Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 75 years on

Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 140,000 people died in the initial blasts or lost their lives as a consequence of their injuries, radiation poisoning and other factors.

At this time, I believe it is important that we remember the destructive powers of such weapons and the terrible human cost that follows whenever they are used.

Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, has vividly described the effect of the first bomb, which fell on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945, destroying 13 square kilometres of the city:

“The heart of the explosion reached a temperature of several million degrees centigrade, resulting in a heat flash over a wide area, vapourising all human tissue. Within a radius of half a mile of the centre of the blast, every person was killed. All that was left of people caught out in the open were their shadows burnt into stone. Beyond this central area, people were killed by the heat and blast waves, either out in the open or inside buildings collapsing and bursting into flames.”

Three days later on 9th August 1945, the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Over the years, I have read many personal recollections from survivors about the awful horrors they experienced. One was from a man called Hirotami Yamada, who was a child at the time. He recalled how “the flash and heat from the detonation felt like the sun had fallen from the sky; then everything went dark. When the light returned, much of Nagasaki had been vaporised in a cloud of smoke and dust that barrelled a mile up into the clouds.”

Most of his family initially survived because they were some distance away from the centre of the blast, but in the coming days he had to watch heartbroken as his siblings succumbed to death.

75 years on, at the annual ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the city’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, called on world leaders to seriously commit to nuclear disarmament. In a moving speech, he said “we must never allow this painful past to repeat itself," adding that “as the only nation to suffer a nuclear attack, Japan must persuade the global public to unite with the spirit of Hiroshima."

The words of Mr Matsui need to be heeded and we must do all in our power to ban nuclear weapons and ensure that they can never be used again.

[This is my article in this week's Cornish Guardian newspaper].