US to attend Hiroshima atom bomb memorial for first time

JAPAN: Sixty-five years after a mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, the United States will for the first time send an envoy this Friday to commemorate the bombing that rang in the nuclear age. Its World War II allies Britain and France, both declared nuclear powers, will also send their first diplomats to the ceremony in the western Japanese city in a sign of support for the goal of nuclear disarmament.

Japan, the only country that has ever been attacked with atomic bombs — first on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, and three days later in Nagasaki — has pushed for the abolition of the weapons of mass destruction ever since.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who arrives in Japan on Tuesday, will be the first UN chief to attend the ceremony. UN spokesman Martin Nesirsky said Ban wanted to draw attention to “the urgent need to achieve global nuclear disarmament”.

In Japan, a pacifist nation since its WWII surrender six days after the Nagasaki bombing, memories of the nuclear horror still run deep.

“Little Boy”, the four-tonne uranium bomb detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 am, caused a blinding flash and a fireball hot enough to melt sand into glass and vaporise every human within a one mile (1.6 kilometre) radius.

An estimated 140,000 people died instantly as the white-hot blast turned the city centre into rubble and ash, and in the days and weeks afterwards from burns and radiation sickness caused by the fallout dubbed the “black rain”.

The death toll from the second bomb, the plutonium weapon dubbed “Fat Man” that hit Nagasaki on August 9, has been estimated at 70,000. Hiroshima, AFP