With tensions between the U.S. and North Korea rapidly increasing, nuclear war protesters who gathered to remember the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are calling for the “total abolition of weapons.”

The protests were held outside of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, roughly 200 protesters came together outside the Livermore Laboratory “to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the bomb that decimated Nagasaki, just three days after another atomic blast did the same to Hiroshima.” Survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attended the protest alone with the anti-nuclear weapons activists.

One of the local groups at the protest was Tri-Valley CAREs. That group’s executive director, Marylia Kelley, said, “We are here to stand with the survivors of that nuclear attack, but we are also here to stop the next nuclear war before it starts.” Kelley added, “We understand if we are ever going to rid the world of the threat of nuclear war, we need to have the total abolition of weapons. There are no right hands for these wrong weapons.”

The Chronicle reported that the protest was “heavy with emotion: indignation, outrage and fear over a potential nuclear build-up” as the U.S. and North Korea increasingly appear prepared to go head-to-head.

The protests against nuclear weapons–based on the prior use of atomic weapons against World War II Japan–overlook many things. Chief among them is the fact that the United States’s conventional weapons were literally burning the Japanese to death via a multitude of air raids. The ordnance burst and tumbled upon impact, spewing fire and death upon those in its path. Richard B. Frank points to colleague estimates “that between a quarter million and 400,000 Asians, overwhelmingly noncombatants, were dying each month the war continued.” This is death on a scale far greater than was caused by the two atomic bombs.

Moreover, the protesters overlook how many Americans would have died had a land invasion been chosen over the dropping of two atomic bombs. The estimates were hundreds upon hundreds of thousands and beyond, and these estimates do not include the POWs being held in Japan who would have immediately been killed.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.