Hiroshima nuclear horror remembered

This video is called Nazım Hikmet & Joan Baez – Hiroshima.

By Rory MacKinnon in Britain:

Hiroshima horror remains with us

Sunday 05 August 2012

Solemn mourners will gather tomorrow to mark 67 years since an atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima – and to warn that the threat of nuclear annihilation is still with us today.

Rallies across Britain and the world are being held to mark the date when the United States government became the only power in history to devastate another people with nuclear bombs – the exhausted civilian population of wartime Japan.

In London demonstrators will gather at noon in Camden’s Tavistock Square, where a Japanese cherry tree stands in memory of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, site of a second bombing on August 9 1945 in the last major act of WWII.

Speakers will include 106-year-old lifelong peace activist Hetty Bower, researcher Peter Burt of the Nuclear Information Service, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and Green MEP Jean Lambert.

The 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted in strict secrecy.

Only Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett evaded military censors to report “a warning to the world” from Hiroshima – the horrifying, slow radiation burns that would bring the city’s death toll to between 100,000 and 180,000.

But Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Kate Hudson told the Morning Star that the world could not afford to treat Hiroshima as a thing of the past.

She said activists in Japan were “twinning” the ceremony with the memory of last year’s Fukushima disaster which left nearly 80,000 locals in exile from their irradiated hometown.

Ms Hudson also pointed to the fact that the use of depleted uranium munitions during the Iraq war has been linked by researchers to a swathe of birth defects.

“Every year we remember that the only country that has used nuclear weapons is the United States.”

And she warned that though generations had passed since Hiroshima and the superpower stand-offs of the cold war the danger now is that world powers are becoming complacent about their own nuclear arsenals or accepting them as irreversible, she said.

“So long as nuclear weapons exist there’s still an increasing chance that they will be used – by accident or design.

“It’s criminally irresponsible,” Ms Hudson said.

Other commemorative events are planned outside the capital.

In Brighton and Hove the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom will meet tomorrow evening in Queens Park for a candlelight vigil “to remember the dead from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear tests and accidents.”

In Derby CND and others will gather at Rolls-Royce’s Raynesway, which manufactures reactors for the Trident fleet of nuclear-armed submarines.

In Glasgow the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Faslane Peace Camp will launch paper lanterns on the Clyde River, 25 miles from where the Trident fleet are based.

Japanese officials pledged to seek a society less reliant on nuclear energy today as the country marked the 67th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki: here.

Events to commemorate the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki took place at centres across Yorkshire and the north today, writes Peter Lazenby: here.

Radioactive cesium found in Japan’s fish, seawater: here.