Nuclear weapons have posed a threat since Russia invaded Ukraine, Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue said Tuesday on the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing that devastated the Japanese city.
The city commemorated this date of August 9, 1945, when it was devastated by an infernal fire that ended the lives of 74,000 people, three days after the first nuclear attack in the world, in Hiroshima. To this day, Japan remains the only country to have been targeted by atomic weapons in wartime.
“The use of nuclear weapons is a real and present crisis”
Tomihisa Taue recalls the commitments made by the leaders of the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China in relation to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and their statement that “nuclear war cannot be won and should never be led” .
“But, already the following month, Russia invaded Ukraine. Threats to use nuclear weapons were made, shaking the whole world. The use of nuclear weapons is not an unfounded fear, but a real and current crisis,” said the mayor of Nagasaki.
In recent days, Russians and Ukrainians have accused each other of bombing the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, located in southern Ukraine.
A message from Antonio Gutterres in Hiroshima
In Nagasaki, survivors of the bombing by Japanese officials and foreign dignitaries held a silent prayer Tuesday at 11:02 am, the exact moment the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese port city.
On Saturday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres delivered a speech in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the attack that killed an estimated 140,000 people on August 6, 1945. He warned that “humanity is playing with a loaded gun” in the context of the current nuclear crises. .
Source: BFM TV
