Bombing of Hiroshima shows the importance of the — UN Secretary General

Tens of thousands of people stood for a minute of silence at 8:15 a.m.at a ceremony in Hiroshima’s peace park near the epicenter of the 1945 attack, marking the moment of the blast.

ArticleFive things your class should know on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombingWorld War II, Atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right), August 1945, Japan.

Wellesterin notes individuals out in the open would fare worse than those sheltered, but that the effects would be lethal and horrific regardless of where you are.

About 90 percent of the city was destroyed, which is why it looks so new today. In an instant, that bomb killed 70,000 people.

Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most significant events in U.S. history.

“People of the world, especially leaders of nuclear armed nations, please come to Hiroshima to contemplate peace in this, a bombed city”, said Kazumi Matsui, Hiroshima’s mayor. Americans, of course, remember December 7, 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Chinese would cite 1937 when Japanese troops invaded, and Koreans might go back to 1910 and the Japanese colonization. Many others were killed in Nagasaki and in the days to follow. And he criticized as hypocritical the government’s repeated pledges to help rid the world of nuclear weapons.

After Hiroshima, US President Harry S Truman said that if Japan they did not accept the terms of surrender, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth”.

US Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, Rose Gottemoeller, the US State Department’s undersecretary for arms control and global security and representatives from more than 100 countries, including Britain, France, and Russian Federation, attended the ceremony.

Abe, who in a speech at the ceremony called for abolishing nuclear weapons, replied by repeating his view that the legislation was essential to ensure Japan’s safety.

China, which often emphasises its own victimisation at the hands of foreign powers, is itself gearing up to commemorate Japan’s World War II defeat, planning a massive military parade through central Beijing. Lanterns floated in the river through Hiroshima overnight, while survivors of the blast were preparing to read poems at the memorial. The first lesson was that enemies, even entire countries like the US and Japan, can move on from devastating war and form incredible bonds in their wake.

A symbolic gesture of leaving bamboo flasks of water at the site of the bomb’s epicentre for those who died was carried out by a number of survivors and local officials.