Guterres in Hiroshima: Mankind "plays with a loaded gun" in nuclear crises

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned in Hiroshima that humanity is "playing with a loaded gun" in the context of the current nuclear crises, marking the 77th anniversary of the US nuclear bombing that destroyed the Japanese city on Saturday.

During an annual ceremony organized by the Japanese city in honor of the lives of victims, Guterres issued a call to world leaders to eliminate nuclear weapons from their arsenals.

77 years ago, he said, “tens of thousands of people were killed in an instant in this city.

The bodies of women, children and men were burned in an infernal fire, and buildings were reduced to dust.

Survivors were cursed with a radioactive legacy” of cancers and other diseases.

"We have to ask: What did we learn from the mushroom cloud that spread over this city?"

Guterres stressed that "the current crises involving a nuclear threat are spreading rapidly, from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula, through the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

He added that "humanity is playing with a loaded pistol," repeating the warnings he made this week in New York during a conference of the signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Two years ago, a memorial ceremony for the victims of the American bombing of Hiroshima, in which survivors, relatives, Japanese officials and some prominent foreign figures, participated, within the restrictions of preventing the spread of Covid-19.

The risk of a nuclear conflict has raised concerns since Russia invaded its Ukrainian neighbor on February 24.

The Russian ambassador to Japan was not invited to Saturday's ceremony, but he visited Hiroshima on Thursday to lay a wreath in honor of the victims.

And about 140,000 people died after the American bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and this toll also includes people who survived the bombing but later died due to radiation.

On August 9, at 11.02 a.m., a second American atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people on the same day until the end of 1945.

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