FROM 12.30pm-1pm on Saturday, August 7, Bolton Stop The War Coalition/CND will be holding a silent vigil in memory of the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, at the War Memorial in Victoria Square.

We hope that many of our fellow Boltonians will join us.

There were two really terrible war crimes in World War Two -- "two holocausts", as Shimon Perez, the Israeli politician, put it: the gassing of Jews and gypsies, and the nuclear extermination of two Japanese cities.

The first holocaust has been repudiated by Germany. Willy Brandt, the then Chancellor, made a public apology for Germany's crime at the Ghetto Memorial in Warsaw. But the USA (and Britain, which approved of the bombing though it did not participate in it), have never recognised that they were responsible for a terrible war crime. But if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not war crimes, why should the gassing of the Kurds at Halabjah be held against Saddam Hussein?

Countries which do not recognise their past crimes are doomed to repeat them, even if not in the same form. The ferocity and ruthlessness of US policies in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq, with a death toll running into millions, and British support for, or as in Iraq, actual participation in, those policies, is an illusion of this moral law.

Germany, however, by recognising and expressing contrition for its crimes, no longer threatens anybody, though Chancellor Schroder made it clear before March 2003 that his country would not participate in any attack on Iraq, even with a second UN resolution.

Malcolm Pittock

St James's Avenue

Breightmet

Bolton