Hiroshima 80 years on
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/hiroshima-80-years
JEREMY CORBYN reports from Hiroshima where he represented CND at the 80th anniversary of the bombing of the city by the US
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Hundreds of thousands died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the bombs and the cancers that followed. Probably two million lives have been lost by testing and the medical effects of radiation emitted.
Hiroshima’s bombing in 1945 did not serve any military purpose. Japan was already on the verge of surrender and was reaching out via the Soviet Union for an end to the conflict.
This was well known to the US and Britain at the time. In reality, it was the last bomb of WWII, and the first bomb of the cold war. The US had spent $2 billion on the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb, despite the opposition of many scientists including Albert Einstein who had initially supported it. They opposed it because they realised the indiscriminate killing of civilians was then, as it is now, an inevitable consequence of nuclear war.
The horrors of the atomic bombings still haunt the now aged survivors. Known as the Hibakusha, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in pleading with the world to abolish the nuclear weapons that had killed their friends and family.
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Eighty years on from the horrors of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki), and the weapons now available are many times more powerful. There are no winners in nuclear war; only burnt bodies, a destroyed environment and a nuclear winter for the whole planet.
After 80 years, we need to make the Global Ban Treaty a reality — and rid this world of nuclear weapons once and for all.