Thousands of people in Nagasaki on Saturday paid tribute to the victims, as the city marked 80 years since the atomic bomb “Fat Man” was dropped on the city, while the mayor of that city warned of the danger of nuclear war in the modern world.
That city, in western Japan, was leveled to the ground on August 9th, 1945, when the United States (U.S.) dropped a bomb of the isotope plutonium-239 weighing about five tons, nicknamed “Fat Man,” killing about 27.000 of the estimated 200.000 residents of the city. By the end of 1945, the number of those killed from acute radiation exposure reached about 70.000.
Addressing the public, Mayor Shiro Suzuki appealed for world leaders to once again embrace the principles of the United Nations (UN) Charter and to take concrete action toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, emphasizing that further delay is no longer acceptable.
“This is a crisis of human survival that is approaching each and every one of us,” Suzuki stated.
He also conveyed the harrowing words of a survivor:
“Around me were people whose eyes had popped out… Bodies lay scattered like stones. He asked those gathered: Is not the perspective of a ‘global citizen’ the driving force for reconnecting our fragmented world?”
The survivors, known as “hibakusha,” still suffer from the effects of radiation and social discrimination. Given that their number this year for the first time fell below 100.000, their stories encourage ongoing efforts to advocate for a world without nuclear weapons.
The annual ceremony was attended by representatives of 95 countries and territories, among them the U.S. and Russia, as well as Israel. Japan, the only country in the world to have suffered nuclear attacks, owes a commitment to nuclear disarmament, yet it is neither a signatory nor an observer of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
