OAK RIDGE, Tennessee – Events commemorating the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima were held in some U.S. cities on Wednesday, its 80th anniversary, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium was enriched to make a deadly weapon that ushered in the nuclear age.
The southern U.S. city was a secret site built to produce highly enriched uranium as part of the Manhattan Project, under which the United States sought to develop atomic bombs.
While a number of Americans believe that the atomic bombing hastened the end of World War II and therefore reduced overall casualties, some people have come to be more ambivalent toward nuclear weapons.
Outside the so-called Y-12 complex, which still stores nuclear weapons and fuel for nuclear-powered vessels, over 20 people offered paper cranes in memory of the victims of the Hiroshima bombing, and remembered their sufferings and the range of destruction rendered by the ultimate weapon.
Gyoshu Utsumi, a 73-year-old monk at a Buddhist temple in the state who hailed from northeastern Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture, recited a sutra after the participants observed a moment of silence to mark the blast 80 years ago on Aug. 6.
Utsumi was joined by Emily Strasser, a Tufts University professor whose grandfather worked on uranium enrichment as a chemist at Oak Ridge, among others. She admitted feeling bewildered at her grandfather’s involvement and said targeting an atomic bomb at a civilian population is unacceptable.
In San Francisco and nearby Livermore in California, home to one of the United States’ nuclear weapons laboratories, people also gathered to rally for nuclear abolition.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, located around 30 miles east of San Francisco, is one of only two sites in the United States currently designing nuclear weapons.
A coalition of community groups who have gathered outside the laboratory nearly every year since 1981 to remember the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki returned this anniversary with renewed urgency.
Group members staged a die-in, a form of protest popularized by environmental and antiwar advocates in the 1970s, commemorating the people who perished in the atomic bombings or soon after due to radiation.
After the outlines of their bodies were chalked into the pavement, participants rose to perform a Japanese Bon dance.
Lifelong advocates for nuclear disarmament said they felt the current nuclear threat level is higher than it has ever been in their lives.
That sentiment was shared by the crew of the Golden Rule, the peace boat that first sailed in 1958 with the mission to end the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and celebrated its arrival in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Gerry Condon, 78, the president of the Golden Rule committee, said they are sailing today against the looming threat of nuclear war.
“All the guardrails are off,” Condon said.
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