never again

Comrades,

Amid the panic and confusion of a world wide pandemic, it's very easy to forget that today is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima. My dear departed father, an RAAF fighter/bomber pilot at the time, went to Hiroshima in the early 1960's simply because he wanted to have a look. He held no animosity against the Japanese whatsoever, but certainly knew all about the power of a bombing run. He never spoke openly about the war, because I think as he got older he rejected it and was uncomfortable with his role in it. And they were still atmospheric testing at Maralinga when I was born in 1957 just 700 miles away, for Chrissake.

My views on The Bomb are well known - fascinated and repulsed by it, perhaps in equal measure. I've been banging on about it in these pages for decades. Someone was once looking at my bookshelves at home and asked me "I know you are utterly opposed to nuclear weapons and war in general, so why do you have so many books about it?" I replied "Know your enemy".

Of course, the horrors of Hiroshima - and then Nagasaki - were small beer indeed compared to what followed - the development of the H-bomb, 2,476 known nuclear tests, and of course the biggest muthafukka of al time...the Russian test that got way out of control...Tsar Bomba on 30 October 1961. That shocked the world into the realisation that "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) was right here, right now - and the concept of the end of the world at the push of a big red button would be with us forever.

Tsar Bomba was really beyond imagining at 1,500 times bigger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two.

Nuclear disarmament will never be achieved in my lifetime, but there was great joy for me when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons."

Of course the Yoof of Today have no idea what it was like in the Cold War and have no fear of these things, but back in the day (late 1970's) when there were actually demo's calling for the world to be rid of this hideous scourge, I used to march proudly under the DRINKERS FOR DISARMAMENT banner as it was a natural fit for a reformed Trot and notorious pisspot. And even in my current teetotal status, I remain a fully paid-up member. I'm in there somewhere...

Hiroshima. Never again. Ever.