NFLA Nagasaki Commemoration, Peace Gardens, Manchester

Hiroshima Day Commemorations 2010

Peace group members were in a wide variety of places on 6 August 2010. Pat Sanchez, for example, was stuck in Paris, but still managed her own quiet ceremony in her hotel room. Meanwhile, the Gilligan family attempted to fly a paper lantern with the message “No More Hiroshimas!” from the beach at Criccieth, only to be frustrated by very strong winds. They returned, later, on a much calmer evening to commemorate the dead of Nagasaki and successfully launched the lantern out across Cardigan Bay.

Philip Gilligan said,

“Remembering the horror of Hiroshima and the death and destruction
wrought on Nagasaki a few days brings home the importance of striving for a
global ban on nuclear weapons and campaigning against the government’s
plans to upgrade the Trident nuclear weapons system. Britain’s existing
nuclear weapons of mass destruction threaten the world with many times the
destructive force of the Hiroshima bomb. They would kill 50,000,000 people
and destroy our planet. They are dangerous, costly and unnecessary. It is
time to scrap Trident and to strive seriously for a safer world in which the
£billions squandered on the potential for nuclear devastation is spent, instead,
on the things we need. We need education, health and social services, not
nuclear missiles.”