According to Japanese media reports, UN Secretary General António Guterres will take part in a ceremony in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6 this year to commemorate the victims of the atomic bombing carried out 75 years ago in August 1945 without military necessity by the United States.
The visit is planned as part of the UN Secretary General’s visit to Japan to attend the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympic Games on August 9, 2020.
This will not be Guterres’ first visit to memorial ceremonies for Japanese peaceful women, children and the elderly who were baked by the American bombing. Two years ago, the current head of this major international organization attended such a ceremony and laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of the atomic tragedy committed by U.S. President Harry Truman and his generals in Nagasaki Peace Park.
There are various figures for the victims of the criminal atomic bombings of Japanese cities. The most common figures are 200,000 people killed in the blast and from burns and radiation and other diseases in Hiroshima and 100,000 in Nagasaki. However, taking into account all “hibakusha”, i.e. victims of atomic bombings, there are much more victims. According to official Japanese data as of March 31, 2013, there were 201,779 “hibakusha” alive. This number includes children born to women exposed to atomic bombs. Of these, 1% had serious cancer due to radiation exposure after the bombings, according to the Japanese government. As the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Simbun reported, as of August 31, 2013, the number of deaths of “hibakusha” is about 450 thousand: 286 818 in Hiroshima and 162 083 in Nagasaki.
It is expected that the United Nations Secretary General in Hiroshima will again call on governments and peoples of the world to nuclear disarmament, as he did two years ago. At that time in Nagasaki, he stated that “the destruction of nuclear weapons is a UN priority. However, as a result of US President Donald Trump’s intention not only not to reduce but also to build up its nuclear capabilities, this goal seems to be moving to an unpredictably distant future.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin noted in an interview with the Financial Times ahead of the G20 summit in Japan and the Trump meeting, if the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction of Strategic Offensive Arms ceases to exist, “in fact, there will be no instruments at all to deter the arms race”.
Trump’s reckless “cowboy” policy of large-scale warfare in the Middle East, when only military force and its use against weaker countries are taken into account, may sooner or later lead to a new nuclear tragedy. When the current U.S. president clinging to power for the sake of re-election can, as his predecessor in 1945, Harry Truman, under the pretext of “saving the lives of American guys”, once again release the genie from the bottle and in order to preserve the military and financial hegemony in the world to use nuclear weapons. This is what the UN Secretary General in Hiroshima should say if he is really concerned about saving mankind from the nightmare of universal destruction in nuclear fire.
Anatoly Koshkin, REGNUM.