Threat of nuclear war must be dealt with, peace activists told
Mayor of Hiroshima seeks support for nuclear disarmament
It's been 63 years since an atomic bomb levelled Hiroshima, but the threat of nuclear war is still with us and growing, the Japanese city's mayor told Toronto peace activists this week.
"We face the imminent danger that the so-called war on terror can go nuclear," Tadatoshi Akiba said in a video message to 60 people gathered at an exhibit of photographs and drawings commemorating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings at Toronto City Hall.
Akiba asked Torontonians to sign an online petition for the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Protocol, which calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020.
"No public document is more important to your future," he said.
The president of Mayors for Peace ( www.mayorsforpeace.org ), whose 2,368 members include Toronto Mayor David Miller, called on supporters of nuclear disarmament to "work like never before."
One member of the Toronto Hiroshima Day Coalition who spoke at the gathering Wednesday was Setsuko Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor who continues to see "the sea of fires and devastation and human suffering" she witnessed after the bomb along with the "modern, clean, prosperous and bustling city" Hiroshima has since become.
Over time and through their agony, survivors dedicated themselves to the abolition of nuclear weapons and eventually war itself, said Thurlow, who was 13 when the blast destroyed her city.
If people use empathy and rational thinking, the North York woman added, they can grasp the "cultural transformation away from our obsession with violence and war."
Though more people died in conventional firebombings of Japanese cities, the August bombings of Hiroshima (which killed 140,000) and Nagasaki (which killed 80,000) in the final days of the Second World War remain singular instances of horror that the coalition members - among them, Toronto's Japanese Cultural Centre and Canadian Voice of Women - say must never be repeated.
On display with photographs in the building's rotunda until Monday, the drawings released by the city's Hiroshima Peace Museum are both gruesome and heartbreaking.
With titles such as "Corpses piled like lumber" and "Mother and child charred black," the drawings, done by survivors decades later, attest to instant or agonizing death. They record how old the artists were the day the bomb was dropped and how close the scene was to the hypocentre of the bombing.
Ward 18 (Davenport) Councillor Adam Giambrone read a statement from Miller and said Toronto continues to apply "moral pressure" toward an era when we do not live under threat of a potential nuclear holocaust.
York Centre MPP Monte Kwinter, recently in charge of emergency management for Ontario, said there's nothing more important than making sure nuclear weapons aren't used again, because "it will be worse, much worse," next time.
The coalition will observe Nagasaki Day at the City Hall's peace garden this Saturday, starting with family events at 4:30 p.m. and ending with the release of lanterns on the garden pool at 9:30 p.m.
