<Begin Segment 21>

MN: Now, going back to Hiroshima, I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on the status of nuclear weapons around the world. Have we learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

JD: Yeah, whenever I give a talk, there's a little poem on the Peace Park that says, "Please rest in peace, for this error shall never be repeated again," and I try to relate that, that feeling to whenever I talk to people and educate the people the horror of atomic bomb and what it does to people. It's almost like a weapon with poison gas in it because the radiation affected the, do to the bodies, and it is declared as a poison gas, a poison weapon. In Japan, when they surrendered they, they protested the Geneva Conference that it's, it was a, weapon against Japan was a poison, poisonous weapon. But of course, Japan lost the war, so nothing was done about it, but it is truly a weapon with poison in it, and we see the sample from the Chernobyl accident that people cannot live in that area for a hundred years because the contamination of the ground, cannot drink the milk, the cow eat the grass in the area because the contamination. And we still don't know what effect it has to human body. We're still studying it because it's something really new. We just know what it might do or kind of feel what it might do, and even when you go to the dentist to have our teeth x-rayed we are protected so that it won't affect our body 'cause only so many radiation could receive in the body, so you have to be very careful. So that's the main message what it'll give, that if you, if you use the atomic weapon against an enemy there's no hope that you, you hit the enemy, enemy will remain there because the earth turns and whatever you affected the enemy will come right back to you as the nuclear count. So it's a really idiotic weapon that, if you think you're gonna win the war against the enemy, you cannot because it comes back to you.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.