London CND will join in chorus again this year, when Raised Voices choir’s offer their rendition of The H-Bomb’s Thunder at our Hiroshima commemoration, on 6 August in Tavistock Square, London CND Chair Carol Turner, writes. The lyrics were penned in 1958 by CND member John Brunner for first of what became a decade-long tradition of Easter marches between Aldermaston and London. The song asks:
Will you let your cities crumble?
Will you see your children die?
Shall we lay the world in ruin?
Shall we blast, or shall we build ?
Today, as the world moves closer than ever to nuclear war, CND lays the same challenge before peace and justice campaigners and political leaders everywhere:
Stop the headlong rush to war!
Build the Peace!
John Brunner, 1934-1995, was born in the market town of Wallingford, south Oxfordshire. A passionate supporter of nuclear disarmament, John was at the start of his career as an award- winning sci-fi writer when he joined the first Aldermaston March and wrote what was to become an enduring anthem of the nuclear disarmament movement.
The H-Bomb’s Thunder
Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder
Echo like the crack of doom?
While they rend the skies asunder
Fall-out makes the earth a tomb
Do you want your homes to tumble
Rise in smoke towards the sky?
Chorus:
Men and women, stand together
Do not heed the men of war
Make your minds up now or never
Ban the bomb for evermore
Tell the leaders of the nations
Make the whole wide world take heed
Poison from the radiations
Strikes at every race and creed
Must you put mankind in danger
Murder folk in distant lands?
Will you bring death to a stranger
Have his blood upon your hands?
Shall we lay the world in ruin?
Only you can make the choice
Stop and think of what you’re doing
Join the march and raise your voice
Time is short; we must be speedy
We can see the hungry filled
House the homeless, help the needy
Shall we blast, or shall we build ?
The lyrics and voice clip below are reproduced from Mark Gregory’s Union Songs, an online archive of more than 840 songs and poems by hundreds of different authors.