Of course it’s passion that motivates us, not a feeling of obligation or even duty. At 6:00 in the morning, having lain down to sleep less than five hours ago, with barely the energy to untuck the sheets from the unfamiliar hotel bed and slide in, after braving 300 miles of Southern California traffic and preparing the next morning’s breakfast for our guests of honor next door, telling them in stunted gestures and broken English their schedule for the next day, it’s passion that flowed through me when my cell phone alarm harmonized to the drone of the obnoxious air conditioner, with the first fluttering of my eyelids, passion that told me it was time to get up and go.

Waking up to face the UC Regents is not a pleasant morning destination. In the three years I’ve been going to their meetings, the three years since I first learned my university manages the nation’s two premiere nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, I’ve been ignored, mocked, condescended to, openly derided, and even arrested. A select cadre culled from the state’s top business people, selected by the governor for 12 year terms with no oversight and only paltry, tokenized representation by students, faculty, and alumni, the Regents have managed and presided over the research and development of every single nuclear weapon ever put into the US stockpile. UC scientists were in charge of every aspect of the Manhattan Project, creating the bombs which were then dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August, 1945, killing hundreds of thousands outright, and leading to contamination, cancers, and birth defects for decades to come. September, 2008, I wake in the hotel with my coworker Nick and four UC students from the UC Student Department of Energy Lab Oversight Committee (DOELOC), representing Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles. The fall quarter starts in a week, and most of their classmates are celebrating the final days of summer vacation in a very different manner, no doubt. But these students have something more important to do.

We bring our guests next door the small breakfast we could manage – some granola in room-temperature soy milk poured into one of the hotel’s plastic cups. I knock at the door to their room and Kayashige-san opens the door, wide awake and ready for the day’s events. She has a fire in her eyes that defies her 69 years of age, or the thyroid problems she has battled for years. She has passion. She greets us with “ohayo gozaimasu” (good morning) and a courteous bow and then, when presented with her granola, a smile and a warm thanks in English, and takes both cups to bring the other to her companion, Yano-san. Junko Kayashige and Miyako Yano are hibakusha – they survived an unspeakable atrocity, the US atomic bombing of their hometown, Hiroshima, Japan, when they were younger than us – ages six and fourteen, respectively. They have come to America with a message as urgent as it is clear: to spare today’s young people, like myself, Nick, and the UC students who have accompanied us, from having to experience the holocaust they lived through, the nuclear powers of the world must give up their arsenals and commit themselves to international disarmament. In Yano-san’s words, “Nuclear weapons and humanity cannot coexist.”

Prior to this meeting on the UC Irvine campus, the student DOELOC, an official student government committee at three UC campuses, on which Nick and I serve as advisers, sent a letter to the Board of Regents, asking that they make time in their agenda to allow the Hibakusha to give their testimony within a time allotment sufficient to convey the power and importance of their message. The Regents rejected this request, leaving the hibakusha no place else to speak but during the time-restricted public comment period, and scheduled them at the end of public comment.

Kayashige-san is the first to testify. She begins by telling the regents about sitting at the windowsill in her family home with her siblings located 1.5 km from ground zero, as she watched an American military plane fly over Hiroshima just before it dropped the bomb. She next remembers waking up on the ground, her house obliterated, her sister dead, with fires raging in the distance and all around her. A second sister died days later due to radiation sickness. Kayashige describes how her own burns eventually healed, but the scars she carries inside from the death of her two sisters and her own poisoning with radiation from the bomb have continued to stay with her. She then pleads with the Regents directly: “I was astounded to learn that the University of California is the manager of the nuclear weapons laboratories,” she says. “The UC must cease this activity immediately. A University is supposed to teach people how to help society move toward excellence and prosperity. It is not supposed to create weapons of terror.” Akiko, Kayashige-san’s interpreter, a student of Soka University in Orange County, is in tears. So are several of us.

Yano-san’s testimony is next: she was living 3.5 km from the bomb’s hypocenter and had taken a sick day from school. Her school was located half a kilometer from ground zero, and when the bomb exploded over the center of the city, every one of the children in her class of 100 was murdered – had the bomb been dropped a day earlier, she would have been among them. Of 7,000 students working outside that day, more than 6,000 were killed that day by the atomic bomb. That bomb, of course, was developed by this university. This institution. These regents still manage these labs, still have the ability to sever ties, and in doing so, deal a decisive blow to the legitimacy of the US nuclear weapons complex.

The room is silent. The UC Board of Regents, who normally occupy themselves with other matters during public comment such as reading the newspaper, talking amongst themselves, or sleeping, are held in rapt attention, even after Yano exhausts her 5 minute speaking allotment, is interrupted by the Regents’ secretary, and is asked to finish. From the far side the UC Irvine Student Center, separated from the students and the hibakusha by two tables, forty feet of floor space, and a line of security tape, the first voice to puncture the reverent stillness is that of Richard Blum, Chairman of the UC Board of Regents and husband to Senator Dianne Feinstein. While acknowledging a theoretical imperative for nuclear disarmament, Blum cites national defense as the prerogative for UC’s continued enablement and validation of the US nuclear weapons complex. Blum rambles, belaboring his point – in effect, upstaging the two atomic bomb survivors who had traveled from Japan to bring this message to the Regents and to the American people. UC service workers, under the AFSCME union, who attended the public comment as part of their efforts to win a new, fair contract, are growing visibly incensed at Blum’s attempt to trivialize and abstract the testimony of these hibakusha, and begin a chant of “real raises, no bombs!” Police and security guards, some close to twice the height of Kayashige-san and Yano-san, draw towards us and guide us out the exit, so the Regents may proceed with their bomb-making business as usual.

Afterwards, outside the meeting, students and the hibakusha give interviews to the media while I try to make sense of the day. Barely past noon and already a long day behind us, Kayashige-san and Yano-san are still energetic, joking and laughing through lunch. And even though the Regents still value their ideological commitment to nuclear weapons over the human stories of these survivors, nuclear abolition has made significant progress. Not from any policies the Regents made – not yet, anyway – but through the commitment, the passion, shared across lines of nationality and generation. Students and hibakusha, working together for a better future.