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Maui Hiroshima/Nagasaki Day
Community Peace Observance (8/6/2004)
Statement of Maui Peace Action member Mele Stokesberry at Maui Hiroshima Day Commemoration, Aug. 6, 2004:
Thank you for the opportunity to share a few impressions from my visit to Hiroshima's Peace Park and museum
two weeks ago. Hiroshima is a leader in world peace, and we can learn something from that city's, and Japan's, response
to the A-bomb.
Today, on the fifty-nineth anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb on human beings, Hiroshima Mayor
Tadatoshi Akiba rebuked Washington for wanting to develop small nuclear weapons that he feared would be easier to use.
"The egocentric world view of the U.S. government is reaching extremes," Akiba told the annual memorial ceremony at
the city's Peace Park, near where the bomb was dropped. "Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of
international law, the U.S. has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more `usable'."
At the museum, somber displays about the nuclear arms race inform us that close to 20,000 nuclear warheads
are already deployed throughout the world today.
The cumulative power of these weapons of mass destruction
equals 1.47 million times the power of the Hiroshima A-bomb.
On the chest in the Cenotaph to the victims that holds the names of all those killed, it is engraved, "Rest in Peace,
for the Error Shall Not be Repeated." And we commemorate on Maui and around the world each Aug. 6 the horror
of atomic weapons because all peoples need to be reminded on a regular basis of the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation.
Still, it's not just the big nuclear warheads that we must stay aware of and work to abolish. President Bush has
asked for, and Congress has authorized, research on tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. Cluster bombs with their
maiming, deadly bomblets, armor-piercing weaponry that emits poisonous depleted uranium radiation, missiles, land mines,
tanks and machine guns are also weapons of mass destruction.
A museum display at Hiroshima speaks of a movement today in Japan to look at perceptions of
their country in the school textbooks of the Asian countries which
Japan colonized or occupied during the war. It says, "Hiroshima was
dealt a severe blow by the atomic bomb"(NOTE not "by the USA" but "by the bomb") "but Japan, too, inflicted
great damage."
Most significantly, it goes on to say,
"Internationalization must begin with speaking the truth about the
role each country played in the war. We must find a way to make our mutual pain a positive gift for the
future." May we someday see this sentiment expressed by
America about American military actions.
In the mean time, let us continue to share knowledge of the dangers and immorality of making war. And in the
words of Pope John Paul II, inscribed in the Peace Museum:
"... To remember the past is to commit oneself to the
future. To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear
war and....to commit oneself to peace."