20 October to 27 October

The real horror of Hiroshima

There were two ordinary stone doorsteps, one above the other. Looking closely, one could see a faded grey shadow in the centre of each. Those faded shadows are all that remains of a human being, vaporised by the first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima in 1945; the nearest that human beings have come to imitating the sun. Those looking at that stone, now displayed at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, stand, reflect and weep for the bomb's estimated 140,000 victims.

A powerful educational resource, the peace museum in Hiroshima is one of over one hundred and twenty such museums scattered throughout the world. Here were history, humanity, and a determination to prevent such horrors ever occurring again. Whenever a nation conducts a nuclear test, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki protest to its government. The array of their letters reminds us that bombs have now been created whose intensity is 3,000 times that of those used at Hiroshima, whilst the creation of smaller bombs threatens to breach an unwritten nuclear threshold. Our country possesses nuclear weapons. Is it true that the real horror is not simply that one possesses such weapons, but that one might be prepared to use them?

Clive Barrett, Visiting Fellow, School of Applied Global Ethics and Trustee of The Peace Museum, recently visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum during a conference of the International Network of Museums for Peace.