Hiroshima

There is a shallow pond beside the Rideau Canal about 200 meters south of our apartment building. In the spring it is the spawning ground for catfish and carp. This day, August 6, it is the location of a moving annual commemoration of August 6, 1945, the first time an atomic bomb was used to kill humans in large numbers. Representatives of the Japanese government, members of the Japanese community in Ottawa, and some of us who advocate and work for nuclear disarmament gather there and float little paper lanterns in paper boats on the pond. I was a teen-age medical student in 1945 and like most of my classmates I had recently learnt enough physics to understand how such a bomb would work according to Einstein's famous formula for the relationship of energy to mass. Through most of my life from then on the threat of nuclear war has been a dark cloud over all of us. This year's commemoration seems rather higher profile than usual, for instance because the UN secretary general is attending the ceremony in Hiroshima and because the time given it in news broadcasts, the column inches in our national newspaper, are more than usual in recent years. I hope these are hopeful portents.