About the Workshop

Workshop Title:  Global Hibakusha: Testimonies of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Witnesses/Survivors

Track: Abolition

Co-sponsored by:  Gensuikyo, the International Peace Bureau, and BANg. Panelists include: Junko Kayashige, Matashichi Oishi, Claudia Peterson, Abbacca Anjain Madison, Kin Yongkil, Claudia Peterson, and Natalia Mironova.

Held on: May 1st, 2010  3:15 pm   (See the conference schedule)

Transcripts

Talk by Claudia Peterson

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this conference peace and justice.

I come to you from Southern Utah, downwind from the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. government has tested over 1000 nuclear devices.

I have spent my entire life downwind from the Nevada Test Site.  As a child we ate contaminated vegetables and fruit from the garden.  We drank raw cows milk that was contaminated.  We swam in contaminated ponds.  We ate fish out of the ponds and ate the cattle who had been grazing and drinking contaminated food.  All during the time when the campaign was to increase weapons and deny any wrong doing and insisted that the testing and weapons development was in the best interests of the nation.

I grew up believing I lived a charmed existence.  The US government took great steps to assure us that everything was safe and no harm would come to us.  When life is good, it’s hard to believe that awful things could possibly happen.  But they do, something the people living downwind from the test site found out soon after the testing began.  We watched loved ones suffer and die at an alarming rate, while the US government continued to deny any wrongdoing.

My husband’s father was a uranium miner and died at a young age of lung cancer as a result of working in improperly vented mines.  We now know from declassified documents that the US government made a conscious decision not to tell the miners of the illness that would occur from exposure to radon gas, because it needed the uranium to build bombs.

My father died at the age of 63 after having a brain tumor the size of a lemon removed from his head.  At this time, our family doctor suggested that the tumor was the result of the fallout that rained over our homes from the nuclear testing.

As hard as my father’s death was, it was nothing compared to the heartache that would follow.  At the age of three, my youngest daughter Bethany was diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer – neuroblastoma.  I watched this wonderfully lively inquisitive child fight so many struggles to live.  After three years of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery she lost her fight.  We held Bethany while she died, knowing the horror that we could do nothing but pray that her suffering would end.

Just one month before Bethany died, Cathy, my only sister passed away at the age of 36 from skin cancer.  She left behind six small children and a husband.  The pain of watching loved ones die is so profound that I too, wished for death to end the sadness from within me.  The nuclear age not only physically killed thousands, but also caused a great many of us the loss of our innocence.

You are changed by loss and suffering.  The heartache never goes away and just when one is able to come up for air, another loved one is diagnosed with an earth shattering illness.  Like a wound that never is able to heal because the scab keeps getting torn off.

My mother-in-law died from the same lung cancer as her husband did but it just look longer as her exposure had been at lower levels.

When my sister died her children ranged in age from 14 years to nine months.  This year her oldest son Kelly died at the age of 35 after fighting with the same spirit that his mother had fought.  Just as it had done with his mother, the cancer was slow, deliberate, and ugly.  Just a little over a year later, his wife died of heartache after never being able to come to terms with losing him.

Several weeks ago, my brother-in-law died of prostate cancer that had spread throughout his entire body.  His first wife and a son had also died of cancer years earlier after living their entire lives in northern Arizona.

I am a medical social worker, who on almost a daily basis deals with someone who is dealing with the continuing incidents of cancer and other illnesses from the nuclear testing.

The U.S. government has seen possession of Nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the aggression of other nations.  Many seem to think this has kept us safe.  Since the beginning of this altered thought process they have continued to promote, justify, and sell these ideas to themselves and others.  Things have changed.  We are no longer country against country.  We are a global community. We have not been kept safe.

Mine is only one story of thousands that  have happened because of the global nuclear fall out. We have the opportunity to change the  polices of our governments, the time has never been more right or close to happening. We can change the future, we are all victims of the nuclear age. Let’s choose to make things right. So, as we listen to the stories we will be reminded that each of us has a stake in our own future.  Anyone of these stories could be yours.

I pray for the earth that has bee abused, the plant life and the animals that have suffered.  I pray for us and those who gone before us and those to come later that the needless suffering can stop.