Peace activists call for no more nukes

OAK RIDGE (AP) — Peace activists marked the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on Saturday with a moment of silence outside the heavily guarded weapons factory that helped fuel the bomb, and later 15 were arrested for blocking the road in front of the plant.

“No more Hiroshimas on this earth. No nuclear weapons. No more Hiroshimas,” Erik Johnson of Maryville, Tenn., told about 150 people who gathered in the early morning outside the gates of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.

Later, some 1,100 demonstrators beating drums and carrying signs — “Nobody wins a nuclear war,” “True security is no nuclear weapons,” “Tell Congress to vote against war” — marched to the plant entrance for a daylong rally.

The Y-12 plant supplied uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — the first nuclear weapon used in war. The plant continues to make parts for every warhead in this country’s nuclear arsenal and is the main storehouse for bomb-grade uranium.

The largest peace protest ever in eastern Tennessee, drawing demonstrators from throughout the Southeast and Midwest, ended with the arrest of 15 protesters for blocking the road about 100 yards from the plant entrance, a misdemeanor.

“Our efforts are a form of negotiation … through creative tension,” said John Heid, 50, of Luck, Wis., before his arrest.

Heid said he spent more than 20 hours traveling to Oak Ridge “to remember, to grieve, to actually celebrate the community that comes together (at the protest), and to resist, to register my dissent to 60 years of nuclear warring.”

He wasn’t the only one who traveled far. Kim Joy Bergier of Madison Heights, Mich., brought about 100 protesters from the Detroit area.

“We feel that if the United States builds new nuclear weapons we are less safe and we lose our credibility as a country to tell any other country that they can’t build them,” she said.

Jacob Griffin, 73, of Dayton, Tenn., came for a reason, too. He stood in a small group of counterprotesters under a spray-painted banner honoring Y-12. “Commemorating 60 years of American supremacy,” the sign said.

“They don’t get it,” Griffin said. “Let them have a country that they would like to live in and see how long they would survive. The rest of the world would eat them up.”

Similar demonstrations were held at the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore in California and the Nevada Test Site.

Some 70,000 people died instantly and an estimated 70,000 more died later from the radioactive fallout from the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. The protesters read many of their names, rang a small temple bell and placed paper cranes on Y-12’s barbed-wire boundary fence.

Two small flocks of Canada geese flew over in V-formation as the demonstrators paused for two minutes of silence at 8:15 a.m., the moment the bomb exploded over Hiroshima.

Among them was Hiroshima survivor Nakanishi Eiji, 63. He removed his baseball cap and lowered his head. A companion said Eiji didn’t know Oak Ridge helped build the Hiroshima bomb until he arrived here for the anniversary.

“It is not exciting standing here, but kind of like a calm,” the freelance journalist said through an interpreter. “The insights, the people. Something very consoling. It is very difficult to express. So many emotions.”

Eiji handed out handmade bookmarks inscribed in Japanese and English. “Hands in hands to stop wars!” they said.

But the bomb also is credited with helping end World War II and saving lives of U.S. troops and Japanese civilians that may have been lost in an invasion of Japan. A plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, and Japan surrendered on Aug. 14, 1945.

Still, Buddhist monk Gyoshu Utsumi, a native of Japan who walked some 300 miles from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina for the occasion, said Hiroshima holds unique significance, particularly to the Japanese.

“This is unacceptable for every human being, not only for us. We cannot let this experience repeat under any circumstances,” Utsumi said.

Along with the names of Hiroshima victims, the protesters read the names of 67 Oak Ridge scientists who petitioned President Truman in July 1945 to not “resort to the use of atomic bombs.”

“Those of us who live here have a special, maybe accidental, responsibility to think about the hard sides of these questions,” said Fran Ansley, a University of Tennessee law professor. “So I am very proud of (the protesters), that they have taken up this kind of homefire (cause).”

“I don’t get discouraged,” said organizer Ralph Hutchison with the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, which has been staging Hiroshima day rallies since the 1980s.

“We look at this as a very long-haul campaign to abolish nuclear weapons,” said Hutchison, a Presbyterian minister. “We may be out here for several more years, but I think time is on our side. And I think the growing sentiment of the people in the world is on our side.”