By Ariana Costakes

As world leaders at a United Nations international conference yesterday pontificated on the theoretical dangers of nuclear proliferation, Terumi Tanaka related his real-life experience of an atomic attack.

Tanaka, participating in a panel at Pace University, told how on August 9, 1945 he lost five family members in the Nagasaki atom-bomb attacks. He was 13 years old.

“After that I suffered in many different ways,” said Tanaka, now 78. “The first was living life. There were times I would go for five or six days without eating.”

The occasion was a conference among survivors of both the Nagasaki and Hiroshima attacks and relatives of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Tanaka told his story in a discussion held by the John Jay College Center on terrorism at the Schimmel Theater.

Coping with he aftermath of the bomb as an adult, he said, was even more difficult.

“I was always worried about the radiation effects,” he said. “My first child was stillborn and my second had a rare disease that was a result of radiation. But I was able to overcome my suffering by fighting against nuclear weapons usage.”

As the director of the Japan Confederation of A-H Bomb Sufferers Organization Tanaka fought for abolition of nuclear weapons.

Tanaka said he saw the September 11th attacks on television in his home in Tokyo.

“I told my wife I hoped U.S. citizens would begin to understand what it was like for survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he said. “But they didn’t have the imagination I wanted them to have.”

“There is something about the experience of surviving that mitigates the rush towards retaliation,” said Charles Strozier, director of the center.
“New York was the center of opposition to the [Iraq] war in contrast to the rest of the country where most people experienced [the September 11th attacks] on television. New Yorkers tended to question the rush to war, the violence to avenge violence.”

The panelists made it clear that the September 11th attacks could not be compared to the disastrous effects of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but said they sought to build solidarity between survivors of both incidents.

“There is so much suffering,” said Tanaka. “Some people get depressed and despair but we are coming together for mutual support.”

“It is profoundly immoral to threaten the use of nuclear weapons,” said Strozier. “They are not weapons, they are instruments of genocide.”