Fumio Kishida has spoken about “Russia’s nuclear threat” rather than recalling that Washington dropped an atomic bomb on the city in 1945.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has refrained from mentioning the role of the US in a speech dedicated to the 79th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
The US is the only country in history to have used nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 warplane dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, killing up to 126,000 people, mostly civilians.
Another nuclear bomb was detonated above the city of Nagasaki on August 9, killing up to 80,000 people.
The devastating attacks prompted Japan to surrender to the Allied powers a week later, which brought an end to the Second World War.
During his address during a ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Tuesday, Kishida told attendees “79 years ago today, an atomic bomb deprived people said to number well more than 100,000 of their precious lives.
It reduced the city to ashes and mercilessly deprived people of their dreams and bright futures. Even those who escaped death suffered hardships beyond description.”
However, the prime minister didn’t directly say which country was responsible for attacking the city with nuclear weapons and causing such “devastation and human suffering.”
“As the only country to have experienced the horror of nuclear devastation in war, Japan has the mission of… steadily building up efforts over time towards the realization of a world without nuclear weapons,” he said.
According to Kishida, the world currently stands at “a critical point where the trend towards fewer nuclear weapons could undergo a reversal for the first time since the height of the Cold War.”
“The widening division within the international community over approaches to nuclear disarmament, Russia’s nuclear threat, and other concerns make the situation surrounding nuclear disarmament all the more challenging,” he said.
The whole speech bore a lot of similarities to the address delivered by the Japanese prime minister a year ago, in which the US was also not mentioned.
Tokyo has been an ally of Washington since the Americans occupied the territory of Japan and wrote the country’s constitution in the aftermath of the nuclear bombings.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also ignored the role of the US in the bombing of Hiroshima in his message dedicated to the anniversary.
“We must not forget the lessons of August 6, 1945,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter), adding that nuclear weapons “represent a real and present danger.”
Last week, US acting assistant secretary of defense for space policy, Vipin Narang, claimed that Washington should “prepare for a world where constraints on nuclear weapons arsenals disappear entirely” due to Chinese nuclear armament, Russian-North Korean cooperation and alleged nuclear anti-satellite weapons development by Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that Russia intends to update its nuclear arsenal and warned that the country would use all means available to defend itself if faced with an existential threat.
However, Putin expressed hope that “it will never come” to an actual nuclear exchange between Moscow and the West, despite mounting tensions over the conflict in Ukraine.