Hiroshima Day Rally At Sydney Town Hall Square, 2pm, Sat August 6, 2022

A rally in Town Hall Square on Saturday 6 August at 2pm will commemorate the US dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945.

“About 212,000 men, women and children died then and today nuclear weapons are the greatest immediate danger confronting our species and our planet,” said Frank Vavasour from the Sydney Hiroshima Day Committee.

“The existence today of nearly 13,000 nuclear weapons, ready to be launched without warning, poses an imminent threat to the survival of humanity.”

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently stated that “We have never been so close to a nuclear event since the Cuban missile crisis”.

“The only defence is to ban all nuclear weapons,” Mr Vavasour said.

Speakers including Senator David Shoebridge (Greens), Gem Romuld (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), and Nick Deane (Sydney Anti-AUKUS Coalition) will call for Australia to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

“The TPNW prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory” Frank Vavasour explained.

“The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations have adopted the TPNW, recognising the moral, ethical and security imperatives which inspired and motivated its creation.

“And in the latest public opinion poll 76 per cent of Australians supported the government signing the TPNW.”

Mr Vavasour said events are being held around Australia which support the statement made at the meeting of States Parties to the Treaty in June that:

“We will not rest until the last state has joined the Treaty, the last warhead has been dismantled and destroyed and nuclear weapons have been totally eliminated from the Earth.”

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