Some 50 people gathered in Dublin’s Merrion Square today to mark the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
The event was organised by the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and was held at their memorial cherry tree, which was planted in Merrion Square Park on August 6th, 1980.
Irish CND president Reverend Canon Patrick Comerford criticised the world’s governments for their ongoing investment in nuclear arms. “Sixty-five years later, we are still building more and more terrifying weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Britain is one of the smallest nuclear powers in the world today – but its Trident force alone has the capacity to destroy Hiroshima 7,296 times over.
“It has become difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between war and mass murder because any respect for the rights of civilians has been discarded. It doesn’t have to be so,” he said.
Fine Gael councillor Eoghan Murphy, representing Dublin’s Lord Mayor, laid a commemorative wreath at the memorial tree. “A fact of humanity is that we’re determined to learn through making mistakes. The great tragedy behind that fact is that some people do not learn at all,” he said. “In remembering this, we remind ourselves that this actually happened, and it is not just some story.”
Japan's ambassador to Ireland Toshinao Urabe expressed his gratitude to the Irish CND for organising the event. He commended Ireland’s “perseverance” in laying the ground for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970.
The US dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 by executive order of President Harry S Truman. Three days later, it dropped a second weapon on Nagasaki. It is estimated that over 300,000 people as a result of the bombings. They are the only instances of active deployment of nuclear arms in human history, and quickly brought about the surrender of the Japanese army and the end of the second World War.