MEMBERS of Woking Action for Peace – the local branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – and their friends in Woking Debates are again commemorating the first use of nuclear weapons in war.
This year’s event will be on the actual anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima in Japan, Tuesday, August 6. We will gather in the evening on the towpath of the Wey Navigation at Send to remember the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki in August 1945.
Estimates of total deaths in Hiroshima range from 100,000 to 180,000, out of a population of 350,000. Casualties from Nagasaki are thought to be between 50,000 and 100,000. By 1950, more than 340,000 people had died as a result and generations were poisoned by radiation.
It is important to remind people of the horrors of nuclear weapons – and the thousands of weapons that exist today that are many times more powerful than the bombs that fell on the Japanese cities.
Evidence is mounting that the United States Air Force is preparing to site some of its nuclear weapons in the UK, specifically at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. The airbase previously hosted US nuclear weapons for more than five decades, from 1954. Following years of protests by CND and others, the weapons were removed in 2008, but not before nuclear accidents endangered the local community.
To join our commemoration on Tuesday evening, bring tealights in half grapefruit or orange skins, candles in safe holders or battery powered lights. If the fire risk is low, we will float tealights on the canal, in a traditional Japanese ceremony that commemorates the dead.
Otherwise, we will arrange the lights on the canal bank for a commemoration of appropriate poems, readings and songs. If it’s not safe to float tealights, we will be floating white petals and confetti on the canal.
The ceremony, on the towpath by the New Inn pub in Send Road, Send, will begin as dusk falls, earlier if we cannot float tealights.
We will be gathering for a meal and socialising at the pub at 7pm, when everyone is welcome to join us.
