Portside

A dreadful anniversary and the call for strengthening our struggle against nuclear weapons

At this 70th anniversary of the criminal US bombings against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we write to you reinforcing our solidarity to the Japanese people, victim of this appalling inauguration of the use of nuclear weapons in our world. We pay our respects to thousands of victims of this war crime and crime against humanity perpetrated by the US imperialism, still to be held accountable.

The victims are not numbers: they are people whose lives were ripped-off by the greatest expression of warmongering and brutality, but who should be remembered by us in our struggle against weapons of mass destruction and for peace.

At the time we stress our solidarity to the Japanese people, offering our support, we also stress the call for strengthening the peoples’ common struggle for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. We regret that, 45 years after it was adopted, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a superficial and insufficient document, has not granted humanity freedom from the threat of a nuclear war.

We pay homage to 300 thousand of Japanese victims and the victims of the US nuclear tests in places such as Marshall Islands – who still face the consequences of tests conducted by the US between 1946 and 1958 – reiterating our call to the world for the complete abolition of arsenals putting humankind in danger.

In 1950, the World Peace Council launched the Stockholm Appeal, signed by over 350 million people, demanding “the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples”. The document, which we reinforce 65 years later, calls on “all men and women of good will throughout the world to sign this appeal”. Although millions of people have demanded the abolition of nuclear weapons, the world leadership is still debating a much less ambitious goal: the mere reduction of the existing arsenal.

The failure of the NPT Review Conferences, last held in April 2015, is the responsibility of the most hostile regimes, with their imperialist policies of massacre, threats and oppression: Israel and the United States. The goal of turning the Middle East, one of the most unstable regions due to the imperialist actions, into a zone free of nuclear weapons, was enough to prompt Israel’s response, derailing the process through the US.

The US, on its turn, is playing a theatrical act with the reduction of its arsenal, hiding the “modernization” trend: keeping their nuclear power, they raise the lethality and broaden their arsenal’s reach, even though it is reduced in number. Their policies – allied and promoted through the greatest war machine known to humanity, NATO – are based on threats and on aggressions against the peoples in the whole planet.

Therefore, in this dreadful anniversary, we declare vehemently, once more, our condemnation of the Japanese people’s massacre and the threat of repetition of such a horrid event.
We strengthen our determined struggle for the abolition of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. In our anti-imperialist endeavor, we are certain that unity among us will defeat warmongering and militarist policies, since the peoples’ will is a just peace.

Socorro Gomes,
President of the World Peace Council