In the shadow of Hiroshima

MANY thanks to the people who joined Woking Action for Peace members to stage our traditional Japanese ceremony to mark the 79th anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons in war.

As we have done every year for many years, tealights in half grapefruit and orange skins were floated on the Wey Navigation at Send.

This year, we held the commemoration on the anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima in Japan, Tuesday, August 6. Floating candles and lanterns on water is one of the ways in which Japanese people honour the dead and spirits of their ancestors.

We first gathered on the towpath by the New Inn to listen to appropriate readings, poems and prayers before launching dozens of tealights and some illuminated floating lanterns on the canal.

It is important that we continue to remember the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki when nuclear weapons were dropped in August 1945.

Estimates of total deaths in Hiroshima range from 100,000 to 180,000, out of a population of 350,000.

Casualties from Nagasaki are thought to be between 50,000 and 100,000.

By 1950, more than 340,000 people had died as a result and generations were poisoned by radiation.

The potential horror of nuclear weapons is still with us. The thousands of weapons that exist today are many times more powerful than the bombs that fell on the Japanese cities. This includes the missiles carried on the UK’s Trident submarines, our so-called nuclear deterrent.

Evidence is mounting that the United States Air Force is preparing to site some of its nuclear weapons in the UK, at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. The airbase previously hosted US nuclear missiles for more than five decades, from 1954.

Following years of protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and others, the weapons were removed in 2008, but not before nuclear accidents endangered the local community.

Woking Action for Peace, the local branch of CND, will continue to campaign against countries including the UK arming themselves with nuclear weapons. Their use will inevitably lead to millions of people being killed and a huge part of this planet being made uninhabitable.

Keith Scott Organiser, Woking Action for Peace