Scottish CND and local campaigners across the whole of Scotland are organising vigils and commemorative events to mark the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Join us at Glasgow’s Quaker Meeting House at 7pm on the 6th of August for our commemorative film screening, or join your local group’s vigil wherever you may be in Scotland!
This week marked a momentous anniversary: Wednesday 16th of July marked exactly 80 years since the first nuclear detonation as part of the ‘Trinity’ test programme near Los Alamos in New Mexico.
The explosion was conducted on lands of First Nation peoples, inaugurating a trend of massive global injustice in which nuclear states detonated over two thousand nuclear bombs on the lands of indigenous people across the world. The Trinity explosion was so powerful that the residents 160 miles away felt the initial shockwave. Most disastrously, the radioactive fallout from the test contaminated the land, water, crops and air:
“Hispanic and Indigenous residents of downwind towns, like Tularosa, New Mexico, were never warned, never evacuated, and never compensated. They lived with invisible contamination that spread through water, air, and food, contributing to a tragic legacy of cancer and disease. Generations later, families still mourn lives lost, and the lives affected still to this day due to generational health effects. One survivor recently recalled that…
“there wasn’t a household that didn’t have someone with cancer.” (Ploughshares, 16.07.2025).
A recent report by the New York Times detailed how the radiological impact of the Trinity test was severely underestimated in the decades after the detonation, with fallout reaching as far as Mexico and Canada.
Realisation among the scientific community that recent achievements in nuclear physics made a nuclear bomb possible came with the fear that Germany would develop a nuclear bomb first. A clandestine nuclear arms race began in the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, USA. When Germany surrendered, some of scientists involved tried desperately to call a halt to the nuclear weaponisation programme.
The Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, taking place just 3 weeks after the Trinity test, were a demonstration of willingness to deploy indiscriminate and overwhelming violence to secure the interests of a nuclear power. Along with the Trinity test explosion, the atomic bombings of Japan changed the course of history by inaugurating the Cold War and the dark nuclear age.
From the very first nuclear explosion, these weapons have caused literally incalculable harms, harms that have spanned generations. From New Mexico and the Nevada desert to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from Bikini Atoll to Kazakhstan, Algeria and Australia, innocent people have suffered intergenerational sickness, trauma and death due to over two thousand nuclear explosions.
However, a glimmer of justice emerged in the last decade, as the communities foremost affected by nuclear explosions, including the Japanese and Korean hibakusha as well as indigenous Americans, led the movement to establish the UN nuclear ban in 2017. We in Scotland, with the UK’s nuclear arsenal parked in our backyard, are also ineluctably part of the global movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Join Scottish CND or a local SCND group near you during the first week of August to commemorate the 80th year since the first nuclear bombs and keep the memory of all nuclear victims alive.