 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today, that's August 6th is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb, the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. On August 9th, the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. By the end of the year, nearly 210,000 people had died and the impact on health, the impact on people's lives itself was felt for decades to come and it's felt even today. So we have with us Praveen Purukas to talk about some of these issues. Praveen, thank you so much for joining us. So first of all, one of the most important facts that we have been talking about in NewsClick and another place of course is the fact that the nuclear doomsday clock is as close to midnight as has ever been, which means that the possibility of nuclear war is the highest in decades. So despite 75 years of this incident passing, everyone is witness, the horror is, how is it that we still are in this situation right now? Well, I think the first issue is that we have a knack of forgetting because this horrors which we in our lifetime felt that we were virtually witnessed too, though I was born in 47. But nevertheless, this was often magnitude of an weapon which qualitatively changed the war and according to all the people at that time, it was something which was an imminent danger to their lives. So the generation who came immediately after the Hiroshima Nagasaki bombings or who had witnessed it, I think it left them deeply scarred in terms of how this perceived the future and how this on the bomb itself. I mean those pictures that we have seen are etched in our memory. This all came out in the 50s, 60s and still is available in different parts of the world. But I think a lot of the people have forgotten that history and slowly it has faded from memory. You know, I remember our activism as a peace activist, anti-nuclear bomb activist. I remember those that we came into the movement with those images in our minds. And it was not only the 80s where there was a vibrant peace movement which saw in fact in some sense withdrawal of the weapons which were sought to be put on European soil at that point, which was what I call the neutral, neutron bomb and short-range nuclear weapons. And the peace movement did win some battles over there. But subsequently post the 90s, the fall of Soviet Union, the threat of war seems nuclear exchange seems to have diminished. Only one side seems to hold the weapons and Russia was not seen as somebody is going to contest the US. So therefore I think that horror and the threat of nuclear war has receded from people's minds as an immediate issue. In spite of the fact that the nuclear arsenal is more than 12,000 nuclear weapons just with the US and Russia alone, who hold roughly about 93% of all the nuclear weapons in the world. So given that the threat to the world is still almost as it was at the end of the Cold War as it is now, I think it's really a tragedy that the world has forgotten about this threat. And though Mr. Trump is trying his best to remind us of it time and again, but it still doesn't seem to have sparked up the kind of peace movement we saw earlier. Coming back to your question, why is it still happening? I think the fundamental lesson which the US and the Russians had reached was that a nuclear war was not available. Of course, the US was the more trend-setting power in that phase because the US had got the nuclear weapons first. It thought it would have a monopoly for about a decade. That didn't happen. Within three years, the Soviet Union was able to also show that it had the bomb and also did carry out its tests. So there was a rough parity, though the overwhelming power was with the United States initial phases. In fact, if you remember, we had discussed this earlier when the Open Skies Treaty was proposed. At that time, Khrushchev refused. He said, if they know what we have, they'll bomb us. So they will win the war. So we cannot afford to show what we have. So that was the kind of edge that they had. But at some point, both sides realized that they had enough to destroy each other. And the final acceptance of that was that Ronald Reagan finally decided not to go ahead with the Star Wars scenario of nuclear weapons, anti-missiles in space and all the weaponizing space and all of that. That we really got somewhere into this, what was called the Salt Treaty, then the Start Treaty and the New Start Treaty, which is supposed to expire in 2021 February. So this whole history being forgotten is what we see Mr. Trump now coming back with this argument that we can win the war. And even if we don't win a nuclear war, we can spend the other side to oblivion and they will lose because they cannot match our spending. And this is also the mistaken belief that's how the Cold War was won. And actually the history says something else because the Soviet budget never really increased to match the US budget during the 80s. There are other reasons why the Soviet state collapsed and which you're not going into today. But certainly it wasn't being because you tried to match the United States in spending. It really did not. So the whole myth of having outspent the Soviet Union and that's why it collapsed. And therefore the race itself was what made it collapse is the Billingsley and Trump belief that we can win the war if not a physical war. They also don't envisage a physical war being won, but we can spend them to finally concede defeat. And if the Russians do, the Chinese, the belief can be overwrought because in terms of nuclear parity, China has 300 weapons compared to 6000 that US has. And this means that the new start, the agenda is unless the Chinese come and we have a whole range of other things to do, we will not be able to negotiate the extension of the treaty. So this is the position Billingsley has stated. This is the negotiations that he tried to start. He started with the grandstanding. Why are the Chinese not here? Well, Chinese are not a party to the agreement and they certainly are not going to be here. They're not a party to the agreement. So that was pure empty grandstanding, quite childish in fact. And then he went on to say that he wants a complete overhaul of the agreement. He wants China to participate. France, why not UK who have almost a similar arsenal. In fact, according to the Arms Control Association, China has 290 nuclear weapons. France has 300 and UK has 250. So they're almost on the same level. Of course, we also know India, Pakistan possibly have 200, 150, 200 each and Israel has about 200. So all this is known. So why only China? We are not clear. The Billingsley's argument, of course, Trump's as well, is that China is trying to upset the balance and therefore their arsenal matters, others don't come. The other argument is if they're not threatening us, they're not a competition, they don't matter. So we still haven't understood if China comes in, what is the agenda going to be? Are they going to be allowed to build up to 6,000? Or is it that they have to dismantle at the same rate others dismantle? That means if the 6,000 comes down to 3,000, China should come down to 300 to 150. None of these issues are being stated. So to my understanding, this is simple, grandstanding not to have a treaty. And it becomes further reinforced when you want complete comprehensive revision of the treaty to bring in tactical weapons, what are called battlefield weapons, intermediate range weapons, a treaty which you have just walked out of months back. And you say all of this should be negotiated in one go. With virtually six to eight months available for the negotiations, this seems a way not to negotiate rather than any serious negotiations. If you really wanted that, all you have to do is to say, well, let's extend the treaty for another five years while we negotiate these issues. And if we reach a successful negotiation, by all means prepone that agreement and start immediately saying, now we'll take this further measure. So that's not the issue. So this is not a serious attempt to negotiate at all. It's in fact a way not to negotiate. And that seems to be their strategy. Absolutely. So in this context, you mentioned how the US is selectively treating China, of course. And it also in some ways mirrors a larger policy direction over the past decades, how US imperialism has worked. In fact, if you go back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki itself, there are serious questions about why was the bomb even dropped in the first place? Was there a real necessity for that? So you made some arguments in one of the recent articles regarding that. Well, you know, the question that comes up is that why was, as you said, why was the bomb used at all? It was well known. Japan was suing for peace. The only condition they wanted was the emperor should be protected. He should not be hauled before a war crimes tribunal, which in fact the United States did after Japan surrendered. So that was not a condition which was going to stick in the American crawl. So to say that they were not going to object to it. So why was the bomb then dropped? And I think we had a discussion earlier about this when we talk about the peace movement, particularly among the scientific community. And the scientific community had actually said this bomb should not be used. Okay, we started the process by having, in fact, the famous Einstein letter to Roosevelt. But now we feel that this is something that's not required. And therefore we should not drop the bomb. But the US argument, and that's interesting, was clear that it wasn't really targeting the Japanese. It was a bomb to be dropped to show the Soviet Union that what is the power that the United States has, and therefore impact the post-Japan, post-Second World War scenario. So once Japan surrenders to put the United States and the Western powers in a much stronger position in the negotiations, that was really the intention. And that Zillard has written that once General Grove, who was in command of the basically the bomb effort from the military side, he said it's not intended against Japan, it's actually intended to show Soviet Union. The target is really Soviet Union, it's not Japan. Japan is only basically a testing ground to show. So Japan was really used, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used to display the power of the bomb to the world and architecture the post-war scenario. And there is the other issue, even if we accept that Hiroshima was something the United States did in order to hasten the close of the war, that doesn't make any sense when you look at Nagasaki bombing. Because by that time, the enormity of the nuclear weapon had already been shown that this is a weapon which qualitatively changes the war. So why did it not let that lesson be sunk in, asked for Japan to surrender again before dropping the bomb on Nagasaki? No explanation, no credible explanation has ever been given why the second bomb was dropped. So we come back to a conclusion. This is what Ellen Skari has written in the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she says that we cannot divorce what white supremacy saw from that of the bomb. Because there was that vision underlying the bomb, that you would not drop it on the white population anywhere, anywhere else. But the yellow population, the brown population, the black population is okay, that you could drop the bombs on. She goes on to make the argument that the black academics, writers, poets, journalists, all of them had actually identified that as the cause, that you wouldn't have dropped it on the white population. She quotes Langston Hughes who wrote about it and other people as well. But I think she makes a much more powerful argument when she says, let's look at all the geographies where threats of nuclear weapons have been held. All of them have been in Asia or it was against Libya's Gaddafi. But Libya's Gaddafi, it was not the use of the bomb of course as much as asking him to submit and give up his attempts to make the bomb after which of course he was deposed and killed. But given the geographies that she talks about, she talks about three things. Where were threats of the bomb actually made? And it was made both by Aishan Haver, it was made by Truman, subsequently it was made by Lyndon Johnson. And of course we have Nixon who has talked about that he thought about having the bomb dropped four times, two of which he has identified. One of course was not Vietnam, the other was China. So all of these examples seem to show that the consideration of where the bomb could be used was always that it can be used against non-white population. So that is one example she gives. Second example she gives is where were the nuclear bombs tested, Marshall Islands and of course in New Mexico, which is largely Hispanic and Native American, Indigenous American population. Again, the same arguments and for Marshall Islands and the people of the Marshall Islands, of course we know that what extent it affected their lives. So this is the second argument she gives. The third argument she gives is when have the threats given to those leaders who wanted to build nuclear bombs. And she says all those threats, if you look at them, they were all directed at people who came from quote unquote other cultures. So the threat of using nuclear bombs against those or threats against people who wanted to develop bombs were also people who are brown. And it never crossed the American mind that they could say that they had the right to use the bomb and this is a right that others did not have. And she quotes extensively from the submission that the US made to different bodies which actually asked international bodies which asked what basis are you claiming that you can hold the bomb but others can't. So these are the three grounds she gives and says that it is not possible without racist underpinning to the American belief. I don't know to what extent we should take this as a basic existential issue regarding the bomb. But there's no question that if we look at the larger architecture of the United States, how it has looked on other countries, how it has looked at Africa, Latin America. Let's be clear that racism has informed their policies and is informed their policies for a long time. And clear issue and this is what Elaine Scarry raises that if you're racist at home, it has to leech into your foreign policy. It cannot be that you discriminate against black bodies, you discriminate against black skin, you lynch people of different color. The policeman kneels on the throat of a George Floyd for nine minutes, nearly nine minutes, squeezing out his life. And yet this does not affect your worldview when you look at brown nations, black nations or yellow nations and white nations. So if you're a settler colonial settler colonial state, you have exterminated people of the indigenous people, you have brought in slavery slaves from Africa. If this is your history, and if you have really decided the slaves right to live depends on you as whites, they're never going to be equal to whites. And if that battle still continues in the United States, as you know it does, then is it possible that your foreign policy does not have any underpinning of white supremacy then in it? And I think that's a very valid question to answer that foreign policy, after all, is the reflection also of the internal policies, internal economic policies as well internal politics of the country. Therefore, it cannot be divorced from that. Thank you so much for talking to us. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching.