"TRAVELLER" (Your Letters, August 22) seems to be suggesting that Prestwich and Whitefield CND is selective in commemorating the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and wonders whether we are also concerned with the suffering of the British and Allied PoWs in Japan during the Second World War.
As an organisation which fervently works towards creating a peaceful world, we remember with respect all those who have suffered, and are still suffering, as a result of wars, including the 25 million, mainly civilians, who have died in wars since 1945.
The UN designated this year as International Year for the Culture of Peace and it is seeing the British Legion, the UN Association and the National Peace Council working together. There will be special events around November 11. Just as slavery, apartheid and land mines have been abolished, the aim is to work towards the de-legitimisation of war. A pipe dream, some may say, but then it is not so long ago that some politicians were predicting that the ANC would never govern South Africa and the end of apartheid could not be envisaged.
The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed thousands of innocent civilians, and documentary information which has come into the public domain in recent years would indicate that we have been sold the lie that it was necessary to drop the bomb in order to get the Japanese to surrender. Winston Churchill has stated that "Her (Japan's) defeat was certain before the first bomb fell". The US saw the atomic bomb as a general warning to the Soviet Union (see Gar Alperovitz's book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb).
The Hiroshima commemoration serves to act as a reminder of the hideous nature of nuclear weapons as people continue to die in large numbers as a result of the effects of radiation in Hiroshima, and also at sites where uranium is mined and where weapons are tested.
World-wide there are 36,000 nuclear warheads and Britain possesses the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs in its nuclear arsenal. General Lee Butler, who was the commander of the US nuclear arsenal from 1992-94 now campaigns for the abolition of nuclear weapons as he is of the opinion that a nuclear accident is more likely than a nuclear war.
N. E. WILSON,
chairman,
Prestwich & Whitefield CND.
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