THIS was a week when issues of war and peace were firmly in focus.

On Easter Sunday, a grim milestone was reached in the war in Iraq when the death toll of United States service personnel reached 4,000.

The following day, thousands of miles away, another landmark was commemorated on the Hampshire/Berkshire border as campaigners gathered outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment
at Aldermaston to mark the 50th anniversary of the first peace protest march on the base where the UK’s nuclear warheads are manufactured and maintained.

For some, wars and conflict are a necessary evil – a time when a stand has to be taken for the greater good against an aggressor or oppressor. For others, wars and conflict, and the weapons that are manufactured as a deterrent or to fight them, cannot ever be justified.

While the case for and against wars and military intervention will often be complex and controversial, what is not in doubt is that there will always be casualties of war.

On Monday, one of those victims – 77-year-old Yoshio Sato, a survivor of the atom bomb blast in Hiroshima – spoke to the peace campaigners outside AWE. He told how the blast had claimed the lives of several members of his family who suffered fatal after-effects from the radioactive fall-out.

Mr Sato, who overcame stomach cancer, told the crowd: “I’m a survivor. The nuclear weapon must not survive.”

It will not happen in his lifetime. However, wouldn’t it be wonderful if one day Mr Sato’s dreams of a world where there was widespread peace and no need for weapons of mass destruction finally came to fruition? We must all live in hope.