Protecting Our Communities and Planet from the Harms of Nuclear Weapons and War

AUGUST 6, 2024

Dear PSR Friends and Colleagues,

This week, we ask you to join us in commemorating the 79th anniversary of the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Beyond the lethal toll from heat, blast and radiation that caused the deaths of over 200,000 human beings in Japan by the end of 1945, the detonations ushered in a deadly epoch of widespread testing and development of nuclear weapons that poisoned, and continues to wreak immense damage on diverse populations and ecosystems around the world.

Far from addressing the damage done and moving rapidly as needed to end the scourge of nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons states (NWS) have instead embarked on dangerous programs to modernize nuclear arsenals to increase their lethality and conceivably make them more “useful” for nuclear war-fighting scenarios. The “clear and present danger” of such insanity has been most recently brought to our collective consciousness by the escalating conflicts in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine where clashes of nuclear-capable forces can immanently plunge the world into unimaginable catastrophe.

From this perspective, we strongly urge you to add your voices to our protest against carrying-on as usual, and to consider participating in a number of events we are sponsoring to raise public awareness. Below please find information about Bay Area events including our annual rally at the Lawrence Livermore Labs and a number of screenings and related conversations regarding the award-winning film Silent Fallout  which covers much of the hidden history that the film Oppenheimer left out, including the health and environmental consequences of radioactive fallout contamination from above-ground nuclear tests.

Far too few people know that before U.S. armed forces bombed Japan, our government bombed New Mexico. The July 1945 Trinity bomb test in New Mexico caused generations of health harms, magnified by subsequent nuclear tests conducted in the region (and throughout the world) following World War II. To learn more about this little-known and tragic aspect of our nuclear era, we invite you to join our Virtual Gala on September 25, (buy tickets here) to hear our inspiring keynote speaker, Tina Cordova. Ms. Cordova is the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium and a cancer survivor. She is featured in the new award-winning documentary First We Bombed New Mexico, which explains how she and her community partners catalyzed a national movement to draw attention to the impact of the world’s first nuclear bomb detonation on thousands of New Mexicans, mostly Hispanic and Native American.

After Japan was nuked, the U.S. exploded nuclear bombs throughout a number of islands in the Pacific, and warships that were made radioactive by those nuclear blasts were brought back home to our San Francisco Bayview Hunters Point community, leading to widespread radioactive contamination that poses harm to inhabitants and the surrounding environment more than 75 years later. At our Gala we are also honored to include a local update about this situation by J. Michelle Pierce, a lifelong resident of Bayview Hunters Point and executive director of the Advocates, SF’s oldest environmental justice nonprofit, who will discuss the state of legacy radioactive and other environmental health issues in her community.

Toward the end of providing justice for harmed populations, PSR has been supporting strengthening and expanding the scope of the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) which would provide health care and compensation for the many downwind communities across the U.S. and elsewhere harmed by nuclear testing and contamination.

Our work is part of a vibrant global movement, including the multitude of affiliate partners within the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), working in movements such as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). ICAN has provided a global focus of action that complements the Back from the Brink program that many PSR chapters like ours have been working on, with its significant achievement being the 2017 passage of the United Nation’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is currently signed by 93 nations and 70 state parties.

We invite you to join us in these efforts and more. Please consider joining our SF Bay PSR Nuclear Weapons Abolition Committee to move this critical work forward. The NWAC meets virtually, every other month, and the next meeting will be on Thursday, August 15, at 7pm. We welcome your engagement! To join email info@sfbaypsr.org.

Help us to stop our greatest threats to survival—nuclear weapons devastation and the climate emergency.

In peace and solidarity,