Recalling Hiroshima, Nagasaki

Jonathan Parfrey knows that the debate over the atomic bomb is far from over. Fifty years after the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--resulting in Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II--the subject is still painful for many.

“The issue still has a mythic hold on Americans, which keeps it alive,” says Parfrey, executive director of the Santa Monica-based activist organization Physicians for Social Responsibility.

“It’s something very powerful in the American identity, a collective scar. [Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki], there were 200,000 casualties in three days; the vast majority of those were not combatants. If you can legitimize that kind of warfare, you can legitimize the use of nuclear weapons in the future.”

Which brings Parfrey to his point: that despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the slowdown of the international nuclear arms race, vigilance is still essential.

“When the Berlin Wall came down, so too did public concern about nuclear weapons,” he says.

“But the truth is we’re only halfway through the life of the Atomic Age. We now have 1,000 tons of plutonium, enough to kill the whole world. The U.S. still has 9,000 nuclear weapons--3,500 strategically deployed. I find that untenable.”

To mark the anniversary of the bombings Aug. 6 and 9, the group is sponsoring events throughout the city in galleries, movie houses, community centers and churches.

Founded locally in 1980, Physicians for Social Responsibility is the U.S. affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. The group is not strictly composed of doctors; they number only about 800 of the group’s 1,900 members.

Parfrey himself is not a doctor. The Los Angeles native received his bachelor’s degree in history from UC Berkeley. But it was in college that he began to read a lot about Gandhi, and to practice what he calls “a respectful way to engage in civil disobedience.”

After college, Parfrey and his family--wife Rio and their four children--spent six years in Catholic Worker Community, a lay religious order in East Los Angeles.

He later established a similar community in Santa Ana, opening his home and providing up to 150 meals a day to the homeless.

“We’re genetically defective do-gooders,” he notes amiably. After a fund-raising stint for Nevada Desert Experience, a group that protests bomb testing, Parfrey returned to Los Angeles, and in 1994 assumed directorship at Physicians for Social Responsibility, which he had nurtured in its local beginnings 15 years ago.

Aug. 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, also happens to be Parfrey’s 37th birthday, which he will mark with a speech at a Rancho Palos Verdes church--a definite contrast to his public protests of years past. “I’ve spent a few of my birthdays in jail,” he admits. “It’s not so bad.”

For further information about Physicians for Social Responsibility, or any of the following commemorative events, call (310) 458-2694.