Today marks seventy five years since an atomic bomb was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by one being detonated over Nagasaki. No-one will ever know how many tens or hundreds of thousands died as a result.

I was born just over two years after these horrific events, and grew up in post-war England where I remember a constant national worry about a possible nuclear war. The term "four minute warning" still echoes in my head to this day. That was considered to be the length of any warning we could expect to have between a long range nuclear attack being spotted, and the bomb actually reaching us. Politicians tried to assure us neither side in the Cold War would dare use any of the vast amounts of nuclear weapons they were aiming at each other, because of what they termed the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that would cause. The world seemed to stand still when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962. I was just 15 years old. For two weeks in October it seemed that the end of the world was about to happen.

A little over two years later I was seventeen years old, and still at school, as the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities arrived. (I make no apology for calling them atrocities, because they truly were atrocious.) Here's a poem I wrote at the time:

https://gayauthors.org/story/marty/martys-poetry/3

Many years later, the Cold War eventually ended. And suddenly the world felt a much safer place.

So when I read this morning, 75 years to the day since Hiroshima was obliterated in one blinding flash of light, that there are apparently still "more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world, many on ‘hair-trigger’ alert status, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice" my heart feels heavy.