Humanity is “playing with a loaded gun” in the context of current crises with nuclear connotations, warned the UN secretary general in Hiroshima on the occasion of the 77th anniversary this Saturday of the US atomic bombing of Japan.
At an annual ceremony held in the Japanese city to honor the victims of the 1945 bombing, Antonio Guterres made a strong appeal to world leaders to withdraw nuclear weapons from their arsenals.
“What have we learned?”
Seventy-seven years ago, “tens of thousands of people were suddenly killed in this city. Women, children and men were incinerated in a hellfire,” he said.
“The buildings turned to dust. The survivors were cursed with a radioactive legacy” of cancers and other diseases, Antonio Guterres added.
“We have to ask ourselves: what did we learn from the mushroom cloud that swelled over this city?”
“Humanity is playing with a loaded gun”
Today, “crises with a strong nuclear connotation are rapidly spreading, from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Humanity is playing with a loaded gun,” said Antonio Guterres, reiterating warnings he issued this week at a conference. of countries that signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in New York.
For the past two years, Hiroshima bombing commemorations, attended by survivors, family members, Japanese officials and some foreign dignitaries, have been held on a restricted basis due to Covid.
The ceremony this Saturday was more important. A silent prayer was held at 8:15 am local time, as the US bomb devastated the city at the end of World War II.
The nuclear threat behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Nuclear risk has been on people’s minds since Russia invaded its Ukrainian neighbor in February. The Russian ambassador to Japan was not invited to Saturday’s ceremony, but on Thursday he went to Hiroshima to lay a wreath in honor of the victims.
Around 140,000 people died as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, a number of victims that includes those who survived the explosion but later died due to radiation.
Three days later, the United States dropped another nuclear bomb on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people and ending World War II.
Source: BFM TV
