In memoriam

At age nine, Tony deBrum witnessed the greatest-ever
hellfire ignited by the USA, the Castle Bravo Bomb,
detonated in 1954 and a thousand times more powerful
than the Hiroshima bomb. “It was in the morning and
I was fishing with my grandfather. He was throwing
the net and suddenly the silent bright flash – and then
a force, the shock wave. Everything turned red – the
ocean, the fish, the sky, and my grandfather’s net. And
we were 200 miles away from ground zero. A memory
that can never be erased.”
The US considered the 867 Micronesian islands scattered
over 180 square kilometers a test area. For 12 years,
beginning in 1946, the United States tested a total of
67 atom and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere and
under water. It was then that the Bikini atoll became
synonymous with horror and fear.
Senator deBrum, today Foreign Secretary of the Republic
of the Marshall Islands, spent the better part of
his professional life fighting for clean-up and damages
for radiation victims in the Marshall Islands, focusing
on the cause as much as on the effects. The core of the
matter is nuclear power, a precondition for most of
today’s arsenals of nuclear weapons.
Recently, he brought suit in the International Court of
Justice on behalf of the Marshall Islands, but with the
moral support of countless people, against the signatory
powers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),
charging them with inaction in spite of numerous
declarations of intent to reduce the number of nuclear
weapons.
In a United Nations plenary session the man from
the islands declared on April 27, 2015: “The serious
shortfalls in the NPT’s implementation are not only
legal gaps but also a failure to address the incontrovertible
human rights.” deBrum also cautions us against
a deceptive sense of security: “While it is true that the
number of nuclear weapons worldwide has slowly diminished
no one can seriously claim that sixteen thousand
warheads mark the threshold of global security. We are
witnesses as nuclear nations modernize and expand
their arsenals. There can be no right of ‚unlimited possession‘.“
For many years, banning all nuclear weapons and fighting
global warming have been the focus of deBrum’s
activity. He likes to use local earth and water colors
when illustrating the effects of global warming on vast
coastal and island regions. The islanders, who in the
past had to abandon irradiated parts of their homelands,
will soon have to leave low-lying parts threatened
by the rising sea-level. The Marshall Islands are
facing extinction. The population is being expelled in
two stages: first, they had to escape death by radiation,
soon they willhave to escape death by drowning. Both
catastrophes are man-made.
Over the years, Tony deBrum has become an anchor for
people all over the world confronting both the threats
of the nuclear complex and the oncoming dangers of
the submersion of low-lying coasts and islands. He became
a public figure because he knows how to publicize
the lethal consequence of human action and inaction.
When the overkill of horror – death by radiation and
/ or drowning – threatens to make us speechless, we
need people who will speak up. We need many de
Brums.
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