People’s World August 15, 2025
LIVERMORE, Calif.—Among advocates for abolition of nuclear weapons mobilizing worldwide on Aug. 6 to commemorate the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were over 100 peace protesters who gathered outside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Westgate entrance to honor victims of the attack and to call for the weapons’ total abolition.
The theme of their gathering: 80 Years of Nuclear Devastation – Remember Our History, Reshape Our Future.
Livermore Lab, one of two locations designing every nuclear bomb and warhead in the U.S. arsenal, has played a central role in escalating the power and reach of these weapons since its founding in 1951.
Marylia Kelley, co-founder, executive director emerita and now senior advisor at Tri-Valley CAREs (Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment), which monitors the Livermore nuclear weapons complex and works for the weapons’ worldwide abolition, began her remarks with a tribute to the now-dwindling role of hibakusha, survivors of the bombings who have devoted their lives to sharing their memories of the horrific attacks with the world.
Kelley highlighted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded last year to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, and recalled bombing survivors who have shared their stories at past commemorations at Livermore Lab, including Nagasaki survivor and retired Methodist Minister Rev. Nobuaki Hanaoka and Hiroshima survivor Takashi Tanemori.
“In this period, we who are here, we who strive for peace and justice, must pick up the torch being passed to us by the last witnesses who experienced the atomic explosions,” Kelley said. “Today at Livermore and moving forward, we heed their plea of ‘Never again,’ and pledge to do everything in our power to make sure the world does not forget the human devastation caused by nuclear weapons and the absolute imperative of their elimination.”
With the Trump administration calling for an overall 58% boost in spending for “nuclear weapons activities,” Livermore Lab’s overall 2026 budget request is up by 16% over last year to nearly $3 billion, with nearly 90% earmarked for nuclear weapons development.
While the Lab has sought over the years to “mask its horrific weapons activities in the neutral language of science,” Kelley said, “we are here today to pull down that mask—follow the money!”
She held up a pie chart of the Lab’s 2026 budget request, citing weapons and components the Lab is developing:
- The W80-4 new warhead that will let pilots launch a sneak attack from thousands of miles away to strike a target anywhere in the world with an earth-hugging, radar-evading nuclear weapon;
- The new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCMN, to be placed on small U.S. Navy submarines that have not carried nuclear weapons for over three decades;
- The W87-1 warhead to top the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile which will be deployed in land-based silos throughout the Midwest.
- The W-93, a totally newly designed warhead to be deployed on the large nuclear-armed submarines that patrol the ocean.
- New plutonium bomb cores, or pits, to be installed on the W87-1 warhead.
Kelley reminded demonstrators of the victory Tri-Valley CAREs and three colleague organizations recently won with their lawsuit to assure that a nationwide programmatic environmental impact statement will be developed concerning the new bomb cores, with public hearings in Livermore and other affected locations.
Kelley declared, “Together, we proclaim the illegality of nuclear weapons! Together, we proclaim the immorality of nuclear weapons and say Never Again! Together, we will stand with the last survivors and pledge to them our continuing efforts to stop new warheads and achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons!
Onward, together! We can do this!”
Carrying forward Kelley’s call to “follow the money” was Rev. Monica Cross, quad chair of the California Poor People’s Campaign and a pastor serving Disciples of Christ congregations. A U.S. Navy veteran, Cross said that during her service, including work at the Pentagon, she had seen how corporations in the military-industrial complex assure that they make money for their shareholders.
“As a quad chair of the Poor People’s Campaign,” she said, “My purpose is to speak up for 7.2 million Californians who are poor, low wealth, living on the streets and homeless. They’re across the rainbow, and many are veterans – some with PTSD and others are poor and struggling with injustice.
The issue is especially obvious today but has been clear for many decades, Cross said. “If the money they spend on nuclear weapons and other forms of death and destruction were spent on vets, spent on housing, spent on food, many of the issues we have would not be. I and many others call for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons and the infrastructure that supports them.”
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, gave an overview of the history of nuclear weapons as they emerged from an initiative for scientifically advanced weapons just before the U.S. entered World War II, becoming a project first considered to target Nazi Germany but later focused on Japan, before finally being used against Japan as a warning to the Soviet Union.
Along the way, Makhijani said, nuclear weapons development, testing, production and cleanup have inflicted great multigenerational harm around the world.
“In a way, the elimination of nuclear weapons is a larger project,” he said. “It’s the tip of an extremely violent system … And we have a bigger project. We need to fix the problem of civilization, which is a very longstanding one. It’s a big job, but I think we can do it!”
Makhijani invited the audience to read his just-published article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Rev. Michael Yoshii, pastor emeritus at Buena Vista Church in Alameda, Calif., joined Kelley in sharing warm remembrances of Rev. Hanaoka, a fellow Methodist minister.
Yoshii, whose paternal grandparents came to the U.S. from Japan in the early 1900s, shared with commemoration participants the hardships relatives on both sides of his family experienced after President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, resulting in the incarceration of some 125,000 Japanese Americans throughout most of World War II.
Yoshii’s paternal grandparents lost their home and restaurant in Oakland, Calif. They were taken first to a temporary detention center at Tanforan Racetrack before being sent to a more permanent internment camp in Topaz, Utah. Meanwhile, his mother’s family were rounded up in Fresno, Calif., losing their home and farm and being sent to Jerome, Ark. for the remainder of the war.
“Our families, our communities, were seen as the face of the enemy,” Yoshii said. “And being the face of the enemy, we could be dehumanized and demonized, even though there was not one case of espionage by Japanese Americans on the West Coast.”
Many Japanese Americans participated in the redress and restoration movement during the 1980s, Yoshii said. That movement brought about formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians and passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which apologized and provided symbolic reparations to every surviving family of the mass incarceration. Among the commission’s findings: “preexisting racism” dating back to the start of Japanese immigration and growing during the 1920s as anti-immigration bills were passed targeting Japanese American communities.
Yoshii also emphasized the strong connections Japanese American communities have with the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“My own mother-in-law was there in the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945,” he said. His mother, a teenager at the time, “could only remember the ashes strewn all over the place, dismembered bodies walking all around, and the graveyard of dead bodies all around her. She didn’t know at the time that upwards of 70,000 people had been killed in an instant, because she was miraculously saved, became a survivor, a hibakusha.”
“The hibakushas say ‘Never again!’” Yoshii declared. “Never again should this happen! And I hope we can amplify the voices of the hibakushas still in Japan and the hibakushas here in the U.S. as well, so we can all say Never Again! to war, Never Again! to the proliferation of nuclear arms in this world!”
Also speaking were Helen Jaccard, a founding member of the Veterans for Peace Nuclear Abolition Working Group, and Patricia Ellsberg, who in 1971 helped her husband, Daniel Ellsberg, release the Pentagon Papers to the press, helping to end the Vietnam War.
Tri-Valley CAREs’ Executive Director Scott Yundt chaired the program and presented the land acknowledgment.
As the program concluded, participants gathered for a symbolic “die-in” during which their bodies were outlined with chalk as they lay outstretched on the driveway leading to the Lab’s West Gate, followed by a ceremonial bon dance led by Chizu Hamada that brings participants together with their ancestors.
During the commemoration’s final moments, a dozen volunteers from among the participants underwent symbolic arrests by guards at the lab’s gate.