The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, remembered this Wednesday the victims of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on August 9, 1945, during World War II, and insisted on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons.
“78 years ago atomic weapons were used in Nagasaki. We must not allow such devastation to happen again. The only way to eliminate nuclear risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons,” Guterres said in a message on the social network X (formerly Twitter). ).
78 years ago, atomic weapons were used on Nagasaki.
Never again must we allow such devastation to occur.
The only way to eliminate nuclear risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons.
– Antonio Guterres (@antonioguterres) August 8, 2023
Japan is commemorating the 78th anniversary of the attack on Wednesday, which immediately killed more than 70,000 people and came three days after a similar attack in Hiroshima, which caused some 140,000 deaths.
The Nagasaki authorities used the evocative ceremony to call on nuclear powers to “show courage and abandon the idea of using nuclear weapons as a deterrent.”
Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki said countries with nuclear weapons and “those under the protection of nuclear weapons must step up and free themselves from this dependency.”
“As long as states depend on nuclear deterrence, we cannot build a world without nuclear weapons,” Suzuki said.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was unable to attend the ceremony in Nagasaki due to bad weather conditions.
In a video message, Kishida acknowledged that rising tensions and conflicts, including Russia’s war with Ukraine, had made nuclear disarmament more difficult.
“The road to nuclear disarmament has become more dangerous due to deepening international divisions and nuclear threats from Russia,” Kishida was quoted as saying by the Spanish news agency EFE.
Since they invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian authorities have been warning the West that involvement in the conflict could lead to nuclear war.
Source: TSF
