By Mel Stride, Conservative MP for Central Devon

AUGUST marked the 70th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — 100,000 died on the days the bombs fell.

A people already weakened by widespread malnutrition were in little state to withstand what the final bursts of world conflagration brought to their door. Those deaths were but a part of the 60-million of World War II, a conflict in which Japan herself had slaughtered a million Chinese through chemical weapons alone.

There was unrestrained horror on all sides. But few of man’s deeds can surely approach Hiroshima and Nagasaki for such instant brutality. There are survivors like Sunao Tsuboi, now 90. He appears in one of the few photographs that survive of Hiroshima the day it happened. The ragged grainy figures in the foreground are police dousing little children with cooking oil to try to ease their burns.

He says the smell of burning flesh was overpowering, bodies flowed by in the river; a man, he remembers, was gazing down at a hole in his stomach trying to gather in his organs: ‘people looked like ghosts — bleeding — trying to walk’, he said.

It is hard to read these accounts without some sense of shame about being human. But this use of the ultimate destructive weapon undoubtedly foreshortened the war. Japan would have continued to defend herself to the bitterest of ends — some estimates suggest that had the war continued with conventional weapons then another four million US personnel and ten million Japanese would have died.

Today, whilst unilateral disarmament would be a dreadful miscalculation leaving our country far less secure in a highly uncertain world we must continue to press for further disarmament and non proliferation.

The memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be reason enough for that.