Hiroshima 70th Anniversary: Japan Renews Push for Nuclear Arms Ban

As the only country to have experienced nuclear bombs – Nagasaki was attacked three days later – Japan has a special duty to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons, Abe told the audience after a minute’s silence. On that day in 1945, the US Air Force dropped atomic bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.

“Abe’s peace is a phony peace”, Oiwa said as he waited in line to lay a bouquet of flowers in front of the eternal flame. Mayor Kazumi Matsui renewed calls for U.S President Barack Obama and other world leaders to continue to increase efforts toward eliminating nuclear weapons from the world, reported USA Today.

The bishop said that since the end of the Cold War in 1991, Americans think little about nuclear weapons and the threat they pose. If a demonstration had to be furnished to Stalin of the enormous and unmatched military prowess of the US, nothing was calculated to achieve that effect as much as a new super-bomb that was immeasurably greater than anything witnessed thus far.

Bishop Cantu, who serves as chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on global Justice and Peace, said that as a U.S. citizen, he arrived in Hiroshima with a sense of “sorrow and repentance”. American scientists, military strategists and politicians were keen to assess the impact that a nuclear bomb might have on its target. A “Don’t repeat the war” conference was held, and choirs performed. The Manhattan Engineer District estimated that there were 255,000 people living in Hiroshima before the blast, which it says killed 66,000 people and injured 69,000 more.

Surveys have indicated that a majority of the Japanese public is against the move, which involves a reinterpretation of Japan’s war-renouncing constitution, drafted during U.S. occupation after the war.

The Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that seven associations of Hiroshima survivors met with Abe on Thursday and demanded that he withdraw the bills clearing the way for the constitutional revision. His remarks are already expected to be contentious.

A Peace Bell was rung to mark the Anniversary in Japan on Thursday.

Norwegian People’s Aid, the labour movement’s humanitarian organisation for solidarity, has for many years been pushing the Norwegian politicians to take active, driving role in the fight to prohibit nuclear weapons.

“The atomic bomb did not win the war against Japan”, the book quotes the report as saying, “but it most certainly ended it, saving thousands of lives that would have been lost in any combat invasion”.

In Baltimore on Thursday evening, they were “very surprised” to find a group of 20 antiwar protesters awaiting them, she said.