Picture is of the model of the atom displayed in front of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, near Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. (Tom Vaughan/FeVa Fotos)
Gila Friends Meeting (Quaker) invites those who are concerned about nuclear weapons in the world to bring chairs and join them for the 29th annual Hiroshima Peace Day observance at the pavilion in Gough Park at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, August 9 - the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. There will be an hour of silent meditation in consideration of the fearsome destructive power of atomic weapons.
Nuclear energy has changed the world. We use it in many beneficial ways in 2015, and we undoubtedly will learn more by 2025.
However, this energy burst on the scene with several bangs 70 years ago and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is still an ever present danger today. Three weeks after the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Three days later, another nuclear weapon was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9.
Many thousands died in those atomic blasts, and many died afterward as a result of the radiation received in the explosions. The deadly power was indiscriminate in its victims - soldiers, civilians of all ages, Allied prisoners of war, Japanese-American citizens who had returned to Japan and were unable to leave during the war and unborn infants.
Those were the only two nuclear weapons ever used in wartime … so far. In the arms race of the Cold War, the United States at one point had 31,139 nuclear weapons (1965) and the Soviet Union had 39,187 (1985). In 1968, 43 nations signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, pledging to eventually eliminate nuclear arms from the face of the earth. There are now 190 signatories. Through various treaties, the U.S. nuclear stockpile has been reduced to 7,700 weapons, while Russia has 8,500 and further reductions are planned. Still, India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan have not signed the NNPT and there are constant fears of nonstate groups obtaining the technology or the weapons for terrorist uses.
Gila Friends have been holding this public observance for 29 years. One of the early participants, Dorothy Pine of Cliff, remembers wider participation in the early years. It was a time when, during the Cold War, the threat of atomic weapons was more present in people's minds. She recalls, "It was quite ecumenical; it wasn't just Friends." Concerned people of other faiths are still welcome at the observance.
Pine has good reason to still be concerned about the dangers of the atom today - her daughter, Margaret Pine Otake, lives with her family less than 100 miles from Fukushima, Japan, where a nuclear power plant, hit by an earthquake and a tsunami, had three of its six nuclear reactors melt down. The effects continue to ripple, with new reports of radiation contamination, the shutdown of the school where Margaret Otake taught and the family's removal to a cabin at greater distance.
"It's like the genie's out of the bottle," Pine says. "We need to speak up, do what we can."
Kathy Dahl-Bredine, who founded Silver City's Montessori School in 1979 and directed it until 2000, visited Hiroshima with her son Dominic in 1995 - the 50th anniversary of the bombing. The Montessori students had participated in the Children's Peace Statue program from 1990 to 1995, designing a statue in keeping with the inspiration provided by Sadako Sasaki, a Hiroshima girl who was 2 when the bomb fell and died 10 years later of radiation-related leukemia. Sasaki had a goal of making 1,000 paper cranes for peace, saying, "I will write 'peace' on your wing, and you will fly all over the world."
At the end of the project, Kathy and Dominic and three other New Mexico students traveled to Hiroshima for the 50th anniversary commemoration. Mrs. Dahl-Bredine, in a phone conversation from where she now works in Mexico, spoke again and again of how impressed she was that the whole tone of the ceremony was one of dedication to peace, not of blame-laying. She remembers the residents of Hiroshima saying "what tremendous joy" they felt when plants began to leaf out again the spring after the bombing.
Asked for a message for this Sunday's Hiroshima Peace Day observance at Gough Park, Dahl-Bredine said we need to keep telling the story to the young people. "We must make sure that this never happens again!"
Contact Tom Vaughan at (575) 590-1588 or fevafotos@gmail.com