PUGWASH TO TRURO PEACE WALK BEGINS TODAY WITH POWERFUL STATEMENT FROM HIROSHIMA SURVIVOR SETSUKO THURLOW

Beginning today and ending on September 21, United Nations International Day of Peace, a diverse and international group of participants will walk the 80 kilometres from Pugwash to Truro to raise consciousness and awareness of the appalling legacies and monstrous dangers of the atomic age, now 80 years old and with the symbolic Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ticking closer to Midnight than ever before.

Led by Mi’kmaq land and water protectors, and organized by Voice of Women (VOW) for Peace Nova Scotia with the support of Peace Quest Cape Breton and other organizations and individuals, the event will culminate with the release on September 21 of a joint statement calling on Canada to join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and to rededicate itself to building an authentically communal international community rooted – and flourishing – in a culture of peace and justice, co-operation and non-violence.  

The walk will include events and ceremonies at a number of schools along the route, starting with Pugwash District High School, the only school in the country to declare itself “nuclear weapon free,” honouring the significance of the village of Pugwash as the birthplace in 1957 of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, devoted to deploying science in the service of peace, not war, progress not destruction. 

And in Pugwash today, to mark the beginning of the walk, participants will hear a statement of support and encouragement from the prominent 1950s, and co-recipient in 2017 of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the driving civil society force behind the negotiation of the TPNW. 

In her statement, entitled Every Step We Step (reproduced in full on this website) Thurlow writes: “You have chosen to walk for 80 kilometres to mark the 80 agonizing years of an atomic age that began with the destruction by one Bomb of my beloved hometown of Hiroshima, followed by a similar Hell unleashed on Nagasaki. I was thirteen, buried under rubble while hundreds of my schoolmates burned to death, many crying piteously for their mothers, their young lives stolen by weapons so absurdly destructive they threaten the very life of Mother Earth herself. Miraculously, a stranger reached and called out to me, urging me to crawl toward the light, to keep on moving. I emerged, into an Inferno, and began to walk my survivor’s journey.” “I will,” she concluded, “be with you in spirit every step of the way: let us all keep moving, in all our different ways, away from the brink of nuclear annihilation and toward the light of peace on Earth.”