Concert & Puppet Show for Disarmament

This concert/presentation was held at Alvin K. Bissell Park in Oak Ridge. The puppeteers acted out what might happen in a nuclear disaster.

It starts out being a pastoral scene, with a young girl attending her chickens. The Mad Scientist comes along and sets off nuclear radiation. The chicken is supposed to be affected by this radiation, and his head blows up and feathers go everywhere. In short, the lesson is that life is destroyed by nuclear radiation caused by nuclear bombs. But then life returns as they raise a new flower (which is also quite large). They then sang “One World” and the puppeteers got off the stage and danced with everyone.

President Obama has come out in favor of abolishing nuclear weapons and securing loose nukes. However, the Department of Energy has announced plans to build a new $3 billion bomb plant at Y12 that will produce nuclear weapons for another century.

Also, there is something new this year at Bissell Park: they made a commemorative walk to honor those who build the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and claim that these bombs brought peace to the world.

Seems to me that there has been non-stop warfare since the bombings that ended World War Two. Also seems to me that we are still under threat from nuclear bombs, and we don’t know the ending of the story for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There may be nuclear bombs that go off sometime in the future.

One thing I do know – lots of the workers at the Oak Ridge plant died of cancer, while still in middle age.