Survivors of 1945 atomic bomb express deep concern amid bellicose rhetoric from Russia and North Korea
The failure to make progress on disarmament prompted the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, to warn in August that humanity was “in danger of forgetting the lessons forged in the terrifying fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. The mayor of Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, said he feared the devastation visited on his city in 1945 had “not got across to the world well enough, and [is] looking to become a reality”.
He and his family were living in Tokyo when his father, who was from Hiroshima, evacuated them to his home town after large areas of the Japanese capital were destroyed in the March 1945Months later, the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, instantly killing between 60,000 and 80,000 people, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year.
Today, the number of people officially recognised as having died from the effects of the Hiroshima bomb stands at just over 330,000, while the average age of the 118,000 survivors has crept up to 84.