SILENCE descended on Hiroshima at 8.15am today as the city marked the day and the hour that the first atom bomb struck it 76 years ago, killing over 75,000 people immediately and the same number again over the next few weeks.

A socially distanced ceremony lacked the usual crowds for the second year running because of the coronavirus pandemic, but thousands participated an online rally organised by the 2021 World Conference Against Atomic Bombs. Another rally is planned for Monday, the 76th anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing. The two bombings by the United States remain the only occasions nuclear weapons have been used.

Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui called on world leaders to recognise the continued possession of nuclear weapons is a threat to humanity that should be taken as seriously as Covid.

“Nuclear weapons are a threat of total annihilation that we can certainly end, if all nations work together,” he said. “No sustainable society is possible with these weapons continually poised for indiscriminate slaughter.”

And he took aim at the Japanese government for continuing to refuse to sign the global Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, demanding it do so “immediately.”

Japan is not a nuclear power, but as a close ally of the United States and home to 50,000 US troops has proved reluctant to sign the ban on nuclear weapons. 

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s address today claimed the world needed a more “realistic” approach than that of the treaty and was later forced to apologise for omitting a section of his prepared speech promising to pursue efforts for a nuclear-free world, claiming he had “inadvertently skipped” that part.

But Japanese Confederation of Atomic Bomb Victims deputy general secretary Michiko Kodama had earlier warned that Japan, as the only country to have been at the receiving end of nuclear weapons, needs to stop “turning its back on the treaty.”

The 2021 World Conference statement noted that Japanese support would be a “significant boost” for the treaty, and “make a positive difference to the situation in north-east Asia, where tensions are rising.”

Japanese Communist Party chairman Kazuo Shii called for opposition parties to work together to replace the current government at the general election due this autumn and form a coalition government that would sign the treaty and work to defuse US-China tensions instead of participating in Washington’s new cold war.