Today marks the 64th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians died, mostly on August 6, 1945. But the carnage and pain continued in many subsequent days and years and successive generations, and still goes on.

The same horrible story was repeated in the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. That US inflicted story goes on there as well.

Nuclear weapons gave the phrase “The war to end all wars” a new and apocalyptic meaning. Originally coined to motivate people to fight and kill in World War I, its words rang false less than 20 years later when an even more terrible World War broke out.

After WWII ended, the US, USSR, Britain and France developed weapons so deadly that war waged with them could end all wars, because they could end all human life.

Today in the Bay Area protesters gathered early in the morning at the gates of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which has played a key role in all this nuclear madness.

According to the Contra Costa Times, police “arrested, cited and released” 22 protesters who blocked the entrance to the nuclear murder facility this morning.

The Times reported this statement there by Marlia Kelley, director of Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment:

“I think the US and world people forget the images of devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that creates a situation where dropping a bomb is likely to happen again.”

Recently the two oldest surviving veterans of World War I died. The world would do well to remember their final words.

Briton Henry Allingham was said to be the world’s oldest man when he died on July 18 at age 113. He was still a teenager when he joined his nation’s fledgling Air Force during the First World War.

He was the sole remaining survivor of the naval Battle of Jutland, where 6000 Brits died in two days.

Allingham “spent his final years reminding Britain about the 9 million soldiers killed in” the war to end all wars, “and pleading for peace,” according to the July 8 Associated Press.

“War is stupid,” the July 18 London Times reported him saying. “You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.”

Allingham’s countryman and fellow vet Harry Patch was also 113 when he died a week later. Patch was drafted in 1916 and sent to the abysmal trenches in France.

According to the July 25 London Times, Harry Patch left us with these words about the war to end all wars: “Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.”