Today, bells sounded in Hiroshima — the 77th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing. On August 6 at 8:15 am, the Little Boy bomb destroyed a city of over 350.000 people. And thousands more Japanese died painfully from radiation sickness and injuries. 3 days later, on August 9, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki began. More than 75.000 people died. And now, 77 years after the terrible tragedy, Putin is deliberately threatening the world with the use of nuclear weapons. The mayor of the city, Kazumi Matsui, criticized Putin, who is once again pushing the world towards a nuclear catastrophe by blackmailing the world and Ukraine.
"In invading Ukraine, the Russian leader, elected to protect the lives and property of his people, is using them as instruments of war, stealing the lives and livelihoods of civilians in a different country," Matsui.
"Around the world, the notion that peace depends on nuclear deterrence gains momentum," Mayor Matsui continued.
The mayor publicly recalled that the Russian army right now turned Ukraine's nuclear power plants into military bases. Moreover, quite recently, Russia threatened the world with a second Chornobyl: the Russians were at the Chornobyl station for more than a month, taking Ukrainian scientific and technical personnel hostage.
"These errors betray humanity's determination, born of our experiences of war, to achieve a peaceful world free from nuclear weapons. To accept the status quo and abandon the ideal of peace maintained without military force is to threaten the very survival of the human race."
Russian ambassador to Japan Mikhail Galuzin was not invited to the ceremony to commemorate the victims of Hiroshima. Galuzin laid it on his own on the memorial stone and said that Russia would never use nuclear weapons. Hardly anyone believed him.
"At the start of this year, the five nuclear-weapon states issued a joint statement: 'Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Why do they not attempt to fulfill their promises? Why do some even hint at using nuclear weapons?" Kazumi Matsui.
António Guterres was in Hiroshima today. "Nuclear weapons are nonsense. They guarantee no safety - only death and destruction. Three quarters of a century later, we must ask what we've learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945."
Next year the G7 summit will be held in Hiroshima. Prime minister of Japan Fumio Kishida calls on the world to give up nuclear weapons. Moreover, he became the first representative of Japan to take part in the conference of the parties to the Treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
"We will continue towards the ideal of nuclear disarmament even given the current tough security environment," Fumio Kishida.
Kishida told Guterres that it condemned China's ballistic missile launches as a threatening display of brute force. According to the minister, this is "a serious issue concerning Japan's security and the safety of the Japanese people", so Japan will work closely with the UN and the US on the China issue.
