On Aug. 8, 2019, the Gazette published the final column by our beloved anti-war activist Frances Crowe, just 19 days before she died at the age of 100. Her column, marking the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later, was her last plea for nuclear sanity.
Like Rep. John Lewis’s column in The New York Times on the day of his funeral (July 30), Frances left her own “marching orders” which concluded bluntly: “Now is the time to make a difference. Now is the time to stop building nuclear weapons.”
Frances of course practiced what she preached. Her column recalls her role in helping to launch the Nuclear Freeze Movement in collaboration with Randall Forsberg, Randy Kehler of the Traprock Peace Center, and other Massachusetts activists. In 1982, Frances writes, “voters in eight states and several major cities, including one-fourth of the country’s population, voted for a worldwide nuclear freeze.” The movement helped to propel arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union that ultimately achieved a reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal from about 30,000 warheads in 1980 to nearly 4,000 today.
(The Valley’s continuing leadership in promoting nuclear arms control –– despite the setbacks under the Trump administration –– continues through the efforts of Dr. Ira Helfand, Timmon Wallis, Vicki Elson, Jeff Napolitano, Pat Hynes, Michael Klare, the Rev. Andrea Ayvazian, among many others.)
But as Frances often warned, the power and lethality of the newer weapons far offsets the advantage of having fewer of them. And the costs of developing, manufacturing, storing and delivering them continues to spiral out of sight. Surely if she had lived to see the COVID-19 pandemic, she would now call for immediate cuts in the defense appropriations (currently about $741 billion a year) and the reuse of military dollars to help save lives, homes and livelihoods.
For a starter, those thunderous F-15 fighter jets based at Barnes Air National Guard Airport serve no useful purpose in the fight against COVID-19, or anything else (although the unit website claims it is “readily available to the Governor of Massachusetts to respond to natural or manmade disasters”!)
Most of us live a state of denial concerning the risk of nuclear war. People my age were taught to hide under our school desks to survive a nuclear blast, the so-called “Duck and Cover” era of the 1950s. An equally ridiculous deception was “Crisis Relocation” — the brainchild of Reagan-era Cold Warriors who claimed that most Americans would survive if they quickly relocated before an attack (!) to small towns somewhere distant from cities.
(Greenfield was slated by federal and state authorities to “host” 17,000 refugees from eastern Massachusetts, but no one told the town until my students made a presentation about it to the select board, which asked to keep our copy of the “plan.”)
Compared with today’s mammoth weapons, the 50-kiloton Hiroshima bomb was a popgun. But any doubt as to the horror of that first step into nuclear oblivion is banished by reading John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” first published as an entire issue of The New Yorker Magazine (Aug. 24, 1946). Based on survivor accounts and preliminary studies, Hersey reported that: “At least 100,000 people [out of 350,000 residents] had lost their lives in the bombing. . . About 35 percent had died of direct burns from the bomb, 50 percent from other injuries, and about 20 percent as a result of radiation effects. . . 62,000 out of 90,000 buildings were destroyed and 6,000 more were damaged beyond repair.”
Later estimates placed the Hiroshima death count from all causes closer to 130,000 men, women, and children, and up to 80,000 more deaths in Nagasaki.
Chastened by the horror of what they had unleashed, several Manhattan Project physicists founded The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945 at the University of Chicago where the first nuclear fission reactor was built. Since then, the Bulletin has maintained its famous “Doomsday Clock” which represents the risk of nuclear war in terms of “time left until Midnight.” Over the years, the “clock” setting has fluctuated with the editors’ assessment of changing world geopolitical conditions. On Jan. 23, 2020, the clock was reset to 100 seconds to Midnight — the highest level ever — with the dire announcement:
Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers — nuclear war and climate change — that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.
Frances, we still hear you.