tHis week is 80 years since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and talks about the family that remained, melted and wiped, with a few remaining witnesses burned and melted. There’s nothing to remember right away. The survivor’s graphic account for “Noiseless Flash” was filmed by John Hershey in his book Hiroshima and was read by my generation with shock and fear. Neville Schute on the beach gave me all the courageous details of the radiation disease I had expected to die. The Civil Defense Leaflet told the family how to hide under the stairs with a radio and a torch.
I grew up hoping for early death from the nuclear war. My father was the founder of the 1957 nuclear disarmament campaign and did not expect us to survive the inevitable nuclear Holocaust. He saved them from being slowly perished by the Strontium-90 by carrying a large bottle of suicide tablets enough to kill us all when the bomb fell. When he left the jar behind the driving to Wales on his holiday, he had to go back halfway there to get it out. We lived under the shadow of a cloud of mushrooms. I knew that the three white geodesic domes in Filingdale’s early warning system would give you enough four minutes to boil eggs or run extremely fast miles.
I set out with the 11-year-old on my first march at Aldermaston (but after talking at Trafalgar Square, my alcoholic father was no longer farther than the bundle of grapes at Knightsbridge). But every year since then, I went with a friend on a four-day Easter march with Berkshire’s Atomic Weapons Research Facility. It was a high social event this year, and Glastonbury of our generation, but our fear and anger were also true.
Why did the sense of impending fate disappear? The Vietnam War took over most of the protested energy, and now the climate crisis is clear, desperate and immediate. The nuclear threat has fallen into a league threat, but it’s very big or even better. The US and Russia show that they are incredibly prepared to use nuclear weapons as a vicious threat. “I ordered two nuclear submarines to be placed in the right areas, in case these stupid, inflammatory statements are more than that,” Donald Trump announced that former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is ready to launch a nuclear strike in the war in Ukraine.
In the Cold War position, mutually guaranteed destruction seemed rather unthinkable to use them, but neither side could measure their willingness to end the world. There have been close calls over the Cuban missile crisis and the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe in the 1980s. Now, whether Trump or Putin is rational, they don’t think each other is rational and may even tug their fingers over the button. Talking about nuclear threats suggests that initial use is not taboo. The Trident, a nuclear armed submarine that relies on the United States, is our “last resort weapon.”
New designs can be deployed on the battlefield. Are these even more plausible deterrents, or are they even more dangerous, “easy to use” weapons? The non-proliferation treaty does not prevent Pakistan, North Korea, India, or Israel from becoming nuclear states. Iran may follow soon. Disarmament and world peace did not advance. 61 armed conflicts in 2024 were the most common since World War II.
NATO has fallen apart, but we are never again sure that the US president will protect its allies. Europe must protect itself, as Russia threatens more than ever. Unilateral nuclear disarmament by the UK does not seem like a good proposition. Nuclear weapons are scary and angry, but they remove them, fill in knowledge, and look even more difficult in a more dangerous world.
“Don’t target us” is the slogan for CND’s current campaign. But Europe, which abandons these weapons, will become our Russian vassals. Looking back at the 80 years since the detective bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week, CND Vice President Jeremy Corbyn, who is in Hiroshima this week, must ask where leadership lies in pursuing the urgent need for nuclear weapons? ”
Criminal? The inconvenient truth is that most historians believe that fewer people have died from those bombings than they have died in Japan’s long-term invasions. It does not reduce fear.
This week, Corbyn called on the UK to “rethink the disastrous nuclear expansion.” However, unilateral disarmament always trolled the workers’ chances, as he knew when he urged the Party to “not bare the Labour Foreign Secretary in the meeting room.” The pledge to leave the unilateral market has made Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto “the longest suicide note in history.” Neil Kinnock, a former CND supporter, persuaded him to abandon the party ahead of the 1992 election.
That Kinok journey is one of many of us. But the old Aldermaston song remains embedded. “Like the crack of fate, don’t hear the H-bomb lightning/echo. It was political education walking under the large flag for anarchists, young communists, Quakers, ANCs and 57 different socialist divisions, Trotsky, Maoists and Stalinists.
Traitors, terrorists? Bertrand Russell, 89, leads direct action, causing massive traffic blockages in Whitehall sit-ins. Are they now called “terrorists”? Whatever their cause, the atrocities from Hiroshima to Gaza deserve the right to publicly express the quaker-esque, mediocre disgust in a massive, inhumane humanity.
At the commemoration ceremony on Wednesday, the mayor of Hiroshima linked the Ukrainian and Gaza wars to increased acceptance of nuclear weapons. The released white pigeons really did not suggest hope. He was the right thing to look for new urgency in a bygone era to remind those who satisfied the reality of nuclear war. If you forget about recent discussions, you can do things you can’t think of. Human stupidity has many ways to end the world.
This article was revised on August 7th, 2025. Neil Kinnock’s workers abandoned unilateralism in 1989, not in 1992, the year of the next general election.
