Remembering Hiroshima

As Scotland gets ready to reflect on the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their people,  President Trump relocates his submarines in response to the online assertions by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. We live in worrying times. 

It has been 80 years since the US bombed the Japanese cities. The use of nuclear weapons still horrifies. It is important to remember. On the 6^th August a film screening will take place in the Quaker Meeting House in Glasgow at 7pm, whilst on the other side of the country the people will climb Dundee Law at 8.30pm to again focus on what happened all these years ago. Edinburgh, Stirling, Paisley, Aberdeen and Ayrshire will also see events take place across the week.

President Trump understandably met opposition when he recently came to Scotland. The generation that led those protests and marched to his golf course in Aberdeenshire should be supported to connect with those that remember what happened In Japan. 

Today peace and respect for a rules-based international order are under attack. The destruction of 80 years ago is paralleled in many ways by the destruction of Gaza. The human cost of war is rightly at the front of people’s minds but the destruction of infrastructure on the extent we are see it is also a crime, as Dominic Davies and others have noted. 

New alliances need to be built to push for peace. Westminster's focus on military spending must be a concern for us all. Here in Scotland with nuclear weapons on the Clyde, saying no to the bomb is more important than ever. 

Published 4 August 2025.

Image: one of the original 1958 sketches for the symbol adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.