Japan has marked 80 years since Hiroshima’s atomic bombing on Wednesday with a ceremony reminiscent of the world the raging horrors, while Saber is attached between the United States and Russia maintains the nuclear clock of “the day’s clock” almost midnight.
A silent prayer took place at 8:15 am (2315 GMT), the moment when the American Gay planes dropped “Little Boy” in the Western Japanese city on August 6, 1945.
One stifling morning, hundreds of managers, students and survivors dressed in black posed flowers to the commemorative cenotaph, with the ruins of a back building, a raw recall of the horrors that took place.
In a speech, the mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, warned against “an accelerated tendency towards a military accumulation in the world”, in the context of the invasion of Russia of Ukraine and chaos in the Middle East.
“These developments ignore the lessons that the international community should have learned from tragedies of history,” he said.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said it was the mission of Japan “to take the lead … to a world without nuclear weapons”.
The final number of deaths of the Hiroshima attack would strike around 140,000 people, killed not only by the colossal explosion and the fire ball, but also later by the radiation.
Three days after “Little Boy”, on August 9, another atomic bomb killed 74,000 people in Nagasaki. Imperial Japan went on August 15, ending the Second World War.
Today, Hiroshima is a flourishing metropolis of 1.2 million, but the attacks live in the memories of many.
On the eve of the ceremony, people started to queue to pay tribute to the victims before the cenotaph.
Before dawn Wednesday, families who lost dear beings in the attack also came to pray.
Yoshie Yokoyama, 96, who arrived in a wheelchair with her grandson, told journalists that his parents and grandparents were victims of bombs.
“My grandfather died shortly after the bombing, while my father and my mother died after developing cancer. My parents-in-law also died, so my husband could not see them again on his return from battlefields after the war.
“People are still suffering,” she added.
Wednesday’s ceremony was to include a record of around 120 countries and regions, including, for the first time, Taiwanese and Palestinian representatives.
The United States – which has never officially apologized for the attacks – were represented by its ambassador to Japan. Russia and China were absent.
Nihon Hidankyo, the popular organization which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, represents the number of decline survivors, known as Hibakusha.
In March, there were 99,130 hibakusha, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, with the average age of 86 years.
“I want foreign envoys to visit the Peace Memorial Museum and understand what happened,” the co -president of the Toshiyuki group Mimaki told local media before commemorations.
Pope Leo XIV said in a statement that “in our time to set up world tensions and conflicts”, Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained “living reminders of the deep horrors forged by nuclear weapons”.
The Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres warned that “the very arms which brought such a devastation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are again treated as coercion tools”.
Young generation
Attacks remain the only time that atomic bombs have been used in wartime.
Kunihiko Sakuma, 80, who survived explosions as a baby, told AFP that he hoped that there could be a nuclearless world.
“The young generation works hard for this end,” he said before the ceremony.
But in January, the “The Doomsday Clock” bulletin of atomic scientists went to 89 seconds at midnight, the closest to its 78 years of history.
The clock symbolizing the distance of humanity against destruction was moved last time at 90 seconds at midnight against the invasion of Ukraine in Russia in 2022.
Russia and the United States represent approximately 90% of the more than 12,000 warheads in the world, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Sipri warned in June that “a new dangerous nuclear weapon race emerges at a time when armament control diets are seriously weakened”, with almost all nine nuclear armed states modernizing their arsenals.
Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump said he had ordered the deployment of two nuclear submarines following an online spit with former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
