Mayor Suzuki: ‘Nuclear weapons are absolute evil’
Three days after the Hiroshima commemorations, Japan commemorates the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which occurred on the morning of August 9, 1945.
At 11:02 (4:02 in Italy), the exact time of the explosion, the city observed a minute’s silence in the Peace Park, where the commemorative ceremony took place in the presence of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and representatives of 98 countries.
The plutonium bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’, caused the death of around 74 thousand people, while many of the survivors, the hibakusha, later suffered various pathologies and tumors linked to radiation. Mayor Shiro Suzuki laid down an updated list of victims, which now numbers 204,708 names, including 2,773 confirmed deaths in the last year. In his ‘Declaration of Peace’, Suzuki called nuclear weapons not a ‘necessary evil’ but an ‘absolute evil’, incompatible with humanity, criticizing the concept of nuclear deterrence as “extremely dangerous and fragile”. The first citizen also recalled the failure of the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty last May, and asked Tokyo to participate in the congress on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, scheduled for November. Takaichi reiterated Japan’s adherence to the three non-nuclear principles – do not produce, do not possess, do not permit atomic weapons – promising “realistic and practical” efforts towards a world free of nuclear weapons, in the context of international tensions related to Ukraine and the Middle East.
