Articles from the Peace News log: Nuclear Weapons

Having recently rejoined Merseyside CND, and believing that membership of an organisation necessarily entails participation in its activities, I decided to attend this year’s Hiroshima commemoration in Liverpool, part of which was a film screening at our local social centre. The documentary had originally been shown on BBC4 and concerned the attack on Hiroshima itself, particularly the logistics of delivering the bomb to its target, an aspect of that frightful episode with which I was unfamiliar, despite a longstanding interest in all things nuclear and anti-nuclear.

Several points have remained with me since seeing the film. The first is that, even on the morning of August 6th, 1945, the actual target for the ‘new weapon’ had not been finally decided. Hiroshima, a nearby port and Nagasaki were identified as possible sites, with the weather over each place on the actual day dictating where the bomb would be dropped. This meant that three other US planes would fly to Japan with the bomb carrier, Enola Gay, each to assess the weather conditions over a possible target and radio the information back to the mission commander, who would take the final decision. By this method, Hiroshima was chosen, and the fate of its people decided. Yet August 6th was not the first time that American bombers had appeared over the city. In the weeks prior to the attack, the US air force had been in the habit of overflying Hiroshima without actually dropping bombs. The effect of this had been to accustom the population to the sight of warplanes passing overhead without then taking cover in air raid shelters. The evident and cruel cynicism of this tactic was not lost on those watching the film.

The human aspect of that horrific day was dramatised by the film telling the stories of several individual inhabitants of the doomed city and of personal possessions they had with them at the moment of impact: a watch, a lunch box and its carbonised contents and a child’s tricycle (all recovered and now preserved in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum). One of those who featured was a photographer with a city newspaper, who ventured out into the streets after the explosion and who captured, as far as we know, the only five images from inside Hiroshima that day. The pictures, as one might imagine, could have come from hell: shattered people cowering in shattered streets, bathed in a light which could not be created in any studio.

The week of 6 June 2011

It’s mostly been a week of paper. Those who try and marginalise us as only interested in “action” have no idea just how much paper NVDA (nonviolent direct action) can generate!

I start the week helping Brian with preparing his international law defence for his court case for blockading the Trident refit area of Devonport in November last year. So it’s copying, collating, stapling and labelling new information found on the internet, while out of the cupboard come piles of documents used in past cases. And with them the memories of many days in court supporting people attempting to use the very strange process we have for judging what is right from wrong to explain that if murder is considered wrong then threatening mass murder must surely be very wrong. It’s amazing how many bits of paper that takes.

While Brian is off in Plymouth, I haul out more boxes of paper. The revived Faslane Peace Camp are having a week-end gathering to celebrate their  29^th birthday and I have promised to bring some old photos etc as some of them weren’t even born when the camp started!