PEACE and anti-nuclear campaigners held memorial events across Britain and worldwide on Saturday to mark the 76th anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Vigils took place despite pouring rain, with many of the events involved music and poetry. Local branches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament also held a one-minute silence to remember the hundreds of thousands of people killed and maimed in the US’s atomic strikes against the two cities. 

Commemorations took place in cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Bradford and London and also in many smaller communities.

In the small town of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire more than 50 people defied the poor weather to gather near the historic Pack Horse Bridge for a commemoration.

In the nearby city of Bradford wreaths were laid by Deputy Lord Mayor Bev Mullaney.

Sheffield in South Yorkshire is part of the global Mayors for Peace organisation, which was established in 1982 by then mayor of Hiroshima Takeshi Araki.

Today Mayors for Peace has 6,800 member cities in 161 countries committed to opposing nuclear weapons.

At the Sheffield commemoration members of Sheffield Creative Action for Peace (SCRAP) laid flowers and held a vigil outside city hall.

The commemorations came against the background of the United Nations ratification in January of an international ban on nuclear weapons.

The British government says it will defy the ban to increase its nuclear stockpile.

A SCRAP member at the Sheffield event said: “Rather than seeking to reduce the UK’s nuclear warheads, our government recently made the decision to increase them by 40 per cent — despite this being illegal under the terms of the United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which the UK is supposedly committed.”