By MARTIN FACKLER - Published: August 6, 2011 NAGASAKI, Japan - In 1945, Masahito Hirose saw the white mushroom cloud rise from the atomic bomb that incinerated this city and that left his aunt to die a slow, painful death, bleeding from her nose and gums. Still, like other survivors of the attacks here and in Hiroshima, he quietly accepted Japan's postwar embrace of nuclear-generated power, believing government assurances that it was both safe and necessary for the nation's economic rise.
That was before this year's disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan confronted the survivors once again with their old nightmare: thousands of civilians exposed to radiation. Aghast at the catastrophic failure of nuclear technology, and outraged by revelations that the government and power industry had planted nuclear proponents at recent town hall-style meetings, the elderly atomic bomb survivors, dwindling in numbers, have begun stepping forward for the first time to oppose nuclear power.
Now, as both Hiroshima and Nagasaki observe the 66th anniversary of the American atomic attacks at the end of World War II, the survivors are hoping that they can use their unique moral standing, as the only victims of nuclear bombings, to wean both Japan and the world from what they see as mankind's tragedy-prone efforts to tap the atom.
"Is it Japan's fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?" said Mr. Hirose, 81, who was a junior high school student when an American bomb obliterated much of Nagasaki, killing about 40,000 people instantly. "I wish we had found the courage to speak out earlier against nuclear power."
Atomic Bomb Survivors Join Nuclear Opposition - IHT
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