Comments on the Article “Life Still Thrives After the Nuclear Cataclysm”[1]
(December 25, 1964)
Read. Forward to Comrade Luo Ruiqing.
Mao Zedong
December 25
Chuan
This is Mao Zedong’s marginal note on a letter submitted on December 24, 1964, by Luo Ruiqing, Secretary-General of the Central Military Commission of the CPC, Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, and Vice Premier of the State Council.
[2]
Refers to a signed report titled “Life Still Thrives After the Nuclear Cataclysm,” published in Hong Kong’s News World, which Luo Ruiqing had forwarded. The report stated that, according to scientific theory, areas subjected to nuclear explosions would become completely barren due to heavy contamination by radioactive fallout, with all vegetation withering and animals perishing. However, when a group of American scientists recently returned to Bikini Atoll and Eniwetok Atoll in the western Pacific—nuclear test sites that had been sealed off for six years—they found wild grasses growing, birds singing, rats scurrying, fish leaping, and seaweed drifting in the water. Astonished by nature’s remarkable capacity for recovery after such devastation, they concluded that the claim that “radioactivity would persist indefinitely after a nuclear explosion, extinguishing all life” was somewhat exaggerated.
[3]
On December 27, 1964, Luo Ruiqing wrote to Peng Zhen, Secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, and Mayor of Beijing: The Chairman has given verbal instructions that this document may be distributed as reference material to comrades attending the Central Work Conference and to deputies to the National People’s Congress.