For the past five decades, Wilmington College’s Peace Resource Center has preserved the stories and artifacts of nuclear war, in hopes of encouraging disarmament of nuclear weapons across the world.
On the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, it’s holding a vigil to remember the victims of the atomic bombings in Japan. Community members will read personal testimonies from hibakusha, or atomic bomb sufferers.
“It is a litany, it is prayer for all human beings that military violence is no longer a way in our world to resolve international conflict and that it no longer harms human civilians, especially,” said Tanya Maus, the center’s director.
These sorts of firsthand accounts have been the focus of the center for the last half a century, Maus said. The Peace Resource Center is the largest archive in the U.S. that centers around the human experience of nuclear war.
A Quaker activist
Quaker activist Barbara Reynolds began the Peace Resource Center in 1975, after seeing firsthand the fallout of the atomic bombing of Japan.
The U.S. government asked her husband, Earl Reynolds, a physical anthropologist, to travel to Japan to study children who had survived the bombing. Barbara went with him. Their observations propelled them into the nuclear disarmament movement.
The pair became international figures in the anti-nuclear movement, sailing a yacht into a nuclear test site and collecting artifacts that documented the human toll of war.
When they returned to Ohio, Barbara looked to Wilmington College as a permanent home for her archive of testimonies, photographs and artistic works.
“We've had several [Wilmington College] presidents who are conscientious objectors, Quakers, follow the peace testimony and reject military violence,” Maus said. “And so through those connections, she was able to establish her archives regarding the atomic bombings here.”
Art and disarmament
In the 50 years since, the Peace Resource Center has used those archives to call for nuclear disarmament. It’s invited Quaker artists and nuclear abolitionists from around the world to promote an end to military violence.
To mark the center’s 50-year anniversary, Maus said the center has ramped up its programming. Throughout the fall, they will offer opportunities to learn about the aftermath of the atomic bombing through plays, an art exhibit, an artist symposium and an academic conference.
Maus said the intersection between contemporary art and historical archives offers a dual perspective.
“[Those events] are really intended to give a new way of understanding the harmful impacts of nuclear weapons use and development, and also to provide hope through our use of imagination … helping us envision a future in which these kinds of weapons are no longer used or made possible,” she said.
The center’s relevance today
Despite 80 years passing since the U.S. atomic bombing of Japanese cities, Maus said the threat of nuclear war is very much still a part of our world today. Global conflicts dominate the news and weapons of mass destruction are still debated.
She said the current geopolitical landscape, in many ways, mirrors that of the Cold War, when the center first opened.
“We're seeing a sort of renewed nuclear arms race and an emerging revival of that anxiety regarding nuclear weapons that is coming to the fore,” she said.
But, she said the Peace Resource Center, and the variety of social justice movements that stand with it, offer hope. She said the center is a physical manifestation of a much larger opposition to nuclear war.
“There are millions of committed human beings in our world, both in the United States and throughout the world, who do not want military violence as a solution to conflict among our states and our governments,” she said.
