I went out to Seattle’s Green Lake on Sunday night to catch a little bit of the annual ‘From Hiroshima to Hope‘ gathering there. It’s been 72 years since the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A banner at Green Lake pointed out that barely 20 miles west of Seattle, at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base, one finds the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the United States. Last month, the United Nations reached its first agreement to ban nuclear weapons. But it’s complicated : Japan, alongside the nine nuclear-armed nations*, including the United States, refused to take part in the negotiations and the vote.
*United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea (!). The entire Southern Hemisphere is free of nuclear weapons.
