Peace Quest & Cape Breton Regional Municipality Commemorate Hiroshima Day

For the fifth consecutive year, August 6 was proclaimed and observed as ‘Hiroshima Memorial Day’ in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM). In a ceremony held on the Sydney Boardwalk behind City Hall, Deputy Mayor James Edwards delivered the proclamation following brief remarks by PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard. On August 20, the proclamation was retrospectively – and unanimously – adopted by a full meeting of Council, when it was read into the official record by Deputy Mayor Edwards.

The full text of the Proclamation – which calls on Canada to join the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and declares August 6 as a day “to renew our commitment to ensuring freedom from the intolerable threat to civilization and existence posed by nuclear weapons” – is provided below, along with Sean Howard’s opening statement applauding the example set by CBRM since joining the global ‘Mayors for Peace’ anti-nuclear network, headquartered in Hiroshima, in 2013. The real and rising risk of nuclear war, Howard argued, was a prospect that “no country, no council, no citizen can ever prepare for; that every citizen, council, and country must pledge to prevent.”

A report on the well-attended ceremony was published in The Cape Breton Post on August 7, 2024, under the headline ‘“The Threat is Very Real”: Nuclear War a Strong Possibility as CBRM Marks Hiroshima Anniversary’.

“Why It’s So Important to Remember”: Opening Remarks by Sean Howard, Campaign Coordinator, Peace Quest Cape Breton

 I’d like to welcome everyone to this short, solemn ceremony to commemorate the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki, three days later: two detonations leaving over two hundred thousand people (the great majority civilians) dead by the end of that year, with tens of thousands more condemned to hideously strange new ways of dying and suffering, an agony not only cascading through the generations to today, but affording an atrocious glimpse into our potentially common ‘future’, an intolerable ‘fate’ that no country, no council, no citizen can ever prepare for; that every citizen, council, and country must pledge to prevent.  

In a few minutes, August 6, 2024, will be proclaimed ‘Hiroshima Memorial Day’ in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality by the Deputy Mayor of CBRM, Councilor James Edwards. This is the fifth consecutive Hiroshima Memorial Day Proclamation, the first delivered by then-Councilor Amanda McDougall, outside City Hall in the 2020 depths of the COVID pandemic. We are sorry that now-Mayor Amanda McDougall-Merrill is unable to join us today, and we would like to pay tribute to both her leadership on issues of peace, especially nuclear disarmament, and that of her predecessor, Mayor Cecil Clarke, who in 2013 supported the request of Peace Quest Cape Breton for the Council to join ‘Mayors for Peace,’ the Hiroshima-based global coalition of over 8,000 municipalities (over 100 in Canada), advocating for a nuclear-weapon-free world. 

I would like to briefly place the Proclamation in context of the many nuclear dangers we face. How many? We can start with the numbing number of nuclear weapons – 12,500 – in the unsafe hands of the nine members of the Mushroom Cloud Club: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK, the US. Most of these Bombs are H-Bombs, thermonuclear weapons set, often on ‘hair-trigger’ alert, to kill millions in minutes, erase cities in seconds, and – even in a so-called ‘limited’ exchange, involving say 3% of that global total – to rapidly poison the atmosphere, triggering irreparable climate breakdown and a ‘nuclear famine’ killing hundreds of millions, maybe billions, in a radius extending thousands of miles from the blasts. 

In addition to the Nuclear Nine, 33 states claim the ‘right’ to be ‘protected’ by these weapons of genocidal, ecocidal devastation: 29 of them, including Canada, in NATO, plus Australia, Belarus, Japan and South Korea. The nearly 80-year-long shockwave from Hiroshima has thus created an atomically-split world, a Disunited Nations in which 42 states feel they can’t live without the Bomb, and the other 150 feel they can’t, and shouldn’t have to, live with It. 

Very recently, from July 22-August 2, diplomats from both these ‘camps’ met at the UN in Geneva to review the sorry state of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (the NPT): a supposedly ‘grand bargain’ in which non-nuclear-weapon states promised not to proliferate on condition that the nuclear-armed states recognized by the treaty (America, Britain, China, France and Russia) promptly begin to negotiate their own – complete – nuclear disarmament. Yet in the 54 years since, those states have sat down together to hold such talks for a round total of…Zero days! 

In 2017, this scandalous failure finally spurred two thirds of UN states, 122, to negotiate a new accord, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the TPNW), finally ‘banning the Bomb’ just as biological and chemical weapons have long been outlawed. The TPNW offers a bridge to a livable, non-nuclear world: but the 42 pro-Bomb states remain on the wrong side of history, refusing to cross it... 

Reporting on the NPT meeting, Canadian analyst Ray Acheson wrote that the nuclear-armed and their allies always “assert that nuclear weapons are the only things” that “keep their states safe from each other,” never mind “that the rest of the world does not insist upon having the capacity to destroy cities, countries, or the planet to feel ‘safe.’” These states patronizingly call calls for abolition ‘impossible’; yet, as Acheson argues, what’s “impossible is that the risks, dangers, and harms from nuclear weapons can continue to be borne by future generations, into the indefinite future. What is impossible is that nuclear weapons can continue to exist without being detonated.” 

That’s why it’s so important to remember what happens when such a detonation occurs, and I want to close by sharing testimony provided at the Geneva meeting by a hibakusha, a survivor of an atomic blast, Michiko Kodama, rescued from her burning school in Hiroshima 79 years ago today. She was seven: 

“Carried on my father’s back, I witnessed hell on earth. I saw a man with his skin burned heavily and peeled. A mother with heavy burns was carrying a baby, which was burned-black and looked like charcoal. Some had their eyeballs popped out and others ran around trying to escape, while holding their protruding intestines in their hands.” 

Three days later – the day Nagasaki was incinerated – “my favourite cousin, who was like a big sister for me,” died in the agony of a then-mysterious sickness: “She cried in a small voice, ‘O, it hurts!’” Then “she breathed her last in my little arms. She was 14”. 

In her early twenties, pregnant, Michiko “wavered” about whether to give birth, but decided to. After years of sickness, her daughter died of cancer, as, by then, had her parents and two younger brothers. “Every day I wonder if my turn will come next,” she said: “The atomic bombs did not allow us to die as human beings or to live as human beings.” 

I would now like to invite Deputy Mayor James Edwards to proclaim today ‘Hiroshima Memorial Day’ in the CBRM.

 PROCLAMATION 

Hiroshima Memorial Day

 WHEREAS:              August 6th, 2024, marks the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, followed three days later by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki; and 

WHEREAS:              Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in these attacks, and tens of thousands more have suffered and are suffering from the wounds, radiation sickness, and multigenerational impacts and traumas triggered by the explosions; and 

WHEREAS:              Today’s 13,000 nuclear weapons, possessed by nine states, are equal in their destructive power to hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima’s; and 

WHEREAS:              Recent scientific studies confirm that even a so-called ‘limited’ nuclear war would, in addition to killing millions in minutes, cause a global famine and massive damage to the global environment and climate; and 

WHEREAS:              President Vladimir Putin’s illegal and atrocious war on Ukraine, and his constant threats to use nuclear weapons, expose the lie that nuclear weapons deter conventional war and help preserve international peace and security; and 

WHEREAS:              Eleven years ago, in July 2013, the Cape Breton Regional Municipality has been a member of Mayors for Peace, based in Hiroshima, which now has 8,265 members from 166 countries, including 113 municipalities in Canada; and 

WHEREAS:              The Cape Breton Regional Municipality once again supports the call of Mayors for Peace for all states, including Canada, to join the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), recognizing the Treaty as the best path to a world free from the fear of nuclear annihilation;                                                                                                   

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED: That CBRM Mayor Amanda M. McDougall-Merrill

and Council proclaim August 6th, 2024, as “Hiroshima Memorial Day” in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. A day to remember the devastation of Hiroshima in 1945, and to renew our commitment to ensuring freedom from the intolerable threat to civilization and existence posed by nuclear weapons.

 Mayor Amanda M. McDougall-Merrill

August 6th, 2024