Sheffield comes together to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This weekend marks 76 years since nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, causing total devastation and leading to a legacy of environmental poisoning and human sickness which continues to this day.

Sheffield has long shown solidarity with the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with a commitment to ensuring such devastation does not happen again. The city’s own Peace Gardens were opened and dedicated to peace by three atomic bomb survivors in 1985.

Sheffield Creative Action for Peace plans to mark the anniversary at 2pm on Saturday with a short vigil at the plaque in the Peace Gardens, followed by a display of colourful pennants - one for each country that has ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Lord Mayor Gail Smith will be joining the event. In her role she is part of the international network, Mayors for Peace, which is working for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

A spokesperson for the group said: “We know that many people have forgotten the long term and irreversible damage caused by atomic weapons.

"Many more states now have nuclear weapons than in the 1940s and the risk of a nuclear explosion, whether as an act of war or from human or technical failure, is ever greater.

"Even a ‘minor’ explosion would cause, as well as huge loss of life and environmental destruction, a catastrophic acceleration of climate change affecting the whole planet.

"No masks would protect us from the devastating radioactive pollution. Meanwhile the UK government continues to invest billions in increasingly outdated nuclear weaponry.”

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was approved by a majority of UN member states in 2017, has been ratified by 55 countries and became international law last January.

The spokesman added: “Shamefully, instead of signing this treaty, our government plans to increase our nuclear warheads by 40 per cent, despite this being illegal under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”“Covid-19 has shown up the desperate shortages in UK budgets for health, social care, and education as well as the need to invest in sustainable jobs and training especially for our young people, in order to meet our net zero goals. The costs of renewing Trident, the UK’s nuclear weapons bearing submarine, before the planned 40 per cent increase, was estimated at £205 billion and rising.

“We could seize this anniversary to call upon our politicians to take radical and progressive steps to move monies from obsolete nuclear weaponry to the services everyone knows we need.”

Sheffield MPs, Louise Haigh, Paul Blomfield and Olivia Blake have signed a parliamentary pledge to work towards the UK supporting the treaty.

Sheffield Creative Action for Peace can be contacted at [email protected] or on Facebook.