Hiroshima Memorial Day
Peace Quest Cape Breton and the Cape Breton Regional Municipality Commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings
On Wednesday August 6, Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) and the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) jointly commemorated the 80th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, standing in solidarity with hundreds of other municipalities and millions of people around the globe determined to honour all victims of nuclear use, testing, and violence in the most meaningful manner possible: working to build a world free of the threat of nuclear war and annihilation.
A well-attended ceremony heard a statement – ‘We Don’t Have to Live Like This’ – from PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard, focusing on the 40,000 children killed in the Bombings, and on the key role played by Canada in the shaping and sustaining of the nuclear age. Councillor Steven MacNeil then read the ‘Hiroshima Memorial Day’ Proclamation unanimously adopted by CBRM on July 15, describing August 6 as “a day to remember the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and to renew our commitment to ending the threat to human civilization, and all life on Earth, posed by nuclear weapons”, and calling on Canada to sign the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the ‘Ban Treaty’ campaigned for the last eight decades by the peace movement led by the hibakusha, the survivors of the Bombings, and by Indigenous activists and communities grievously affected by over 2,000 nuclear tests. A moment’s silence was then observed, followed by a sharing of reflections, fears for our war-torn, nuclearized planet, and hopes for a return to the sanity of détente, diplomacy, and deep disarmament in the life-or-death years leading up to the centenary of the Bombings.
CBRM has proclaimed August 6 as Hiroshima Memorial Day each year since 2020: the full text of this year’s Proclamation, plus Sean Howard’s statement, is provided below. The August 7 edition of the Cape Breton Post reported on the ceremony, which this year was attended by the Member of Parliament for Sydney-Glace Bay, Mike Kelloway.
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Cape Breton Regional Municipality
Hiroshima Memorial Day Proclamation – August 6th, 2025
Unanimously adopted by Council, July 15, 2025
WHEREAS: August 6th, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, followed three days later by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki;
AND WHEREAS: Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in these attacks, and tens of thousands of survivors, or “hibakusha,” have suffered from the wounds, disabilities, diseases, and other traumatic impacts of the explosions;
AND WHEREAS: Today’s 12,100 nuclear weapons, possessed by nine states, are equal in their destructive power to hundreds of thousands of Hiroshimas;
AND WHEREAS: Numerous recent scientific studies confirm that even a so-called ‘limited’ nuclear war would, in addition to killing millions of people, cause a global famine and massive damage to the global environment and climate;
AND WHEREAS: There are no credible means of defence against nuclear attack and no possibility for any level of government to adequately respond to such an attack;
AND WHEREAS: Any use of nuclear weapons in war would be contrary to international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict;
AND WHEREAS: Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and threats to use nuclear weapons illustrates how possessing such weapons, far from deterring conventional war, acts to embolden aggression and incite proliferation;
AND WHEREAS: Since 2013 the Cape Breton Regional Municipality has been a member of Mayors for Peace, based in Hiroshima, which now has 8,487 members from 166 countries, including 113 municipalities in Canada;
AND WHEREAS: The Cape Breton Regional Municipality supports the call of Mayors for Peace for all states, including Canada, to join the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), now ratified by 73 states and signed by 94 states;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED: That CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke and Council proclaim
August 6th, 2025, as “Hiroshima Memorial Day” in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. A day to remember the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and to renew our commitment to ending the threat to human civilization, and all life on Earth, posed by nuclear weapons.
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We Don’t Have to Live Like This:
Opening Remarks by Sean Howard, Campaign Coordinator, PQCB
It’s my honour to welcome you all to this ceremony marking a most solemn occasion: the eightieth anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. By the end of that year, those two Bombs – small and ‘crude’ by the standards of today’s 11,000+ nuclear weapons in the unsafe hands of nine nations – had claimed over 200,000 lives, the great majority civilian, nearly 40,000 of them children. Many thousands more would, in coming years and decades, suffer and die from their wounds and the proliferating ravages of ionizing radiation. For the remaining survivors, known as the hibakusha – all of them in their youth, infancy, or unborn in 1945 – the trauma and suffering, the struggle against marginalization and stigma, continues, as does their courageous struggle to warn the world of the evil reality of the only weapons on Earth capable of sealing the fate of the Earth.
In a few minutes, I will invite Steven MacNeil, Councillor for District 8 of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, to read the Hiroshima Memorial Day Proclamation unanimously adopted by CBRM on July 15, the eve of another sombre 80th anniversary, the world’s first atomic explosion, an artificial sun brighter than the real one, rising over Indigenous land in the ‘New Mexico’ desert. While the new ‘wonder-weapon’ was America’s, it was built with the crucial assistance of Canada, including the provision of uranium from Dene land in the Northwest Territories – mined and shipped at appalling human and environmental cost – and the enrichment of uranium from the Belgian colony of the Congo at Port Hope, Ontario.
Every year since 2020, under the leadership of Mayors Cecil Clarke and Amanda McDougall-Merrill, CBRM has called on Canada to help bring to an end the nuclear age it helped create and sustain: Eighty Years on the Edge, as a special edition of The Atlantic magazine describes it. And each CBRM Proclamation has identified one step in particular Canada could take back from the dizzying brink: signing the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW or ‘Ban Treaty’ tirelessly campaigned for by the hibakusha in alliance with survivors of more than two thousand nuclear tests desecrating and devastating Indigenous lands and waters in the Arctic, Africa, Asia, America, Australia, and the South Pacific – while changing the atmosphere of our suddenly very small world forever, inaugurating what many regard as an ‘atomic Anthropocene.’
Following CBRM’s example, and at the initiative of Voice of Women for Peace, August 6 has also been proclaimed as Hiroshima Memorial Day in the Halifax Regional Municipality; one hour ago, a morning of ceremonies began at City Hall in Halifax to mark both the anniversary and the opening of a poster exhibition featuring harrowing images of the impacts of the Bombings – many never shown before – provided by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to hundreds of municipalities in dozens of countries, including, in Canada, Victoria, Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. And in Toronto, a ceremony in the city’s Peace Garden this afternoon will hear a call for Canada to join the TPNW from 93-year-old Setsuko Thurlow, who survived the Hiroshima bombing and has been an inspirational leader of the Canadian – and global – anti-nuclear movement since the 1950s.
In 2017, Setsuko received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the driving civil society force behind the Ban Treaty. In her Nobel Lecture, she said of the hibakusha that “we were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist. …Today I want you to feel…the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.”
Today, in this time and place seemingly so far away – though nowhere is far away – from that day in Hiroshima, I invite you to sense amongst us just two of those souls, two of the hundreds of deaths documented at ICAN’s new Children’s Peace Memorial, inspired by the banner displayed by Setsuko at countless talks around the world, naming the 351 students and teachers – just from her own school – who died the day she saw, as she says, “the beginning of the end of the world,” just as she now describes the Ban Treaty as potentially the “beginning of the end of nuclear weapons”. And this month, her 80 years of resistance to apocalypse takes a newly-powerful form with the publication of her children’s book, Never Silent.
So, let us name and mourn 4-year-old Keiko Yoshino, playing in her Hiroshima garden nearly 2 kilometres from the hypocentre of the blast, the shockwave killing – less than 2 seconds after the explosion – her baby sister Hideko as she was being breastfed. Keiko suffered severe burns and other injuries: she died on August 9, the day 70,000 people were killed in Nagasaki, including 3-year-old Hiroto Matsuo, outside near his home – 0.7 kilometres from the hypocentre – with his mother Chiyoko and baby sister Yukiko, both of whom were grievously wounded. In ICAN’s account, though it initially seemed Hiroto had miraculously “received no serious visible wounds, he soon became delirious. He sucked on a stick, imagining it to be a delicious sugar cane, and worried about his lost shoes”. That evening, he – and Yukiko – died. Four days later, their father, Atsuyuki, who had been working nearly 4 kilometres from the hypocentre, took his dying wife to an overwhelmed ‘relief station,’ passing, on a road in Hell, “charred corpses of children frozen in a running posture”.
Eighty years later, there is still nowhere – there will never be anywhere – to run or hide from a Mushroom Cloud, no high-tech ‘Golden Dome’ or Magic Missile Shield to save us. On August 8, 1945, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote in the New York Times that Hiroshima “suggests the end of urban civilization as we know it. If they are to be preserved, cities of the future may have to burrow downward...” That, of course, is impossible; would be intolerable. But it is also intolerable that something very possible, a nuclear-weapon-free world, remains elusive. As President John F. Kennedy confided to the British Ambassador in Washington, after the Cuban Missile Crisis: “The world is really impossible to manage as long as we have nuclear weapons. It really is a terrible way to have to live in this world.”
But we don’t have do: it is not only desirable but feasible to abolish nuclear weapons before, to quote Kennedy again, “they abolish us.” Why haven’t we? Maybe, in order to finally break free, we need to keep at the core of our vision not the Mushroom Cloud but the ‘cloud of souls’ Setsuko senses every second, urging us to build and keep the peace that will only come from ending the nuclear nightmare.
