THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALTHURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020 Y A
clear weapons. From welcoming
visitors into their homes in Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki to lecturing
on cruise ships, they have shared
their message of peace with audi-
ences at home and abroad, includ-
ing with the world’s political and
religious leaders.
For both policymakers and the
public, hearing survivors’ first-
hand experiences of bombings
that killed more than 200,000 peo-TOKYO — The hibakusha, as
the survivors of the atomic bomb-
ings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
are known in Japan, have
achieved a powerful feat of alche-
my, transforming their nightmar-
ish memories of the blasts and
their aftermath into a visceral
force for promoting a world free of
nuclear arms.
Each year for over half a cen-
tury, many of them have gathered
in the early hours of Aug. 6 at the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
to mourn the destruction of the
city by the American military dur-
ing World War II and to serve as a
living testament to the abiding
dangers of the bomb.
But on Thursday, as Hiroshima
marked the 75th anniversary of
the nuclear assault, the hibakusha
were a diminished presence, vic-
tims of the twin forces of the coro-
navirus pandemic and advancing
age.
“There were people who ques-
tioned whether it was OK for hi-
bakusha to participate in the cere-
mony in the midst of the pan-
demic,” said Kunihiko Sakuma,
chair of the Hiroshima branch of
the Japan Confederation of A- and
H-Bomb Sufferers’ Organizations.
Despite the health risks, a rela-
tively small number of survivors
attended this year, Mr. Sakuma
said. They believe that “they’ve
come this far” and “can’t quit,” he
said, adding that “sending this
message from Hiroshima is ex-
tremely important.”
City officials and peace activists
had envisioned a series of grand
events to commemorate what was
most likely the last major anniver-
sary of the bombing for almost all
of the hibakusha still living.
But the coronavirus forced
them to curtail the events, moving
conferences on nuclear disarma-
ment online, canceling or post-
poning related meetings and re-
ducing the number of attendees to
around 800, a tenth of the turnout
during a normal year.
Cognizant of the declining pop-
ulation of survivors of the two
atomic bombings, which now
stands at about 136,000, the Hiro-
shima government decided to fo-
cus this year’s remembrance on
mourning the dead and honoring
the experience of those who re-
main.
The memories of the hibakusha,
whose average age is 83, are an in-
creasingly precious resource. As
their numbers fall, they and their
supporters are being forced to en-
vision what the disarmament
movement will look like without
the people who have put a human
face on the cost of nuclear war.
Mr. Sakuma said he hoped that
the survivors’ children and their
children’s children would carry on
the fight as long as it took.
“The hibakusha can’t avoid the
fact that our numbers are de-
creasing,” he said. “Each year a
few thousand more disappear.
Who knows how many years we
have left?”
Scarred physically and men-
tally by the tremendous power un-
leashed by the splitting of atoms
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
hibakusha have become a rallying
point for peace activists the world
over, as well as the moral ballast of
Japan’s postwar pacifism.
Survivors have spent measure-
less time and energy campaigning
for the complete elimination of nu-
ple has been “really important on
a personal level,” said Sharon
Squassoni, director of the global
security program at the Union of
Concerned Scientists. “It’s really
easy for these issues to become
abstract because these weapons
haven’t been used in 75 years.”
When survivors’ organizations
first began to be politically active
in the 1950s, they had two goals: to
demand compensation and finan-cial support from the Japanese
government, and to push for the
elimination of nuclear weapons.
They have largely been suc-
cessful on the first front, although
some compensation claims are
still wending their way through
the country’s courts.
But after years of optimism fed
by signs of progress, most sur-
vivors now say that a world free of
nuclear weapons is a distantdream. That bleak outlook reflects
a general feeling in the arms-con-
trol community that the world is
giving up hard-won gains.
The number of nuclear war-
heads has dropped from a peak of
around 70,000 in the mid-1980s to
about 13,000 today. But in the past
25 years, India, Pakistan and
North Korea have established
themselves as nuclear states,
China has expanded its modest ar-
senal, and most important, the
United States and Russia — far
and away the largest nuclear pow-
ers — have begun extricating
themselves from treaties that
have bound them since the end of
the Cold War.
Those trends, however, have
only steeled the survivors’ resolve
for fighting. In 2017, their efforts
were rewarded with passage in
the United Nations General As-
sembly of the Treaty on the Prohi-
bition of Nuclear Weapons.
The treaty’s future is uncertain.
It has only 40 of the 50 signatures
it needs before it can go into effect.
And it is unlikely to ever gain sup-
port from the nuclear-armed
states or from countries, like Ja-
pan itself, that are under the aegis
of the American arsenal.
For the hibakusha, though, the
treaty is a validation. The sur-
vivors had long believed that “no
one was listening to them,” said
Kazumi Mizumoto, an expert on
security studies and nuclear dis-
armament at Hiroshima City Uni-
versity. But the treaty’s passage“reaffirmed their existence,” he
said.
Still, that existence is facing the
inevitable toll of time. As the
ranks of hibakusha shrink, their
lobbying groups have begun to fall
on hard times. One disbanded in
June 2019, citing the difficulties of
continuing with an aging leader-
ship.
“We’re coming to the point
where we have to think about how
our organizations can continue
forward. The situation is tough,”
said Koichiro Maeda, 71, a former
director of the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum and the cur-
rent head of the secretariat of one
of the survivors’ groups.
It is more important than ever
to ensure that the survivors’ lega-
cy is carried on, said Maika
Nakao, a professor of history at
Nagasaki University who studies
Japan’s relationship with nuclear
weapons.
In addition to their role on the
international stage, the survivors,
and their stories, are an integral
part of Japan’s national identity,
serving as the country’s con-
science in an era when the rea-
sons for adhering to principles of
peace have become more and
more abstract.
“We have to think about how to
acknowledge the history, how to
memorialize it and how to pass it
down to the future generations,”
Professor Nakao said.
“We have a lot of testimonies,
but it’s not enough,” she said.
“There is no perfect condition. No
matter how much you ask, no mat-
ter how much you collect, it’s
never enough. It’s important to
document everything.”Dwindling in Number, Hiroshima Survivors Press Their Case for Peace
By BEN DOOLEY
and HISAKO UENOHiroshima Peace Memorial
Park, where a ceremony was
scheduled for Thursday. Lee
Jong-keun, far left, a survivor
of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic
bombing of Hiroshima, at-
tended a memorial service on
Wednesday for Korean victims
of the bombing. Michiko Ko-
dama, near left, survived the
bombing but has lost many
relatives to cancer.DAI KUROKAWA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKEUGENE HOSHIKO/ASSOCIATED PRESSThe Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. About 136,000 bombing survivors are still alive.DAI KUROKAWA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKEUGENE HOSHIKO/ASSOCIATED PRESSAdvancing age
and a pandemic limit
the numbers present
at a milestone event.
WASHINGTON — Russia con-
tinues to use a network of proxy
websites to spread pro-Kremlin
disinformation and propaganda in
the United States and other parts
of the West, according to a State
Department report released on
Wednesday.
The report is one of the most de-
tailed explanations yet from the
Trump administration on how
Russia disseminates disinforma-
tion, but it largely avoids dis-
cussing how Moscow is trying to
influence the current campaign.
Even as Democrats on Capitol Hill
have urged the American govern-
ment to declassify more informa-
tion on Russia’s efforts to interfere
with the election, President
Trump has repeatedly told offi-
cials such disclosures are unwel-
come.
Most of the report focuses on an
ecosystem of websites, many of
them fringe or conspiracy
minded, that Russia has used or
directed to spread propaganda on
a variety of topics. Those include
an online journal called the Stra-
tegic Culture Foundation and
other sites, like the Canada-based
Global Research. The document
builds on information disclosed
last week by American officials
about Russian intelligence’s con-
trol of various propaganda sites.
Secretary of State Mike Pom-
peo, who announced the release of
the report on Wednesday, said the
State Department would offer re-
wards of up to $10 million for infor-
mation to help identify any person
who, acting at the direction of a
foreign government, tries to hack
into election or campaign infra-
structure.
The report was prepared by the
department’s Global Engagement
Center, whose mandate is only to
examine propaganda efforts out-
side the United States.
The report states that the Stra-
tegic Culture Foundation is di-
rected by Russia’s foreign intelli-
gence service, the S.V.R., and
stands as “a prime example of
longstanding Russian tactics to
conceal direct state involvement
in disinformation and propaganda
outlets.” The organization pub-
lishes a wide variety of fringe
voices and conspiracy theories inEnglish, while trying to obscure
its Russian government sponsor-
ship.
“The Kremlin bears direct re-
sponsibility for cultivating these
tactics and platforms as part of its
approach of using information
and disinformation as a weapon,”
said Lea Gabrielle, the coordina-tor of the State Department’s
Global Engagement Center.
Absent from the report is any
mention of how one of the writers
for the Strategic Culture Founda-
tion weighed in this spring on a
Democratic congressional prima-
ry race in New York State. The
writer, Michael Averko, published
articles on the foundation’s web-
site and in a local publication in
Westchester County attacking
Evelyn N. Farkas, a formerObama administration official
who was running. The F.B.I. re-
cently questioned Mr. Averko
about the Strategic Culture Foun-
dation and its ties to Russia.
While those attacks did not
have a decisive effect on the elec-
tion, they showed Moscow’s con-
tinuing efforts to influence votes
in the United States, Dr. Farkas
said Wednesday in an interview.
She criticized the State Depart-
ment for failing to explain how the
Strategic Culture Foundation had
tried to intervene in the current
election, arguing the report
missed an opportunity to “wake
people up.”
“The State Department should
not be releasing information that
is so sanitized that it fails to con-
vey the enormity of the situation,”
Dr. Farkas said. “The whole point
of writing a report like this is to
put the American people on alert.”
Intelligence officials in recent
days have briefed members of
Congress about election threats
from Russia and other countries.
Senator Richard Blumenthal,
Democrat of Connecticut, and
other lawmakers have called on
the administration to declassifyand release to the public informa-
tion about those threats.
“The fact that they are issuing
this report about what the Rus-
sians are doing around the globe
but not in the United States shows
all the more how information rela-
tive to our own security should be
declassified,” Mr. Blumenthal said
in an interview on Wednesday.
“The classified briefings have
been absolutely chilling and
frankly terrifying in the magni-
tude of foreign threat to our elec-
tion security that we face. It really
is a break-the-glass moment.”
The State Department report
tries to gauge the reach of the pro-
Russia propaganda sites. Global
Research is by far the most popu-
lar. According to the report, it has
accumulated 12.4 million page
views, drawing an average of
351,247 people per article. Other
sites, like News Front and South-
Front, have nine million and 4.
million readers each. The Stra-
tegic Culture Foundation has far
less substantial internet traffic,
having drawn only about 990,
visitors.
Global Research, according tothe report, is a “home-grown Ca-
nadian website” that nonetheless
has become enmeshed in
Moscow’s propaganda ecosys-
tem. The report notes that the
founder of the site, Michel Chossu-
dovsky, was a former contributor
to RT, Moscow’s state-sponsored
international broadcaster, and sits
on the board of other pro-Russian
conspiracy sites. Global Research
has denied that it is part of a pro-
Russian network of websites.
The State Department report
also highlights how the websites
have spread disinformation and
conspiracy theories surrounding
the pandemic, most notably the
false story that the novel coro-
navirus was created in an Ameri-
can military lab.
One false story by Global Re-
search claiming that the coro-
navirus pandemic was not real
was then spread by 70 other sites
and publications, Ms. Gabrielle
said.U.S. Traces Russia Disinformation Network; Offers Reward to Curb Hacking
By JULIAN E. BARNESWhat a senator calls
a ‘break-the-glass
moment.’
No day is complete
without
The New York Times.