No Nukes, Surrey, BC, 1981

“[We] must assume full responsibility for settling human differences peacefully”. ~ Jonathan Schell

Peace capital

Vancouver is still ostensibly a nuclear weapons free city. So is Victoria and Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. Kitimat, in northern British Columbia, also says no to nukes.

My photo files from the 1980s and ‘90s contain many sleeves of negatives, exposed at Vancouver anti-nuke rallies, an almost annual occurrence in those days. The previous post features one of those photos, made at the massive 100,000-strong protest, in the spring of 1986, the year the city proclaimed itself the capital of peace. My “Faces of Resistance” gallery contains more.

Nuclear disarmament was a thing

California Dreaming, Alaska, 1976

Boomers grew up under the cloud of the mushroom cloud. At 15, among my Beatles, Kinks, and Yardbirds posters on the wall of my basement pad there was one, a dark humoured list of ten things to do in the event of a nuclear attack. It began with suggestions like “Seal windows and doors” and ended with:

9. Put your head between your legs
10. Kiss your ass goodbye

The fifties nuclear boom, if you’ll forgive the pun, gave way to the sixties peace movement in response to permanent war and nuclear one-upmanship. I recall meeting an American airman at a campsite in Alaska, in 1976. He’d just completed a stint “playing chicken,” as he put it, with his Russian, or rather Soviet counterparts, over the Bering Sea. He revealed how close those silly, provocative war games had come to unleashing nuclear annihilation. He couldn’t wait to get back to California, chill out, and “… smoke a lotta dope, man.”

In the ‘80s, we read Jonathan Schell’s troubling Fate of the Earth* and quaked in our boots. Then we marched.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Today, it looks like the Lower Mainland is vying for title of “drive-by capital,” with Surrey particularly hard-hit by gun-violence. Where have all the hippies gone?

Meanwhile, signs proclaiming Vancouver a “Nuclear Weapons Free Zone,” once prominent on city lampposts, are disappearing.

Peace art

The graffiti artist responsible for the stencilled declaration in the top photo must have recognized that the oven’s draft resembled the trefoil symbol, international warning for ionizing radiation. The thought of a radioactive oven is disturbing.

I recently watched the PBS documentary The Bomb, which uses declassified footage of nuclear tests and comforting government propaganda to illustrate the madness of the world’s infatuation with atomic destruction. The thing that struck me most deeply was just how obsessed the whole military industrial complex became with its own nihilistic project. How many megatons does it take to incinerate a Pacific atoll?

With the World’s Craziest Autocrats again waving their missiles at one another and 15,000 nuclear warheads still spread among nine countries, perhaps it’s time to dust off the “No Nukes” placards and hit the streets again.

Caesium and strontium do not poppies grow.

*Schell’s seminal warning to humanity appeared in The New Yorker in February, 1982 and was subsequently published in book form by Alfred A. Knopf. A copy sits on the coffee table in a zany self-portrait made in my Vancouver living room, in 1991.
California Dreaming characters: Rear (L-R) Wounded Vietnam Vet Charles Scott, Jan Smith, Raymond Parker | Front: US Fighter Pilot with dog & Wife, author’s daughter Kyah, age 1.