A-Bomb Earrings

As the Chinese know, much to their dismay, Department of Energy sites have become an odd new tourist destination. More people visit Los Alamos each year than Fort Ticondaroga, site of another famous spy scandal. On display are some of the curios of the nuclear age. At Oak Ridge, visitors are led on a self-guided nature tour of an irradiated forest. At the Idaho National Engineering Labs, the curious are shown a prototype of one of Edward Teller's more bizarre fantasies, the nuclear powered jet engine. (Yes, it could have flown, but the designers couldn't come up with a way to keep the pilots from suffering a lethal dose of radiation poisoning.) According to the Department of Energy's Public Affairs office, many of the foreign visitors to these sites are Japanese.

Where there are tourists, there are also gift shops. Among the trinkets to be found at the Energy Department's Sandia Labs gift shop on Kirtland Air Force Base, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are medallions commemorating the flight units which dropped the atom bombs on Japan. The gift shop also sells matching pairs of earrings shaped like Little Boy and Fat Man, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The earrings sell for $20 and, according to gift shop manager, Tony Sparks, are the most popular items in the store.

Naomi Kishimoto, who heads Japanese anti-nuke group Gensuikyo (Council Against A and H Bombs) and learned of the bomb replicas from outraged Japanese tourists, told us that she found the earrings and other nuclear mementos appalling. "We're very angry," Kishimoto said. "It's not the sort of thing that should be hanging from your ears or be used to decorate your desk. How can that museum sell something that praises the unit that dropped the atom bomb?"

The museum's director James Walther sees no problem with the bomb earrings and says he has no plans to stop selling them. This museum doesn't advocate war, Walther said. But the museum director did note that he believed the earrings commemorated a turning point in history and that the museum, and its gift shop, promotes the idea that the bombings, which killed at least 210,000 Japanese civilians, ended the war and saved the lives of U.S. soldiers.

This rationalization perpetuates one of the great frauds of the war in the Pacific. As described in John Dower's brilliant War Without Mercy, by the spring of 1945 the Japanese military had been demolished. The disparities in the casualties figures between the Japanese and the Americans are striking. From 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy suffered 1,740,955 military deaths in combat. Dower estimates that another 300,000 died from disease and starvation. In addition, another 395,000 Japanese civilians died as a result of Allied saturation bombing that began in March 1945 and ended with the dropping of Fat Boy on Nagasaki on August 9. The total dead: more than 2.7 million. In contrast, American military deaths totaled 100,997.

The commemoration of the Air Force wing which conducted the bombing of Japan is particularly galling. Beyond the atom bombs, such a memorial sanctifies the barbaric actions of General Henry Arnold, who pressed Harry Truman to put on as big a finale as possible. Even though Japan had announced its intentions to surrender on August 10, this didn't deter the bloodthirsty Arnold. On August 14, Arnold directed a 1,014 plane air raid on Tokyo, blasting the city to ruins and killing thousands. Not one American plane was lost, and the unconditional surrender was signed before the planes had returned to their bases.

Those atom bombs were aimed at Moscow as much as they were at Japan.

From Belgrade to Santa Fe?

In a new advertising campaign that could have been designed by the same PR flacks who prepped us for the war in Kosovo, cattle ranchers and other Wise Use types in the Southwest are smearing environmentalists as Milosevic-like ethnic cleansers. One of the ads, which appeared in the July issue of The New Mexico Stockman magazine, reads:

"Ethnic cleansing--cultural genocide--Serbs---you don't have to go overseas to find them. They are right here in our national forests, in our communities, in our media outlets. SERBS (Selfish Environmental Radical Bigots) are demonizing livestock producers through the courts and the media. Their goal--and they are doing a pretty good job of it so far--is to remove livestock producers from the land; to destroy rural economies and families; to erase the traditional ethnic backgrounds of New Mexico and the Southwest."

"These SERBS are finances by wealthy outsiders and the federal government. By suing federal and state agencies, SERBS are dictating land management policy that in turn impacts your private property and water rights. By telling lies to the media and buying advertising space to print even bigger lies, they are turning the public against you!"

The ad goes on to blast environmentalists' efforts to protect endangered species such as the Southwest Willow Flycatcher and the Mexican Wolf, and urges readers to send money to the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association Litigation Fund, a group of rancher lawyers who have filed lawsuits alleging that the federal government has no rights to restrict activities on public lands in New Mexico.

"All this is reminiscent of the garbage being spouted by hate groups against Jews, blacks, and gays," says Patricia Wolff, one of several New Mexico environmentalists who has received death threats over the past two years. "We have a right to pursue justice through the courts just like everyone else. I won't be deterred by those who want to foment hate and violence against us."

Nature & Politics appears weekly in the Anderson Valley Advertiser ( 12451 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville, CA 95415, $40/year). Cockburn and St. Clair also edit the biweekly newsletter CounterPunch, which "tells the facts and names the names" (3220 N. Street NW, PMB 346, Washington, DC 2007-2829, $40/year).