Nuclear Arms

Nuclear Arms made a strong impression on me from a young age. My mother was (read: "is") a hippie and an activist and I saw my first images of nuclear devastation and received my first lecture on them in elementary school. My mom didn't do this on purpose, I was tagging along at some kind of meeting by choice. However the effect was lasting, and I was probably the only person in my middle school class who knew all about basic nuclear science and its applications before we learned it in seventh grade. (Read: "nerd")So today when I saw an event in the library run by the SGI group and I was very interested. Actually I was busy and almost walked right by it but a representative student caught me and asked me so kindly in English to have a look at their exhibit. How could she know that the kindly foreigner was a Physicist? I was pleased.

Especially of notice was a panel with a digitally rendered image of Seoul with a giant

mushroom cloud covering a large portion of the city, including details on the potential destruction. It's nice to see someone making the message personal. (Although I have to point out that they didn't portray well the nothingness created by even the first two seconds of a nuclear explosion.)
There was also a panel on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ("I went there especially because of the atomic bomb museum," I said.) On the panel was a picture I knew, entitled, "The lens clouded by tears." I remember crying when I saw it in the museum. They discussed with me the mission of the group that "The time to discuss the issue of peace is NOW."

As I walked away (remember I was busy) I stopped to take a photo. A student asked me if I wanted them to send me pictures they took. "Of course," I said and gave them my card. "O.O You're a professor?! I thought you were a student! Oh please wait, no, no you can't leave. Please sign our guest book! The Chancellor and many other professors have signed it." I decided right then that I was going to be a professor about this.

When I went back to the department office, I sent every student that wasn't busy to see the exhibit. We are bodyguard majors, I feel it's pertinent. Any weapon that can hurt the President is, after all, the concern of the Secret Service, is it not?

Then I went to demo team practice so I wouldn't be late, and ordered all the members (about twenty today) to follow me to the library. ("I don't even know where the library is," one joked.) Of course some of them didn't pay much attention, but that's normal for a field trip. ^^ So I explained after how we should be aware of such things if we become police officers or bodyguards. How far away is safe from a nuclear strike? A hard thought.

I think some of them might think a little bigger because of an exhibit like that, and I know the representatives appreciated the additional publicity. Perhaps I made some awkward because of the strong pro-peace message, but even so, I feel I used my professorship to good effect today if even a few of them were changed by that knowledge.

To be honest, mom, I don't remember how many times I've cried over this. Japanese class presentations, the Enola Gay fully reconstructed. Anime about mushrooms of fire and ash. Thousands of paper cranes by Sadako's monument. A blurred photo of burnt and tattered people huddling together in the museum in Hiroshima. And times I remember and wish I could apologize officially on behalf of all physicists.

I wrote a small message on a wall of notes left by visitors.

"As a physicist I will never support the making of weapons. Because of Nuclear Arms."