Reviews

Out Of The Nuclear Shadow, edited by Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian; Lokayan (Delhi), Rainbow Publishers (Delhi), and Zed Books (London), 2001, 525 pp.

Outraged conscience, careful argument, poetry, political analysis—gathered here is the diversity of voices, traditions, and approaches that are weaving themselves into an anti-nuclear movement in India and Pakistan.

In these essays written before, during, and after the May 1998 nuclear explosions, scholars and activists from these two countries attempt to understand and challenge the nuclearisation of South Asia. These essays are an act of resistance against governments that see nuclear weapons as a currency of power, as symbols of prestige, as sources of security, as moments of glory in an otherwise dismal contemporary history.

The collection includes Mahatma Gandhi’s response to the bombing of Hiroshima, and recent writings by Eqbal Ahmad, Rajni Kothari, Ashis Nandy, Arundhati Roy, Amartya Sen, and veteran anti-nuclear activists, academics, and journalists. The volume also contains the texts of many of the historic public statements protesting the May 1998 nuclear tests that helped mobilise public opposition to the bomb in South Asia. There is a resource guide to books, films, and websites on nuclear weapons, as well as information on many organizations now working on this issue.

Smitu Kothari is based at Lokayan in Delhi, where he coordinates research and campaigns on political, cultural, and ecological issues, and co-edits the Lokayan Bulletin. He is a member of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, president of the International Group for Grassroots Initiatives and has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Princeton universities.
Zia Mian is a physicist and writer from Pakistan at Princeton University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and a visiting fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad. He has written extensively on nuclear weapons issues, and is active in the South Asian peace movement and global anti-nuclear organising. He has also taught at Yale University and Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad.

—from Zed Books

Two Walk the Golden Road, by Wilson M. Powell and Zhou Ming-fu. Mahomet, IL: Mayhaven, 2000. $17.95

The history of cenotaphs reveals something hopeful about the evolution of the moral imagination. From the Arc de Triomphe’s glorification of Napoleon’s 600 generals, to the chronologically listed killed US soldiers of the US Vietnam Memorial, to Okinawa’s Cornerstone of Peace, which lists all the dead from the Battle of Okinawa in WWII—Japanese soldiers, Allied soldiers, Okinawans, and Korean slave laborers—we witness an expansion of empathy for all involved in wars. The Korean cenotaph imagines a future peaceful world. Shown to possess common humanity with similar hopes and fears, with families, husbands, wives, children, parents—the enemies created by national war propaganda shed their dehumanizing hatefulness.

Hans Chlumberg’s Miracle at Verdun dramatizes World War I German and French dead rising out of their graves to march on their capitals for peace, unsuccessfully. In Voices from the Ho Chi Minh Trail: Poetry of America and Vietnam, 1965-1993, by Larry Rottmann, Vietnamese soldiers and civilians are human beings first. (One Vietnamese man too old for war was sent down the trail to whistle bird songs to cheer the troops, since all the birds were dead or fled .) Writing Between the Lines, edited by Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl, collects short stories, poetry, and essays by Vietnamese and US veterans and other survivors. Such writings seek to prevent future wars by healing the conditioned enmity between warriors. "We need to see more of such pairings," poet Denise Levertov said.

Two Walk the Golden Road offers a unique, book-length pairing of two Korean War enemies, one Chinese, the other US. The title, suggested by Ming-fu during his visit to co-author Powell’s home in St. Louis, refers to their friendship in peace. The book is dedicated to "all veterans who, recognizing the futility and waste of war, work to bring the birds back to the battlefield."

The two interwoven, chronological memoirs of former enemy soldiers have a strong cumulative impact, as the reader compares their extremely different social lives with their so similar interior lives. Despite the contrast of the one’s repressive and the other’s permissive world, both struggle with their fathers, yearn to strike out on their own, search for love and affection, try to raise a family with mixed success, do their duty as soldiers, and learn to accept each other as friends. Powell writes: "I feel you and I are on a kind of frontier. We have discovered something precious and important about ourselves as human beings. We have a connection that transcends geography, nationality, ideology. What we have is the world’s hope for real peace."

—Dick Bennett, Professor Emeritus, University of Arkansas, compiled the Peace Movement Directory (McFarland, 2001) and helped create Arkansas’ OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology in Faytetteville this year (http://comp.uark.edu/~jbennet).

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