The fight for peace PHOTO: John MacDonald-Fulton TO GO WITH PIC OF CND demo taken on Saturday (Aug 1) Harrow Council Deputy Leader KEITH TOMS explains why he spent his weekend protesting about a bomb which went off more than 50 years ago Once again the fateful anniversary approaches of the explosion of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Destruction came to Earth in a blinding flash, the enormous mushroom cloud of death rose above both cities.

The explosion of the first nuclear device carried by a single plane called the Enola Gay on August 8 over Hiroshima was calamitous.

More than four square miles of Hiroshima were completely destroyed.

In just a few seconds the Sun visited the Earth. Eyewitnesses spoke of seeing human beings "walking like ghosts, trailing their skins" within two miles of the epicentre of the blast.

All pregnant women spontaneously aborted. Babies were born with horrendous physical defects and abnormalities, which they continue to suffer from this day.

Within five years, 200,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 140,000 in Nagasaki.

The death toll to date as a result of the two explosions is more than one million.

If you have read about this for the first time, the question you must be asking is: "Shouldn't we forgive and forget? It was over 50 years ago."

Forgive by all means, but never forget.

All humanity must learn from that first fatal step on the road to the annihilation of the world.

The nuclear race continues at its madcap pace.

Some years ago, when I first put pen to paper on this subject, there were five nuclear powers: America, Britain, France, Russia and China. To these have been added India, Pakistan, Israel, nuclear powers with undeclared nuclear capacity. And Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya are suspected of having nuclear weapons programmes.

The nuclear club is losing its exclusivity.

There are 35,000 nuclear warheads on this planet. If all the nuclear disarmament agreements between the USA and Russia were implemented there would still be 22,000 warheads, including those in reserve, in the year 2003: 22,000 warheads equals 500,000 Hiroshimas.

There are no negotiations at the moment to reduce the numbers further. The nuclear weapons powers show absolutely no sign of willingness to give them up, although 179 countries have signed a treaty to do just that.

It is a sobering thought that one single warhead could, in a microsecond, release more energy than all the conventional weapons used in world history.

But the real obscenity in all this is the enormous cost. Even if Britain scrapped its Trident submarines programme it would save £500 million a year, just a small fraction of the £33 billion this nation will spend in the foreseeable future on nuclear weapons.

How many schools, how many hospitals, how many homes could be built, and how many of the worlds starving could be fed if we stopped our lemming-like march to oblivion?

Perhaps the saddest and most poignant fact of all is that the newest member of the nuclear club, and those making an application to join, are those nations which have a high proportion of their inhabitants living in abject poverty.

So if you passed by that small group gathered around the Katie statue in central Harrow to commemorate Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Saturday, you may have been tempted to think or even shout (as has happened) "loonies or cranks".

Remember that throughout the world millions were also gathered, sporting the universal peace sign, and in a multitude of tongues with the still small voice of sanity uttering: "All we are saying is give peace a chance."

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