Seventy-five years after the United States destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, killing 70,000 people in an instant and that many more in the months to follow, OREPA members gathered at the gates of the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Complex to echo the call of the survivors of Hiroshima and to call for an end to nuclear weapons production at Y-12 and around the world.
“Y-12 enriched the uranium for the Little Boy bomb,” OREPA coordinator Ralph Hutchison said, “so we felt it was important to bear witness, to be in this place on this day. We took precautions throughout the three hour Names and Remembrance ceremony; we paused at 8:15 to mark the dropping of the bomb, and we resumed with chanting and drumming by Utsumi and Denise, our Nipponzan Myohoji friends.”
OREPA’s President, Kevin Collins, also had an article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel addressing the commemoration. You can read it here.