The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, was born at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Sixty-six years later, on August 6, 2011, the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance will mark the Hiroshima bombing with a series of events in Oak Ridge to join our voices with the hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombings, to say “Never Again!”
OREPA’s activities begin at 6:00am with a solemn Names and Remembrance Ceremony at the gates of the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex at the corner of East Bear Creek Road and Scarboro Road. During the ceremony, names of victims of the Hiroshima bombing will be read, along with first hand accounts and other reports of the bomb and its effects. The readings include a petition signed by more than five dozen scientists whose work was instrumental in creating the bomb, including physicists and chemists in Oak Ridge. The Ceremony pauses at 8:15am to mark the time the bomb was dropped in Japan.
At 10:30am, OREPA members and others will gather at Alvin K. Bissell Park in Oak Ridge (Bissell Park is at the corner of the Oak Ridge Turnpike and Tulane Avenue; we will gather at the ampitheatre located behind the library/civic center complex). The March for Nuclear Abolition will leave Bissell Park at 10:45 to walk to the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex.
Shortly after noon, we will convene at Y12 for Never Again! A Call for Nuclear Abolition; peace cranes will be tied to the fence around the bomb plant, and other activities will raise the call of the hibakusha for the world to step away from the nuclear abyss and move toward complete disarmament”the only guarantee that the world will never again know the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You can help spread the word about the August commemoration in Oak Ridge with this flyer:
