Peace group take Hiroshima message to North Wales

The Gilligan’s lantern at Criccieth on 6 August 2010

Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group members, Philip, Patricia and Amy Gilligan ensured that they marked the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the first Atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in 1945, even though they were camping in North Wales.
They flew a paper lantern with the message “No More Hiroshimas!” from the beach at Criccieth in memory of the 140,000 people who were killed in Japan on 6 August 1945 and to commemorate all who have ever died in war.

Philip Gilligan said: “Remembering the horror of Hiroshima and the death and destruction wrought on Nagasaki in a few days brings home the importance of striving for aglobal ban on nuclear weapons and campaigning against the government’s plans to upgrade the Trident nuclear weapons system.

“Britain’s existing nuclear weapons of mass destruction threaten the world with many times the destructive force of the Hiroshima bomb. They would kill 50,000,000 people and destroy our planet. They are dangerous, costly and unnecessary.

Mr Gilligan concluded: “It is time to scrap Trident and to strive seriously for a safer world in which the billions squandered on the potential for nuclear devastation is spent, instead, on the things we need.

“We need education, health and social services, not nuclear missiles.”