Kinshasa, August 6th,2025 (CPA).- An appeal to renounce nuclear weapons was launched on Wednesday by the mayor of the city of Hiroshima in south-western Japan, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, according to international media reports. ‘Some leaders accept the idea that nuclear weapons are essential to their national defence, blatantly ignoring the lessons that the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history. They threaten to undermine the frameworks for peace building,’ has said Kazumi Matsui, mayor of Hiroshima, at a commemorative ceremony.
‘The United States and Russia possess 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, and in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East, we are seeing an accelerated trend toward military build-up,’ he has added. A ceremony attended by representatives from 120 countries and regions was held to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing. Moreover, Kazumi Matsui urged Donald Trump last month to visit Hiroshima, after the US president compared the recent air strikes against Iran to the atomic bombings of 1945.
It should be remembered that on August 6th 1945 at 8:15 a.m., the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing approximately 140,000 people. Three days later, an identical bomb struck Nagasaki, another Japanese city located some 400 km further southwest, killing approximately 74,000 more people. These strikes, which hastened the end of the Second World War, are the only instances in which nuclear weapons have been used in wartime.