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For the past 25 years members of local peace groups re-dedicate themselves to the campaign for international  harmony. Flowers are cast on the waters of Tredegar Park Lake to recall a similar ceremony in Hiroshima.

Arguments still rage on the need to bomb the two Japanese cities. Some argue that it shortened the war and saved lives. Others claim that Japan was already in the process of surrendering and the USA wanted to demonstrate their bomb to assert post-war world domination.

The accounts of this largest civilian slaughter ever still haunt us. A sunny day, a flash of blue light, a thunderous roar, a killer wind, fire and black rain. Then the atomic plague.

There are encouraging signs of previous cold warriors flocking to the cause of a de-nuclearised world.

Will the world eventually obliterate from its military dreams any possibility of a similar act of mass barbarism?

Another occasion to  recall the remarkable topicality of Declaration Against the First World war and the present situation in Afghanistan.

Siegfried Sassoon: Declaration against the War

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

 I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.