Wednesday of this week marked the 80th anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima, which indiscriminately killed over 140,000 people including tens of thousands of children.
Scottish CND groups across the countries gathered to commemorate the Japanese and Korean nuclear victims of the bomb detonated over Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945.
Glasgow CND and Glasgow City Council hosted the formal launch of the brand new peace garden at the Glasgow Botanics. Glasgow CND members Jean Anderson and David Peutherer spoke alongside Lord Provost Jacqueline McLaren and the Japanese Consul General Katsutoshi Takeda:
Members and supporters congregated later the same evening at the Quaker House in Glasgow for our film screening, and enjoyed a wonderful testimony from lifelong anti-nuclear activist Maggi Sale about her personal relationship to the Hiroshima bombing.
Edinburgh CND met with support from the Quakers and Protest in Harmony on Princes Street at 5pm, holding a great presence in the city centre during rush hour!
SCND members also met in Stirling, Paisley, Dumfries yesterday, and are due to meet in Aberdeen and Inverness this weekend to commemorate this momentous –
anniversary. On the 80th anniversary of this great crime, we must push back against the prevailing narrative for why the US dropped these nuclear weapons – a narrative which sadly continues to be propagated across our media and in mainstream US culture.
Historical record shows that the destruction of cities was not the main condition for Japan’s surrender, since the US had already been conducting terror-bombings before the use of nuclear weapons, most notably in the Tokyo fire-bombing of March 1945 which killed 100,000 people.
In fact, the primary condition for Japanese surrender was the Soviet Union joining the US in the Pacific War. This was both because the combined military of the US and USSR made continuing the war a lost cause, but also because Tokyo believed the Soviets would be able to moderate the US’ surrender terms and secure the continuity of the Japanese Imperial dynasty – which the US eventually agreed to.
When the Soviet Union joined the Pacific war on August 8th, US military figures would have known for certain that their surrender was inevitable. Nevertheless, the bombing of Nagasaki the following day went ahead.
As such, the nuclear bombings of Japan were not conducted to end WWII, but more likely to intimidate the world, and especially the USSR, by exhibiting the US’ unique destructive capability. By this historical understanding, the US nuclear exhibition of mass death inaugurated the Cold War.
This callous disregard for human life, this sacrificing of civilians for military and political objectives, is not a feature of history. We see the same reprehensible logic in Ukraine, in Palestine and elsewhere across the world.
And indeed, as long as the UK government boasts its own nuclear weapons – orders of magnitude more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb – Britain continues to subscribe to the same logic of indiscriminate death which led to the first, irredeemable nuclear atrocity.
That is why tomorrow afternoon (Saturday 9th August, 1pm-3pm) Scottish CND will host a commemorative presence at the north gate of the Faslane Naval Base. We encourage any members or supporters who are able to travel to the base to join us. Public transport can take you to the vigil quite easily – the 316 from Helensburgh station, which sets off from 12pm and 12:30pm takes you directly to the north gate.
Join us in expressing our opposition to the UK government’s egregious support for nuclear weapons, 80 years after their invention.