GREENFIELD — The Traprock Center for Peace & Justice invites the public to a one-hour vigil on Greenfield Common on Thursday to join the world in marking the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The United States military dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, and another over Nagasaki three days later. The bombings ended World War II but resulted in an estimated 210,000 deaths and now serve as a warning of the horrors of nuclear warfare.
‘I think it’s the most important topic on Earth,” Cummington resident Dr. Eli Martin Schotz, who sits on Traprock’s board of directors, said. “I think the future of our species hinges on our ability, ultimately, to end war.”
The vigil is slated to begin at 8 a.m. Local groups and members of the public are invited to bring signs calling for peace and democracy, an end to current wars and hostilities, and an end to all situations that increase the possible development and use of nuclear weapons. Nipponzan-Myōhōji Buddhist monks of the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett are expected to be present.
There will be a moment of silence at 8:15 a.m. to commemorate the exact time when “Little Boy” was dropped from the Enola Gay B-29 Superfortress bomber over the citizens of Hiroshima, killing 60,000 to 80,000 people instantly or within hours, and tens of thousands more in the following years due to radiation sickness and infections. “Fat Man” was dropped over Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
Before the end of the vigil at 9 a.m., Sarah Pirtle will play the flute and participants will share concerns and plans for further peace actions. The monks then plan to go to Holyoke for the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemoration Peace Walk to Springfield. Schotz said he will drive the monks to Holyoke if needed.
Anna Gyorgy, Traprock’s secretary, said the vigil is particularly poignant nowadays, with the war in Iran and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“This year, there’s so much to talk about,” the Wendell resident said.
Debate persists decades later on whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. It has been argued that they forced Japan’s surrender and prevented the estimated millions of Japanese and Allied casualties that would have come with a full-scale land invasion. A naval blockade also would have been catastrophic, experts say.
Still, the bombings have been described as war crimes, state terrorism and fundamentally immoral. Some historians have argued that the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan on Aug. 8 played a far greater role in inducing Japanese surrender.
“There’s been a lot of research about this. The history is Japan had been negotiating to end the war. They wanted to keep their emperor,” Gyorgy said. “Japan was so crippled and so destroyed.”
Gyorgy got her start in the anti-nuclear movement when she appeared in Dan Keller’s 1975 award-winning documentary “Lovejoy’s Nuclear War.” She became more involved when she lived in Germany for 29 years and worked as the coordinator of a group called Women and Life on Earth, whose members gathered on the Rhine River every Aug. 6 to commemorate the Hiroshima bombing.
“I found that everything I was working on that was a problem in the world came from my own country,” Gyrogy said. “[The commemoration], for me, became an annual holiday, an anniversary of what we don’t want and what we must stop.”
She said the United States has spent trillions of dollars operating, maintaining and modernizing its nuclear arsenal.
“It’s grotesque,” she said.
