[en] Physicians are exercising their responsibility as healers in their efforts to prevent nuclear war. Death for Hiroshima survivors was experienced in four stages: the immediate impact of destruction, the acute impact of radiation, delayed radiation effects, and later identification as an atomic bomb survivor. Each phase had its physical and psychological impacts and negates Hiroshima as a model for rational behavior despite those who claim survival is possible for those who are prepared. The psychic effects of modern nuclear, chemical, and germ warfare need to be challenged with a symbolization of life and immortality. Studies of psychological reactions to the terror children felt during practice air-raid drills indicate that the fears can be surpressed and re-emerge in adult life as a linking of death with collective annihilation. Other themes which emerge are feelings of impermanence, craziness, identification with the bomb, and a double existence. Psychic numbing and the religion of nuclearism cause dangerous conflicts with the anxieties caused by increasing awareness of death

[en] Nuclear numbing, a term used by the authors, is defined as psychological conditioning that leads us to consider the possibility of nuclear war as something natural and may make it easier for the nuclear threshold to be crossed. Professionals in the nuclear weapons industry from physicists to strategists are alleged to have undergone such conditioning. Much of this book is devoted to psychological factors that allegedly motivate the so-called nuclear professional. A passion for problem solving, and the technological imperative of what can be made must be made are cited. However, politics are probably the most important motivating factor. The race to beat the Germans to the atomic bomb and the fear that Russia would develop the hydrogen bomb were determining factors in the development of these weapons. Avoiding nuclear war is a political problem and cannot be solved by psychological analysis

[en] Since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has witnessed the insidious growth of a genocidal system-a constellation of men, weapons, and war-fighting plans which, if implemented, could put an end to life on this planet. In this book, the cast of mind that created and maintains this threat is examined and an alternative, more hopeful direction is suggested. This book draws on the lessons of the Holocaust- and presents a picture of the genocidal mentality. If we are to survive this genocidal mentality must give way to a species self, to a deepened awareness of belonging to a single species. This shift in mind-set would enable us to renounce nuclearism and to envision a genuine human future

[en] The author discusses his feelings and responses which he experienced from interviewing Hiroshima survivors. As survivors attempted to recall their feelings at the time of the bomb, they conveyed a sense of having been immersed in a sea of death. They remembered not only the expectation of their own death but also the sense that the whole world was dying. What impressed the author most was the survivor's lifelong encounter with death, which could be understood as taking place in four stages: the immersion in death at the time of the bomb; the experience of acute radiation effects (including extreme weakness, severe gastrointestinal symptoms, bleeding into the skin and from bodily orifices, high fever, low white blood cell counts, alopecia, and death); delayed radiation effects (increased incidence of leukemia and of many forms of cancer); and an eventual sense of permanent death taint associated with the identity of hibakusha, or explosion-affected person

[en] We are in the midst of a significant but tortured shift in consciousness concerning the nuclear threat. At precisely such a time, we would do well to consider what might be an appropriate set of convictions - appropriate psychologically and in terms of life enhancement. The 10 principles the authors wish to elaborate are simple ones, already adopted by a growing number of people. We face a new dimension of destruction - not a matter of disaster or even of a war - but rather of an end; an end to human civilization and perhaps humankind. This concept violates our ignored mental constructs concerning human continuity: though we can imagine particular cultures being impaired or even destroyed, we expect humankind to heal itself sufficiently to survive. But the findings of a possible ''nuclear winter'' effect concretize the idea of a nuclear end, and, however grim, serve the imagination in the difficult task of looking into the abyss in order to see beyond it. The image of the nuclear end includes not only death and suffering on the most massive scale but, beyond that, nothingness. Two relatively recent historical events, the Nazi holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assist that kind of imaginative act