Why Washington state is central to U.S. nuclear issues
The 81st anniversary of the United States’ nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offers all of us a chance to remember and honor the dead. The bombings, first in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and three days later in Nagasaki, were estimated to have killed somewhere between 129,000 to 226,000 people, mostly civilians. It is unknown how many tens of thousands more people have suffered from the diseases and complications caused by the radiation fallout and radiation exposure across the subsequent years. How long will it take? We do not know exactly.
In this country, Washington state has the deepest need to contemplate these events and the continuing issues that confront us. The once-secret nuclear facilities at Hanford played the critical role of producing and supplying “weapons grade” plutonium for the initial Trinity test of the atomic bomb and the bomb used in Nagasaki. This legacy, including our state’s involvement, continues today to be lived out in the bodies and in the mental trauma of the Hibakusha (the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings), their families, and in our state’s own radiation exposed families.
Consider the issue of Hanford’s underground storage of nuclear waste products presently leaking into the Columbia River. Also consider the “Downwinders” (people exposed to radioactive fallout from Hanford), and Hanford workers and their families, who suffered cancers and other illnesses. A particularly notorious incident, which many believe produced clusters of illnesses and often thyroid cancer, was “The Green Run” experiment in 1949. The experiment deliberately and secretly released radiation in a failed effort to improve the U.S. ability to monitor nuclear production in Russia.
A close examination of our Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor on the Kitsap Peninsula is also essential. It houses the eight Trident-armed Ohio-class nuclear submarines, and soon, 12 Columbia-class nuclear submarines (much larger) are planned to replace them, fully deployed, 20 miles from Seattle. There are estimated to be 1,700 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) stored in the hilltop depot or onboard the present eight submarines, making up almost one third of all nuclear weapons globally. At various times, Kitsap County has been reported to have the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the United States and possibly globally. It would be considered Ground Zero in our state during any potential atomic warfare. Our lives, our children’s lives today and those of people living here in the future are at high risk of being the first casualties of any nuclear exchange!
The U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) created in 2017 would sanely disarm nuclear weapons through mutually proven verification. It offers security that ought to be pursued with special urgency here in Washington State as home to one of the largest nuclear targets in the world. In addition to the Trident nuclear submarine base just across Puget Sound from Seattle, Washington is also home to military bases at Everett, Whidbey Island, Tacoma’s Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and Spokane’s Fairchild Airforce Base (nuclear refueling for B52s), and the nuclear power reactor/plutonium storage depot at Hanford, where the Tri-City Herald recently published a report on where bombs and radiation fallout might occur in various nuclear war scenarios.
It is time for the people and the decision-makers of our cities, Washington state, the United States, and our world to get serious and use our voices, our power, and our wasted trillions of tax dollars to address economic inequality, the impoverished, and our numerous needs, including healthcare, housing, education, and our climate emergency. Together we can acknowledge that the very existence of nuclear weapons is a threat to all humanity, and all living things. We urgently need to pursue a world free of them! If our state were free of nuclear weapons, we would have the needed economic resources to cleanup at Hanford and the health needs of Downwinders, the Native American populations in Eastern Washington who worked on weapons-related projects like the uranium-producing Midnight Mine and other projects, and the many Marshall Islanders residing as legal refugees in our state (per the COFA Treaty) who suffer long-term health effects from twelve years of nuclear testing, between 1946 and 1958, irradiating their paradise islands.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened nearly 81 years ago. Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only wartime uses of nuclear weapons, so far. However, there is no rational basis for feeling secure about nuclear safety, as the United States and the other eight countries possessing nuclear bombs all “modernized and improved” their nuclear weaponry last year. As memories fade, we must renew our conviction to never allow atomic weapons to be used again.
During his 2016 visit to Hiroshima, President Barack Obama said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Someday the voices of the hibakusha [the survivors] will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of August 6th must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.”
I once heard the Dalai Lama speak at a conference, and he said, “Let us have a religion above all other religions, the religion of World Peace!” We can create peace and healing and love for all, and for all generations.
Cheryl McDaniel RN, BSN, BA is a retired nurse, a member of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility nuclear weapons task force, mother, and grandmother of four children living in Spokane.
Edited by Joe Copeland and Dr. Karl Riecken DO, MA, FMCP-M, of the WPSR nuclear weapons task force.