Hiroshima atom bombing should never be repeated: US diplomat

In the UK, the current military nuclear weapon system, Trident, is often criticised as being too expensive to maintain and unnecessary in its mission to keep world peace by some politicians and political parties.

At a time of increased military tensions between Japan and its neighbours, particularly China, Matsui Kazumi will call on world leaders not to forget the destruction of a city and the death of up to 166,000 of its people.

Under-secretary for arms control Rose Gottemoeller was also scheduled to attend, the most senior US official sent from Washington to the annual memorial.

At 8:15 a.m. Thursday – the moment in 1945 that the Little Boy uranium bomb was dropped – tens of thousands in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park stood in silence to honor the dead. He said the world till bristles with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons.

Japan marked the 70th anniversary of the devastating atomic bombing of Hiroshima in the closing days of World War II with calls to step up efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, even as Tokyo still struggles to come to terms with its role in the conflict.

“Supporting and helping to stop any small fighter planes from coming up”, said Yonkovig, who saw Hiroshima before and after the atomic bomb.

“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. “Certainly, you’ll be impelled to start out discussing a authorized framework, together with a nuclear weapons conference”.

The U.S. dropped the bombs to keep away from what would have been a bloody floor assault on the Japanese mainland, following the fierce battle for Japan’s southernmost Okinawan islands, which took 12,520 American lives and an estimated 200,000 Japanese, about half civilians.

At a ceremony near the onetime industrial exhibition hall that has been preserved as a skeletal monument to the attack, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe renewed a long-standing Japanese pledge to seek worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons.

Hiroshima mayor Matsui used Thursday’s ceremony to criticize Abe’s security plans, saying leaders should stick with the “pacifism of the Japanese constitution”.

People around the world have been using the NukeMap tool to input their city and see the devastating effect it would have had in wake of the bomb’s 70th anniversary. The U.S. also remains the only nation to ever drop the bomb. A “black rain” of radioactive particles followed the blinding blast and fireball and has been linked to higher rates of cancer and other radiation-related diseases among the survivors.

Unfortunately, Ulrich said war is sometimes necessary.