Japan marks 70th anniversary of Hiroshima atomic bombing

The Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, should promise “no war and lasting peace” to honour the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more importantly to leave a peaceful world for generations to come. Seventy years ago, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the darkest chapter in the long history of humanity’s wartime horrors.

The smell of burned flesh filled the air as scores of survivors with severe burns dived into rivers to escape the inferno.

“It was a white, silvery flash”, Sunao Tsuboi, 90, said of the moment when the United States unleashed what was then the most destructive weapon ever produced. Great Britain has nuclear weapons but that didn’t stop the July 7, 2005 attacks. While ordinary Japanese had grown used to seeing American bombers overhead, the hell on earth that was unleashed on August 6, 1945 eclipsed anything anyone had seen before.

Ms. Kinoshita has spent years at Mr. Hasai’s side as he has addressed groups of students, educators and visitors to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, near the skeletal monument of its Atomic Bomb Dome.

Gusts of around 1.5 kilometers (one mile) a second roared outwards carrying with them shattered debris, and packing enough force to rip limbs and organs from bodies.

Tens of thousands of people stood for a minute of silence at 8:30am, local time, in Hiroshima’s peace park, near the epicentre of the 1945 attack.

When he picked himself up, his shirt, pants and skin flapped from his burned body; blood vessels dangled from open wounds and part of his ears were missing. Submarines, planes, and boats carry them, while the rest live in underground silos, able to be delivered to their targets with sophisticated intercontinental missiles.

“We have invited President Obama, but it may be hard for him to visit”.

Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui has designated 2015 as a time to “share Hiroshima’s desire for peace”, launching a series of 35 projects to be completed in the coming months. The survivors of the atomic bomb disaster, known as hibakusha, were also among the attendees.

More specifically, 56 percent of Americans think the use of atomic weapons against Japan during World War II was justified, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.

Takeoka was 17-years old and had just completed a night shift making torpedoes at a military factory when the bomb exploded more than two miles away. The editorial began ‘We have turned one of history’s greatest corners,’ while the London Correspondence column reported that people had been talking about little else and a machine had been devised that ‘will either end war or end us all.’.

Speaking in Hiroshima on Thursday, the 70th anniversary of the US atomic bombing, Abe said that the draft stipulates full nuclear disarmament.

“Article 9 has become a touchstone of Japanese national identity, which explains why Prime Minister Abe has cratered in recent polls because his legislation on Collective Self-Defense is seen as a stealth revision of the pacifist Constitution”. She has talked about her experience of the atomic bombing to American people while serving as president of the American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors.

Last year’s fascist coup in Ukraine, engineered by the US and Germany, has been followed by a provocative military North Atlantic Treaty Organisation build-up in Eastern Europe against Russian Federation that has greatly heightened the risk of conflict between nuclear-armed powers.

People wait in line to pray for victims of the atomic bombing. US imperialism pursued its war aims against Japan to ensure its dominance in Asia with the same ruthlessness and contempt for human life as its Japanese rival. Yet, because eight countries, including the US and China, have failed to ratify it, the CTBT occupies a legal netherworld: it may be said to be in operation, but not in force.