We will be gathering (online) on the evening of Monday 9 August, at 7.30pm, to remember the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Bearing witness to these attacks, as we do each year, is an act of solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of victims of these grotesque acts of terror, and with the brave survivors (known as hibakusha) who have spent a lifetime campaigning for an end to all nuclear weapons everywhere.

Read the testimony of hibakusha here.

Bearing witness to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not only an act of grief and solemn reflection on a terrible moment in the history of humankind. It is also a recognition that the harm done by nuclear weapons persists to this day: in the lives of the hibakusha, but also among others who have experienced the brutality of nuclear tests or the damage done by uranium mining, all too often compounding the existing degradations of colonialism and imperialism.

It is a cry for justice, for healing and for change. It is a time when we call on nuclear-armed states to take responsibility for their wrongdoing: to face up to the human and planetary cost of nuclear weapons, and to make reparations for a legacy of grave harm. And to lay down their arms, to dismantle their nuclear weapons once and for all, so no such harm can ever be done again.

The destructive power of nuclear weapons has only grown over time. The nuclear weapons carried by just one of the UK's submarines have more than 300 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If they were ever used, tens of millions of people would die. The UK government's decision, this year, to further increase its nuclear stockpile is abhorrent and unjustifiable.

Join us for an evening of poetry and reflections on 9 August, in memory of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to call for a complete and immediate end to all nuclear weapons.