IPS got together with people from around the world concerned about excessive global military spending that has doubled over the last decade. Without attention, they didn't see any prospect of change, even with the severe economic recession. People facing crises all over the world like global warming don't have the money to deal with these challenges because of the money wasted on military spending. So they decided to have a global day focused on military spending.

IPS' major partner is the International Peace Bureau (IPB), located in Geneva, first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and about one hundred other organizations are working with GDAMS; Physicians for Social Responsibility, Pax Christi, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and many nationally based organizations in the 35 countries involved.

They chose April 11 because this is the date the Stockholm International Peace Institute releases its figures for 2010. Their goal: to make sure the photographs in the media accompanying these figures were of people rallying for a reduction in global military spending rather than photographs of fighter jets.

Some notes from the interview...

• Excessive and Wasteful Military Spending; U.S. versus China

Sadly, U.S. military spending has doubled over the last ten years.

Number two is China; its economy has grown and some of that money is going to military spending. China roughly spends between 1/7th and 1/10th of what the U.S. spends on military. Its total military spending equals what the U.S. wastes on military spending according to the General Accounting Office (GAO), which identified $70 billion annual waste on military spending in the U.S. budget. That's how much China spends annually.

Russia's economy has turned around from its collapse at the end of the Cold War, largely because of sales from oil and natural gas; it has returned to high levels of military spending that brought it to economic collapse in the 1990's. India and Saudi Arabia are also in the Top Ten.

There have been a number of scandals involved in Pentagon contracts. There was a student from Florida buying cheap ammunition from China and reselling it to the Pentagon; he was indicted. The Pentagon can't track all the number it spends. Most goes to the major contractors: Boeing, Lockheed, Martin. They get U.S. assistance in selling military equipment overseas. There are private contractors who do much of the same work our soldiers used to do. Money goes to healthcare, benefits. This totals around $650 billion in the base budget alone.

• Limiting a Militarized Economy & Expanding Our Civilian Economy: Jobs & Arms Trade

There's only been one time when there's been a reduction in military spending — after the Cold War. That money went to deficit reduction.

Reducing military spending involves an interwoven set of issues. A jobs conundrum accompanies the military spending issue. Factories for components of weapons systems have been distributed carefully across the United States to make it difficult to cut spending. Politicians don't want to close weapons factories and thereby cut jobs in their states.

The question is how to repurpose those manufacturing facilities. If you look at a comparison, a dollar spent on military industries versus a dollar spent on education, healthcare, infrastructure repair, then you find that the latter produces more jobs than the military industry. There was a lively debate on repurposing military factories during the stimulus spending. Unfortunately that was a one-time amount of money; a lot of it hasn't passed through the pipeline, and it hasn't resulted in any structural changes yet.

Have we gotten past they days of $100 bullets yet? There's still enormous waste that we see in cost-overruns. Manufacturers typically low-ball to get contracts and then bill in cost-overruns.

This is a global problem because the military arms market and trade is global. We have to do this globally, restraining the arms trade as we reduce arms spending. So GDAMS is global: a women's demonstration in Seoul, village protests in Kerala, demonstration in front of the White House. Part of this is to build a movement. Part of this is to discuss what works at the local, regional, national, and global levels. We are in the process of identifying effective political tools and developing alliances.

GDAMS is not about eliminating, but, instead, limiting military spending: a problem since Dwight Eisenhower's famous speech on the military-industrial-congressional complex. There are ways to reduce military spending that can make us safer. One way is to cut back on military exports to countries that end up using those weapons against us.

• More About Wasteful Military Spending

The accident-prone V-22 Osprey is an example of a weapons that has had a lot of cost overruns and is an unnecessary addition. We have a plan to expand the U.S. Navy at a time when this is simply fiscally irresponsible. We have plenty of ships. We don't know what to do with all of our ships. Missile defense is problematic for a number of issues. One is technical: does it work? Another is that it encourages a lot of other countries to build more weapons simply to address U.S. & allied missile defense.

• Is Change Possible?

First of all, we have to remind ourselves that military spending hasn't always been this way. The U.S. economy has only been militarized for the past 40 to 45 years. That's not a long time looking at history.

We can reverse what we created. We can roll it back to what the U.S. had before the Cold War. In the U.S., political campaign finance reform is a necessary step to restrain the influence lobbying has on military spending. We can prevent the collapse of our economy overburdened by military spending and build up viable manufacturing.

Citizens were able to stop the war in Vietnam. We were able to influence the U.S. polices in Iraq and Afghanistan by drawing down those wars. We have been able to change things in this country much more powerful than the military-industrial complex.

Other movements have faced much more challenge. Racism in the U.S. was much more powerful, yet the Civil Rights Movement had tremendous impact. We have this capability.

We can take inspiration from other countries that were able to affect U.S. military bases, whether in Puerto Rico, Latin American, in the Philippines, and other places in which our 1,000-based base empire.

Joseph Stiglitz on the failed risk analysis connection between the nuclear & global credit default swap meltdowns; wasteful military spending

In an interview, "Assault on Social Spending, Pro-Rich Tax Cuts Turning U.S. into Nation "Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent," with Democracy Now!, Joseph Stiglitz discusses the failed risk analysis connection between the Fukushima and credit default swap meltdowns.

The Nobel economist speaks of exorbitant, unaccounted for nuclear energy costs to the public via taxpayer subsidization and disaster clean-ups, adding that such corporate subsidization is "money stolen from the public."

Still on the subject of inefficient, wasteful government policies, Stiglitz discusses irrational, out-of-control military spending: "We are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist. The Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. And yet, if you look at our military, nobody seems to have told it that."

JUAN GONZALEZ: I wanted to ask you about another—something that you’ve written about: the connection, in terms of risk analysis, between the nuclear crisis in Japan and the meltdown of the reactors there and the credit default swaps. And I would even throw in perhaps the BP blowout, which was another example of a risk analysis that said it could never happen.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah. Well, I just wrote an interesting article making a comparison between our ability to judge what are called small probability events, you know, rare—events that are supposed to be rare—those in the financial market said that the kind of collapse that we had should happen once in a thousand years, once in the history of the universe. But we had a collapse in the 1980s, we had a problem in the 1990s, we have them every 10 years. And that shows the models are very bad, our ability to judge rare events is very bad. Now, a lot of research in behavioral economics and psychology have explained why it is that these events that don’t happen very much, we don’t have a lot of experience.

But one of the points that I raised was that these people have an incentive not to see things accurately. You know, the nuclear power industry has an incentive to tell everybody, "Oh, don’t worry. Nothing—no risk there." The financial sector had an incentive to say, "Don’t worry about these derivatives, even if they’re already a quadrillion dollars. Don’t worry, because we can manage that risk. We have systems of diversifying the risk across the economy." Clearly wrong. So, you know, when there’s so much money at stake, people have a way of seeing—of discounting these risks, especially because those risks are borne by everybody else in our society.

And, you know, nuclear power is a really interesting case, because that industry has never been commercially viable. It has always existed on the back of a government-provided insurance, that we provide as taxpayers, that they don’t pay for. And we see now in Japan that, you know, they did the same thing, and we see the cost of that. The rest of society is paying an enormous price. There is no way that the slight savings in energy cost can make up for the loss to the Japanese economy that has resulted from the nuclear explosion. And the same thing could happen here in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I loved seeing on Meet the Press right after the tsunami and the earthquake and the terrible tragedy in Japan, they had on the head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, so, you know, they represent the nuclear industry, and the host of the show saying, "Thank you so much for running in at the last minute to be here with us." And I could only think about—I mean, here he is speaking to save the butts of the nuclear industry in this country and saying there’s nothing to worry about here, as we’re saying this—well, what is looking like a partial meltdown or more.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If the industry really believed it, let them make an unlimited liability and provide us with a guarantee that they would pick up for the financial cost of the kind of disaster that Japan is facing. And I can tell you that if you made them bear those costs, if we didn’t give them that free ride of limited liability, that industry would not exist in the United States today...

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Stiglitz...let’s end on the issue of war. You wrote with Linda Bilmes the book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. That’s not talking about Afghanistan, what, $2 billion a week, the longest ongoing conflict in U.S. history. What about the cost of this?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: It’s enormous. And since we wrote that book, we did—new numbers came in, and things are worse than we said. The disability rates are higher. The cost of caring for the disabled are higher. Almost one out of two people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are disabled. This is an unfunded liability of—we calculate now to be almost a trillion dollars, over $900 billion. So, one of the big ways of reducing our deficit is a—is cut back some expenditures.

I believe we could have more security with much less spending. We are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist. The Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. And yet, if you look at our military, nobody seems to have told it that.

Another way of thinking about it, we spend more money now than all the rest of the countries of the world, or almost as much as all the rest of the countries put together.

And yet, when you have a case where you might arguably want some use of it—you know, to protect people who are being killed—we say we can’t do it, even in a small country of a few million people. We say, "Oh, no. Our military can’t do anything." So we’ve been spending all this money and getting actually very little security for it. So my own feeling is that we could reduce our money, our expenditures markedly—particularly, get out of Afghanistan—and improve our security.

20th Sunagawa Aki Matsuri remembers past struggles as it celebrates autumn

The soaring birds seem to ask:
Who created borders between countries?
Grass, birds, humans…
All are the same living beings.

Yesterday, in a tiny park located within the western metropolitan Tokyo city of Tachikawa, a collection of artists, musicians, political activists, local food growers, and community folks of all ages gathered for the 20th annual Sunagawa Aki Matsuri (Autumn Festival).

While the food stalls, children’s games, and overall festive atmosphere may have made the event appear to be just like any other neighborhood gathering, in fact there was a deeper story lying underneath the surface. Put in context of events occurring in the same vicinity 54 years earlier, the energy of the festival resonated with what might be described as pain that has been transformed into joy.

In October 1956, in land adjacent to the park, a collection of farmers, students, Buddhist monks, and other sympathetic citizens gathered to stop a group of surveyors and police officers who had come to measure the land for expansion of the nearby Tachikawa Airbase. The facility served as a launchpad for U.S. B-29 bomber planes, and plans were afoot to swallow up even more local farmland surrounding the existing base. When the protesters refused to back down, police began attacking them with batons. 500 people were wounded, resulting in a national outcry. Three days later, largely as a result of this fallout, the government canceled the surveys.

Dennis Banks, a Native American organizer and co-founder of the American Indian Movement, was stationed at the airbase at the time and witnessed the bloody melee of officers brutalizing the defenseless crowd, which included students as well as monks rhythmically beating their drums. When I had the fortune to speak with him several years ago in Hiroshima, he told me that this experience had had a huge impact on his psyche—and was one of the factors that helped lead him away from the U.S. military and into a life of activism.

The organizers of the Sunagawa Autumn Festival include several people who vividly remember the protests, and who view the event as a chance to help keep history alive. One such person is Katsuko Kato, the founder of the watchdog group Tachikawa Self-Defense Force Tent-Mura (known simply as Tent-Mura, or "Tent Village"). In 2004, three members of the organization were arrested and prosecuted after placing anti-war flyers in the mailboxes of a Japanese Self-Defense Force housing unit. Despite eventually losing at the Tokyo High Court to charges of trespassing, members still remain determined that peace and justice will prevail.

One case in point: at the edge of the park stands a small sign stating that the land is government property and not to be trespassed on. Holding the annual autumn festival there, as well as growing vegetables year-round in the adjacent field, therefore serve as small acts of civil disobedience on the part of organizers. Even in the face of government opposition, they continue to utilize the land to farm in peace--the natural, life-affirming purpose for which they believe it was always intended.

The daikon radish leaves rustle in the blue sky:
Autumn has arrived in Sunagawa.
Even the persimmon trees in the park
Beckon smiling visitors
As they continue to yearn for a true peace.

Left: Panel display featuring this year's festival theme of U.S. military bases in Okinawa

Right: Dancers dressed as yanbaru kuina (a bird native to the Yanbaru forest of Okinawa, which is now under threat of U.S. military construction of helipads for Osprey helicopters)

For more on the history of the Sunagawa Struggle, see this excellent article by Hasegawa Kenji.

--Kimberly Hughes

Poetry is from the Sunagawa Aki Matsuri event flyer (translations are my own).

Photos by Ishihara Mikiko
Text by Kimberly Hughes

Mayors for Peace: U.S. Conference of Mayors calls to slash spending on nuclear weapons & redirect funds to needs of cities

New York, May 2nd 2010 - Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with delegation from Mayors for Peace at head of a rally of 20,000 people marching to UN headquarters. (Photo: Mayors for Peace )

On June 14, Hiroshima-based Mayors for Peace congratulated the U.S. Conference for Mayors (USCM) for unanimously adopting a groundbreaking resolution, Supporting U.S. Participation in Global Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and Redirection of Nuclear Weapons Spending to Meet the Needs of Cities, at the conclusion of its 78th annual meeting in Oklahoma City

Noting that “cities have been hard hit by the recent recession which has left them with rapidly rising unemployment and declining revenues, forcing them to make severe cuts in critical public services such as police officers, fire fighters, teachers, medical and emergency workers and bus drivers,” the resolution provides that: “The U.S. Conference of Mayors calls on the U.S. Congress to terminate funding for modernization of the nuclear weapons complex and nuclear weapons systems, to reduce spending on nuclear weapons programs well below Cold War levels, and to redirect funds to meet the urgent needs of cities.”

The resolution also “calls on the U.S. Senate to ratify the new START treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty without conditions and without delay,” and “calls on President Obama to work with the leaders of the other nuclear weapon states to implement the U.N. Secretary-General’s Five Point Proposal for Nuclear Disarmament forthwith, so that a Nuclear Weapons Convention, or a related set of mutually reinforcing legal instruments, can be agreed upon and implemented by the year 2020, as urged by Mayors for Peace.”

Noting that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “has announced that he will visit Hiroshima on August 6, 2010, the anniversary of the day the first atomic bomb was dropped, stating: ‘There I will say, once again, we stand for a world free of nuclear weapons’,” the resolution additionally “encourages President Obama, members of the Cabinet and Congress to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the earliest possible date.

“This resolution is significant because it comes on the eve of Senate consideration of ratification of the new START treaty, as well as Congressional consideration of President Obama’s FY 2011 $7 billion nuclear weapons budget request,” said Jackie Cabasso, North American Coordinator for Mayors for Peace. “It also restates, in no uncertain terms, the commitment of America’s mayors to the global elimination of nuclear weapons at an early date, and for the first time calls on Congress to make deep cuts in nuclear weapons spending as a concrete measure of that commitment.”

The resolution notes that at the midpoint of the month-long May 2010 Nuclear Nonproflieration Treaty Review Conference “in connection with submission of the new START treaty to the Senate, President Obama submitted a classified report on a Congressionally-mandated plan to maintain and modernize U.S. nuclear forces for the foreseeable future,” at a projected cost of “well over” $180 billion by the year 2020. It further notes that: “Under this plan funding for the nuclear weapons research and production programs of the National Nuclear Security Administration will increase by more than 40%, from $6.4 billion in FY 2010 to $9 billion by 2018. In turn, $9 billion is 43% above the Cold War annual average of $5.1 billion for analogous Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs.”

The resolution recognizes that as we approach 65th anniversaries of the United States atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, “eight nations still possess a total of nearly 23,000 nuclear warheads – 95% of them held by the U.S. and Russia.”

The resolution cites a recent declaration by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that because of the “unique destructive power” and “unspeakable human suffering” inflicted by nuclear weapons, “preventing [their use] requires fulfillment of existing obligations to pursue negotiations aimed at prohibiting and completely eliminating such weapons through a legally binding international treaty.” It recalls President Obama’s April 2009 acknowledgement in Prague, that “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act” for the achievement of the “peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. And it notes the USCM’s history of support for the abolition of nuclear weapons, including its 2009 resolution “call[ing] on President Obama to announce at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference the initiation of good faith multilateral negotiations on an international agreement to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2020,”

The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,204 such cities in the country today. The final package of resolutions adopted at their recently-concluded annual meeting will be forwarded to Congress and the Administration in the hopes of shaping federal legislation.

The nuclear disarmament resolution was sponsored by Mayors Jennifer Hosterman of Pleasanton, California; Frank Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa; Tony Santos of San Leandro, California; Andre Pierre of North Miami, Florida; Frank Ortis of Pembroke Pines, Florida; Laurel Prussing of Urbana, Illinois; Donald Plusquellic of Akron, Ohio, and Kitty Piercy of Eugene, Oregon. The full text of the resolution, submitted by the USCM International Affairs Committee, is on pps. 137 - 139 at:
http://www.usmayors.org/resolutions/78th_Conference/adoptedresolutionsfull.pdf

Mayors for Peace is a rapidly growing international association, headed by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, campaigning for the global elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020. As of June 1, membership stood at 3,965 cities in 143 countries and regions. Members include more than half of the world’s 100 largest cities and nearly half of the world’s capital cities, with 157 U.S. members in 37 states. Past-President of the USCM, Akron Ohio Mayor Donald Plusquellic serves as a Vice-President of Mayors for Peace. Mayors for Peace has “Special Consultative Status” with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.