Residents in Hiroshima observed a minute of silence marking the 72nd anniversary of the first atom bomb usage on August 6, 1945 by the US to end World War Two, bringing peace to the world but the death toll has climbed up to 164,621 so far.
The event at Hiroshima’s memorial park was witnessed by people who released thousands of lanterns the adjoining Motoyasu river that saved all those who jumped into it to save the radiation and heat on that fateful day.
The second bombing on Nagasaki on August 9 will be held three days later.
A US B-29 bomber dropped the Enola Gay (uranium bomb) on Hiroshima some 600m (1,800ft) above the city, at 08:10 on 6 August 1945. While 70,000 immediately died, 70,000 more died gradually by the end of the year while others died with symptoms of radiation over a period.
About 30,000 people attended the ceremony at the Hiroshima Memorial Park near Hiroshima’s epicentre or ground zero where the bomb was dropped. The Hiroshima bombing has left behind Japan, startled and shaken, while survivors vouch for a ban on nuclear arms.
Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matusi called on the Japanese government to sign the treaty banning nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said: “For us to truly realize a ‘world without nuclear weapons,’ the participation of both nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states is necessary.”
The adherence to non-nuclear world remained strong across the nations ever since and here are some quotes from famous world personalities on Hiroshima Day:
1) If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, i would have torn up my formula in 1905.
— Albert Einstein
2) “We must strive towards the goal of abolition of nuclear devices and disarmament and through mutual trust in each other, we must realise One World.”
— Jawaharlal Nehru
3) Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
— George Wald
4) I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immortal act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
— J.G. Ballard
5) “If the radiance of a thousand suns,
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One…
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.
[Quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]”
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
6) “So, let us be alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
7) “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. ”
— David T. Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays
8) “What the diary does not reveal, for it stops too soon, is the appalling fact that from late 1945 until 1952 Japanese medical researchers were prohibited by U.S. occupation authorities from publishing scientific articles on the effects of the atomic bombs.”
— John W. Dower, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician
9) The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul. — Herbert Hoover
10) “Oh my God! Tell that to the people in Hiroshima… Good. Good. When you declare war, you declare war. They started it. We now don’t count who’s dead. You’re dead, you deserve to be dead.
— Joan Rivers, TV personality and Jewish comedian
