Japan bombings to be commemorated

The Remember Bhopal Museum in collaboration with the Regional Science Centre, Bhopal will be commemorating the 70th and 30th anniversary of the Nagasaki-Hiroshima nuclear bombing and the Union Carbide disaster respectively, on August 9.The event will unfold in three parts, a screening of the film ‘Yes Men Fix the World, a talk by Kumar Sundaram from the Coalition for Nuclear disarmament and Peace followed by a discussion with the audience.

“The programme has been designed for the young audience who are the future sentinels of human rights and ecological protection” says Kokila Bhattacharya of Remember Bhopal Museum.The two hour programme will begin at 3pm. The Regional Science Centre will also host an annual exhibition of exclusive photographs from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear bombing at the venue as well.

It’s noteworthy that in the 70 years of that inhuman act, the world continues to see the consequences of this achievement. The ‘little Boy and the ‘Fat Man’ together killed over 1, 29,000 people, most of them civilians and caused tremendous damage to the environment. Survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain acutely ill with cancer related illness due to radiation.

These 70 years has also shown that nuclear devastation does not need war as is evident from the Chernobyl accident, the Fukushima disaster. It is also 30 years of the Bhopal Disaster, infamously known as the Chemical Hiroshima. The Bhopal case illustrates how corporate evade their human rights responsibilities and underlines the need to establish a universal human rights framework that can be applied to corporate directly. Union Carbide’s chemical wastes have contaminated a vast swath of Bhopal with dangerous toxins and chemical compounds and thousands continue to suffer.