Dr Ruth Mitchell, a 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner, doctor and neurosurgeon, delivered the following speech to the Hiroshima Day protest on Gadigal Country/Sydney on August 1.

It’s an honour to be here on unceded sovereign Gadigal land and I want to begin by acknowledging that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Eighty one years ago this month, a uranium bomb was detonated by the United States over the city Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. It flattened and burned around 70% of the city and, by the end of that year, at least 140,000 people had died.

Three days later a larger plutonium bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people by the end of that year. Ground temperatures in Nagasaki reached 4000°C and radioactive rain poured down.

The survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as the Hibakusha, lived with massively increased rates of cancer and chronic diseases, some being passed to the next generations.

As a doctor and neurosurgeon, I am often called upon to treat severely injured people and, apart from the fact that this awful poisonous incineration was entirely preventable, I find it unspeakable that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no meaningful humanitarian response was possible.

In Hiroshima, 90% of doctors and nurses were killed or injured; 42 of 45 hospitals were rendered non-functional; and 70% of victims had combined injuries including, in most cases, severe burns. 

All the dedicated burn beds around the world would be insufficient to care for the survivors of a single nuclear bomb on any city.

It takes around 10 seconds for the fireball from a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size, but the effects last for........

© Green Left Weekly