Alwaght- On Sunday, Japan marked 72 years since the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, destroying a portion of the city and its inhabitants.
About 50,000 people, including representatives from 80 nations, gathered for an annual ceremony at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park Sunday, reports The Japan Times.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for global cooperation to end nuclear weapons.
"For us to truly realize a world without nuclear weapons, the participation of both nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states is necessary," he said.
Last month, the United Nations reached its first agreement to ban nuclear weapons. But, Japan along with the nine nuclear-armed nations, including the US, refused to take part in the negotiations and the vote.
On 6 August, 1945, the atomic bomb dropped by the Enola Gay Boeing B-29 detonated, killing an estimated 140,000 people. Three days later, the US dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 75,000. Within weeks, Japan surrendered.
On Sunday, UN Secretary General António Guterres issued a message calling for the US and other nuclear-armed countries to do more to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
"Our dream of a world free of nuclear weapons remains far from reality. The states possessing nuclear weapons have a special responsibility to undertake concrete and irreversible steps in nuclear disarmament."
Japanese officials routinely argue that they abhor nuclear weapons, but the nation's defense is firmly set under the US nuclear umbrella.
The US was the first country to manufacture nuclear weapons, and is the only country to have used them in combat and now seven decades later, the world faces the specter of another nuclear war, once again due to the ongoing tensions ignited by the US at the Korean Peninsula.
