MV Greenpeace / PC 8023
Position: Noon Pos:28 deg 06 min North and 124deg 12 min East.
June 24th, 1996
Day 39

Hello all,

Just when I thought it was safe to trust my new found computor skills this damn machine has had me in fits of frustration for the last twenty minutes! Anyway here I am.

Big news of the day is that Dominic caught a big mahi-mahi off the poopdeck this morning. He has a fishing line set up with a bungy rope arrangement on it and he'd had it out all morning and when he went to check it there was this beautiful blue/yellow fish there. It will be great for dinner tomorrow.

The deck crew have been working hard again today. As Neil Young's song says `rust never sleeps' and there is a constant cycle of chipping and painting. Having the ship holed up in Hao atoll all those months took it's toll on the general condition of things and the deckhands have had a big job getting it all up to a ship shape standard again.

We are now less than two days sailing time from our destination of Nagasaki, one of the two Japanese cities that was devastated by a nuclear bomb. The bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium bomb. It takes much less plutonium to get a greater explosive force, than it takes of uranium. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was called Little Boy and was 13 kilotonnes while the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was called Fat Man and was 20 kilotonnes.

I have seen photographs taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs were dropped and all that is left of people is their shadow - outlines on walls or footpaths where they were literally vaporised by the force of the blast.

The crew will go to the Nagasaki Peace Park on Thursday for a remembrance ceremony. I just hope that the delegates sitting in Geneva trying to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty will also remember the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

We hear from Geneva that there is some disagreement about how and when the treaty would take effect and that this could lead to delays. If the wording of the treaty isn’t agreed by the end of this week then it will not be ready for signing before the end of this year. Hopefully by going to Nagasaki we will be able to remind people that this treaty is about stopping the testing of nuclear weapons that are designed to kill people - and that is why the world wants a CTBT now, not next year or the year after.

See you Love Lynda.