Background:
Just after eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, a United States plane dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan which killed instantly 170,000 people.  Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. Over 350,000 men, women, and children died from the immediate impact or radioactive fallout from these bombings.  

Today, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Israel, India and Pakistan have joined the United States as nuclear powers.  Other nations are taking steps to produce nuclear weapons.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Congress in 1970, created a pact between nuclear and non-nuclear states.  In exchange for the promise of some 180 countries not to seek nuclear weapons, the nuclear states promised to work in good faith to dismantle their own nuclear weapons.

But thirty-three years after the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States is no longer striving for a world free of nuclear weapons.  The administration now seeks to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, from bunker busting hydrogen bombs 70 times the explosive power of Hiroshima to tactical battlefield weapons that have one-third the killing power of the Hiroshima bomb.  

On June 12, in what can only be called a historic vote, Congress repealed the long standing prohibition on studying, on testing, and on developing nuclear weapons.  In effect the bill lifted a decade-old ban on developing atomic battlefield weapons and endorsed moving ahead with creating a nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb.  In the words of Senator Feinstein from the Congressional Record of May 20, the bill “clearly opens the door to the development of new nuclear weapons and will . . . begin a new era of nuclear proliferation.”   

The Bush Administration’s 2004 budget includes nearly 7 billion dollars for nuclear bomb production.  The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge Tennessee is now the heart of the U.S. nuclear weapons producing industry.  It is here that the core components were made for the “Little Boy” bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.  It is here that W87 warheads are being refurbished to last 100 years, and prototypes of the new bunker busting “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator” are being planned.   Bishop Gumbleton urges us to attend the action at the nuclear weapons facility in Oakridge TN this Saturday in a protest to shut down Y-12.  “If, or when, we shut down Y-12,” Bishop Gumbleton tells us,  “we could stop the production of any U.S. nuclear weapons.  This is where half of the world’s enriched uranium is stored and core components of every U.S. nuclear weapon is produced.”  In solidarity with the Oakridge protest and protests throughout the world this 58th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we will gather together Wednesday, August 6, and remember Hiroshima.  For more information contact Karen or John at dwyerj1@comcast.net or (239) 594-5754.