One hundred years ago, in September 1917, a team at Manchester University led by Ernest Rutherford “accidentally” split the atom, ushering in the atomic age. That set off a chain reaction which led to the “A” Bomb, Cold War terror, the nuclear bomb, the Soviet…reds under the beds, the Fourth Man, the Fifth Man.

What a coincidence that it was in Manchester. The very existence of the atom was first proved here in 1803, and it took just over a hundred years for Rutherford & co. to realise that the atom wasn’t the smallest particle with experiments that led to the momentous 1917 event.

It was a Manchester University scientist that was the brains behind those first 1945 atom bombs. The city became the world’s first to declare itself a nuclear free zone (in 1979) but the nuclear menace is still with us and so the world is forever poised on a knife-edge for fear of nuclear war.

That’s why we have this walk.

Don’t want to worry anyone.