“The use of nuclear weapons is not an unfounded fear, but a real and present crisis,” said Tomihisa Taue, on the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945.
Nuclear weapons pose a threatreal and currentsince the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, said the mayor of Nagasaki on Tuesday August 9, the day of the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing that ravaged this Japanese city.
On August 9, 1945, Nagasaki was swept away by an infernal fire that killed 74,000 people, three days after the world’s first nuclear attack in Hiroshima. The two strikes carried out by the United States had precipitated the end of the Second World War and, to this day, Japan remains the only country to have been targeted by atomic weapons in time of war.
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However, on Tuesday Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue sounded the alarm. “In January this year, the leaders of the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China issued a joint statement affirming that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.“, did he declare. “But, the following month, Russia invaded Ukraine. Threats of the use of nuclear weapons were made, shaking the whole world. The use of nuclear weapons is not an unfounded fear, but a real and present crisis“, estimated the mayor of Nagasaki.
He warned that these weapons can be triggered as a result of errors of judgement, malfunctions or terrorist attacks. Nagasaki survivors, Japanese officials and foreign dignitaries performed a silent prayer at 11:02 a.m., the exact moment the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese port city.
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On Saturday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres delivered a speech in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the attack that killed around 140,000 people on August 6, 1945. He warned that “humanity is playing with a loaded gunin the context of current nuclear-related crises. Over the past few days, Russians and Ukrainians have accused each other of bombing the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, located in southern Ukraine.